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WALSCHAERT'S VALVE GEAR ANIMATION
Acknowledgements to Robert A Booty, 2nd trumpet in the Oshkosh Brass quintet, under whose totally unrelated web page these great technical drawings and animations reside.
Robert appears to have several VERY diverse strings to his bow!
Robert's engineering site (updated link)
provides some more lovely animations, very nicely illustrating how this fascinating and almost unlikely mechanism does its job.
More than half my pleasure in watching a steam engine operate is in simply gazing at the hypnotically relaxing motion of this valve linkage and I think that pleasure is an almost universal feeling. Inside valve motions tend to produce very boring looking machines, by comparison! I still haven't figured out the differences, if any, between Walschaert and the Heusinger named linkages usually assigned to German locos, or what look to me like terribly similar setups, with other names on other locomotives.
Perhaps someone here can clarify this?
Considerably more Walschaert's detail is available via links on the site and yet other illustrated 'tutorials' are provided too. It's a great resource for the scientific/engineering mind. But, for me, this single one is an absolute classic.
Feeling stressed out?
Just watch Walschaert's in action for a couple of minutes and it all goes away!

Acknowledgements to Robert A Booty, 2nd trumpet in the Oshkosh Brass quintet, under whose totally unrelated web page these great technical drawings and animations reside.
Robert appears to have several VERY diverse strings to his bow!

Robert's engineering site (updated link)
provides some more lovely animations, very nicely illustrating how this fascinating and almost unlikely mechanism does its job.
More than half my pleasure in watching a steam engine operate is in simply gazing at the hypnotically relaxing motion of this valve linkage and I think that pleasure is an almost universal feeling. Inside valve motions tend to produce very boring looking machines, by comparison! I still haven't figured out the differences, if any, between Walschaert and the Heusinger named linkages usually assigned to German locos, or what look to me like terribly similar setups, with other names on other locomotives.
Perhaps someone here can clarify this?
Considerably more Walschaert's detail is available via links on the site and yet other illustrated 'tutorials' are provided too. It's a great resource for the scientific/engineering mind. But, for me, this single one is an absolute classic.
Feeling stressed out?
Just watch Walschaert's in action for a couple of minutes and it all goes away!
