Updated: 4 April 2011

This looks like it might have been the first attempt to buld a turbine-powered locomotive. The "turbine" is a sort of lawn-sprinkler affair like Hero's Aeolipile which would rotate at very high speed if supplied with steam. The problem is that the efficiency is abysmal unless the rotor goes round very fast indeed, and an enormous step-down gear ratio would have been required to get any hope of locomotive motion. The losses in any practical gearing system would have been huge because of the very high speeds involved. There is a full description of the goings-on in the text reproduced below.

The turbine is here described as a "sword blade rotary engine". "Sword blade" is a term I have never encountered before in this connection.

Left: Sketch of the Sword Blade Locomotive This shows the turbine mounted inside its sheet-iron casing. The gear reduction ratio looks like about 8 : 1, which certainly would have been quite inadequate to move a locomotive. A worrying aspect is that as shown the turbine will rotate anti-clockwise, and so will the wheels on the rail, so the engine would move backwards if it moved at all. (There is some reference to a reversing clutch in the text below, but it is not shown here) Thanks to Kerry Stiff for bringing this remarkable story to my attention Image from "Railway and Locomotive Engineering" Volume XV, February, 1902, page 72

Left: Letter describing The Sword Blade locomotive No other reference to this machine is known to Google. This whole business sounds a bit dubious to me. Could it have been a hoax thought up by Mr J O Campbell? From "Railway and Locomotive Engineering" Volume XV, February, 1902, page 72

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