When I was a kid in London there were still plenty of steam-rollers in evidence, and there were even a few used on the construction of the M1 in the early 60's. The most common type was built by a firm called Aveling & Porter.
Steam propulsion was perhaps more universal than you think. As well as rollers and traction engines there were many hundreds of steam lorries on the roads in the Thirties and Forties. Google "steam lorries" to see just how widespread the network was.
It was in fact the post-war availibility of secondhand army transport that ended the reign of steam on Britain's roads. While the "wrong kind of steam" might be a nit-picker's factor, the presence of Sentinel or Foden steam lorries on the London streets would be entirely correct. All the major railway companies had fleets of them at their London goods termini. They were certainly much more widespread and numerous than petrol or diesel-driven goods vehicles.
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Another home-built rig:
AMD FX 8350, liquid-cooled. Asus Sabretooth 990FX Rev 2.0 , 16 GB Mushkin Redline (DDR3-PC12800), Enermax 1000W PSU, MSI R9-280X 3GB GDDR5
2 X 128GB OCZ Vertex SSD, 1 x64GB Corsair SSD, 1x 500GB WD HDD.
CH Franken-Tripehound stick and throttle merged, CH Pro pedals. TrackIR 5 and Pro-clip. Windows 7 64bit Home Premium.
Last edited by brando; 05-18-2010 at 09:17 AM.
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