by Engineman Preserved Wook, B&M (retd)
The posting below, in dieselpunks.org, caught my eye:
http://www.dieselpunks.org/profiles/blogs/sunday-streamline-10-lner-w1
Also, here is their home page:
The first write-up is about the type of twentieth century steam locomotive design that is actually completely late-modern and in which the smoothness of form is integral to the function. That integrity, in this case of Depression-era English LNER experimental and A-series steam locomotives, is completely unlike most contemporaneous American “streamliners”. The latter, at a second glance, were mainly of sheetmetal cladding, “added on” as an afterthought and that often took visible running-ripples from the wind.
The industrial-design work of undoubtedly gifted artists such as Raymond Loewy, for the Pennsylvania RR, and Henry Dreyfuss for the New York Central, was also harnessed to an emerging consensus omnium about the role of design in 1930s American national economic recovery. The ideological underpinnings of the American industrial-design “streamliners” (there were many of these workers besides Dreyfuss and Loewy!) caused workers self-consciously to reach for “modernity” as a kind of ding an sich. This quest, potentially at least in conflict with performance goals, would go far to carry design as such away from strictly engineering criteria. The story is comprehensively set forth by Jeffrey L Meikle, in 1979. *
However, if you will take the trouble to do for yourself a (more…)
Engineman Wook 