INTRODUCTION TO STEAM ENGINES ARE ALIVE BLOG

The steam engine bug had hit me by the age of eight years by which time a number of memorable events had impacted upon me. One was the result of visits to the Palmerston North Summer and Winter Agricultural and Pastoral shows where among the many food and refreshment stalls there was one that prepared and sold popcorn and candy-floss. The popcorn oven and the candy-floss spinner were rotated and spun by a beautiful little chrome plated single cylinder horizontal steam engine served by a gas fired matching horizontal boiler.
In the fair ground were the usual merry-go-rounds powered by their centrally located vertical boilers and open frame steam engines. A little later came a 15 inch gauge circular railway track with its Cagney 4-4-0 coal fired steam locomotive and riding trucks.
The city model engineering club always had an indoor stand with a fascinating array of vertical and horizontal small and large model steam engines ticking over on compressed air.
At this time my father owned a small factory producing fancy cheeses for local markets. Part of the plant was a semi-portable four horse-power horizontal boiler that I was allowed to tend in raising steam and maintaining the water level with the feed-water injector.
On an open day of the Palmerston North Technical College I was taken to visit the engineering workshops. Wonder of wonders! Here was my first revelation of how it was done. There were forges, anvils, drilling machines, lathes and shapers. There was even a model steam engine crankshaft set up in a lathe.
I knew then where I wanted to go, and I went. But there were still five more years of primary school and three years of the above mentioned technical college from which I gained an engineering preliminary qualification. Steam engines of many forms were met with on the way.