Thesis covers an earlier time frame than you want (up to 1800), but is this the kind of analysis you are after?
Would pull in development of precision machining, and various improvements in steel making I imagine. The paper below has a time line and details of 'start ups' involved in UK.
In twentieth century various people tried to adapt the steam turbine to rail use with varying success. Marine turbines dominated ship engines then for larger ships.
I think a carefully worded question on a UK railway forum might yield some results. I can just about remember steam locomotives clinging on in the early 60s (my mother hated them - put your washing out and watch the soot land...)
what is interesting to me is they are building machinery designed before modern manufacturing methods and material science. Looking through another steam engine revival project they are using modern design methods and likely materials: https://www.a1steam.com/p2monobloc#/
Funny thing about steam engines is that we think about them as a thing of the past. But in reality steam engines just scaled up and turned into steam turbines, which are a backbone of society
1900s was a long time out. From 1812 to 1880 steamships required sail backups. Without a massive investment in the technology steam would have stayed unreliable and expensive.
Really what kickstarted the whole thing was pumping water from mines which didn’t need anything close to 24/7 operation and could thus handle the expensive, heavy, and unreliable nature of early steam engines.
The author and futurist Bruce Sterling (should need no introduction) has spoken about steam engine time before if I’m not mistaken but I might have mixed it up with someone else. Basically the steam engine could have been developed further in the past but the right set of social factors did not align with engineering and metallurgical factors
> but a large low pressure steam engine is perfectly possible.
Irrespective of whether it was possible for the Greeks to make them, what would be the economic incentive for them to build large low pressure steam engines at scale? In our timeline, the only serious application of large low pressure steam engines was pumping water out of mines, from after 1720 or so. Even with the incentive of the industrial revolution, it took almost a century to get small high-powered engines, with the first public steam train in 1825.
> The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse.
Which steam engine do you mean and do you have a citation for this comment? The first industrial steam engines were based on the Newcomen design and were used to pump water out of mines. Their big drawback was efficiency, not power. They were only economical in coal mines, which had fuel immediately available at near zero cost.
But for this to explain the prior absence of precision engineering, and for that absence to explain the timing of the development of the steam engine, this would have to change around 1700. As far as I know, it didn't.
Btw, some great books on Steam locomotives/engines:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NQ9JG2M - American steam locomotives 1880–1960. The author of drove locomotives, and was the transportation curator at the Smithsonian Museum. He wrote it over 30 years, and you can tell the amount of care and detail he put into with the details and history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B072BFJB3Z - The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World. Talks about how precision engineering was critical to the invention and wider use of steam engines.
> The first steam engines were also written off as being less powerful than a horse.
This may not be the best example considering that steam engines were around since at least 20BCE[0] but the first successful application wasn't till almost 1700.
Your example isn't quite as it seems : "trains" (cars running on rails) were used in mining for hundreds of years prior. The steam engine was first documented in 1698. What happened in 1804 was someone figured out the manufacturing processes to make a steam engine light enough and powerful enough to usefully pull a train of cars over some reasonable distance.
Thesis covers an earlier time frame than you want (up to 1800), but is this the kind of analysis you are after?
Would pull in development of precision machining, and various improvements in steel making I imagine. The paper below has a time line and details of 'start ups' involved in UK.
https://www.iris.sssup.it/retrieve/handle/11382/304403/988/G...
In twentieth century various people tried to adapt the steam turbine to rail use with varying success. Marine turbines dominated ship engines then for larger ships.
I think a carefully worded question on a UK railway forum might yield some results. I can just about remember steam locomotives clinging on in the early 60s (my mother hated them - put your washing out and watch the soot land...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine_locomotive
Has a time line of the companies involved in some of that.
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