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Peter Turvey

Mention ‘steam engine’ to most people and they immediately think of railway engines. Yet long before railways, stationary steam engines helped power the Industrial Revolution – the years between 1760 and 1830 when Britain became the world’s first industrial nation.  Our standard of living, plus the environmental and energy supply issues which threaten us today, grew out of the Industrial Revolution. One of the oldest surviving engines from that time is now in the Science Museum, ‘Old Bess’ built in […]

Whenever I go to London by train I see the civil engineering works outside Paddington Station for the new Crossrail link. There is a big hole ready to take the giant German-made tunnelling machines which will soon start work boring the Crossrail  tunnels under London. These amazing pieces of engineering are often scrapped after their job is done. They are far too large to fit in any museum, so we have a model of the similar machines used to bore the Channel Tunnel in the 1990s.  However, at our Large Object store at […]