Just 40 years ago the last locomotive to be overhauled in Britain left Crewe Works. A photograph was released with all the works staff posed in front of that locomotive, seen above last week newly overhauled. And that should have been the end of the story.
Such is the appeal of these machines that the locomotive, now 57 years old, most of them in preservation, has once more just received it latest overhaul. Who would have expected it in 1968?
But construction of steam locomotives has never quite stopped. It continued on a large scale in China until the 1980s, and there was a handful of new locomotives built by DLM in Switzerland for mountain railways in Switzerland and Austria in 1993, as well as individual machines built for miniature and narrow gauge lines, and of course the replica Tornado.
Shall we ever see large scale construction resume? Bearing in mind that developments since the 1970s has pushed up their efficiency somewhat and that they will run on just about anything that will burn, I don't think we might not have seen the last of them.
I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
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