Steam Coaches The Early History

Here we take a look at the Forgotten passed of the Road going Steam Coaches from 80 years before the modern Motor car.

History

With development of early steam engines in the earl 1800s it was not long before early steam propulsion was applied to road transport.

From 1820 onwards, a large number of steam coaches were built in England. Owing to the work of men like Telford and Macadam, who introduced new methods of road construction. English roads were extremely good and fast coaches were able to operate.

Dasid Gordon, Macerone and Squire, James, and Goldsworthy Gurney were among early coach builders. Gordon's steam carriage of 1824 had mechanical feet as well as wheels to help it up hills SK Goldsworthy Gurney's steam coaches body resembled a stage coach, and a water-tube boiler was mounted tn its rear end. The rear wheels were driven by two horizontal cylinders. while the fore-carriage was turned by a pole having at its front end a pair Of small wheels steered by a tiller . Macerone and Squire's hackney coach, carrying nine passengers, put up average speeds of 15 to 16 m.p.h. James and Gurney were the first to put coaches into regular service.

By 1833, Sir Charles Dance was operating a service between Gloucester and Cheltenham. Also, in 1833 Mr. Roberts of Manchester invented a differential gear which relieved the strain on driving wheels when cornering, although a Frenchman, the Marquis de Chasseloup Laubat, is said to have invented it some six years earlier. The most successful coach builder was Walter Hancock, who produced a fleet of nine steam carriages capable of speeds up to 20 m.p.h. They ran between the City of London and Paddington for a period of about ten years.

By 1840, steam coaches used differential gears, dry steam and condensers. Their decline in England during the next two decades was due to the antagonism of landowners and the new railways. Savage road tolls were levied. On the Liverpool to Prescot road, for example, a horse-drawn coach paid a toll of only 4/-, but a steam carriage was forced to pay £2/8/-. The workers as a whole were opposed to machinery and sabotage was frequent.

A few steam cars were built during the 1860s, notably by Thomas Rickett, who built a gear-driven model for the Earl of Caithness, and by Yarrow and Hilditch.

In 1865, the Road Locomotives (Red Flag) Act imposed a speed limit of 4 m.p.h. in the country and 2 m.p.h. in towns, while a man had to walk in front of the machine carrying a red flag. As a result, the development of the motor vehicle virtually ceased in England until the repeal of this crippling Act in '1896, when motoring in the country was legalised.