This year the group started with a side trip to the …
Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania
The Boat Pond
I would not say the boat pond was the highlight of the show, but this is a ship model club, so we start there!
Locomotives
With the boats covered, we return to where we started…the railroad.
Tractors and Miscellaneous Machines
Before moving on to the model engines, let’s look at some more machines built incorporating model engines.
This video was taken at the 2010 Cabin Fever model engineering exhibition in York, PA. I don’t recall what it is, but it appears to be a model of a walking crane intended for soft ground.
Steam Engines
The models at this show depicted a number of unique designs. I learned that many of them were attempts to avoid patent infringements. This may have been the case for the design modeled above, which avoids the use of a camshaft.
In the case of the oscillating cylinder steam engine modeled above, the goal was simplicity and compactness, which this design achieves by eliminating cylinder valves. Its compact nature was an advantage for ships, and it so happens that the oldest operating marine steam engine in the word is of this type. It propels the paddle steamer Diesbar in Dresden, Germany. The engine was built by John Penn & Sons in Greenwich, England in 1841. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers designated it a landmark in 2008.
