Upscaling Can Change The Game

Mark Rudall reflects on how something not much larger than a model can get you and the whole family on the water.

- Mark Rudall

My earliest brush with model engineering was in 1967 when my clergyman father spotted a Victorian model of a steam portable engine lurking neglected in an old man’s workshop. It was black and filthy, seized solid and covered in sawdust, lying beneath a workbench next to its owner’s venerable treadle-driven Drummond round bed lathe. It had been built, we think, in the 1880s.

I wish we had taken a picture of the Cook portable in ‘as found’ condition, but as I remember it, it was built to what we would now recognise as around 4 inch scale. The engine was a handsome beast and I was just 15 but I suspect its boiler barrel was around 10 inches in diameter, the flywheel around 18 inches and I remember being amazed that it sported just three large firetubes running from its relatively cavernous firebox. The engine itself was probably around 2 inches bore x 4 inches stroke, or even bigger, and had, unusually for a portable, Stephenson link reversing gear; why, I wasn’t sure, but on adult reflection I suspect it was because the blacksmith who built it almost certainly used it to drive a lathe. He may have wanted a quicker means of reversing than, as in portables on farms, turning the whole shooting match round and realigning a drive belt in what I remember as a Vee-section flywheel rim. The wheels on this amazing engine were very small, traditionally built wooden cartwheels. I wrote it up for