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Code Monger, cyclist, sim racer and driving enthusiast.
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What do you think about cars in cities?
I hate driving in London. I always have. I avoid it. It feels like a totally pointless activity. And it spoils cars for me. It makes them boring and annoying.
Obviously I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing about cars and making TV about them, and I love cars, but I do think in my bones they don’t really belong in towns. Cars are great for going between places, like from London to my pub in Wiltshire.
But within London I don’t want to drive the car, and when I’m down in the village in Wiltshire I don’t want to drive around either.
Bicycles work…
Bicycles are a genuine door-to-door transport solution. Cycling is fantastic in cities.
Even Google Maps will acknowledge that a bicycle is quicker for some journeys than a car. It amazes me that people go to the shops a mile away in the car.
The world has proved that bicycles make immense sense in densely populated areas.
Where do you cycle?
I live in Hammersmith and have to do a lot of things up in town: voiceovers, meetings and so on. So I cycle four or five miles each way. I quite often stop off at Russell Square to have a crafty fried egg sandwich at the cabby shelter.
And, of course, it’s pretty much flat.
Have you always cycled?
I used to ride a bicycle massively when I was young. Me and my mates would cycle to Paris, or cycle across the Norfolk Broads, hundreds of miles. And then later in life, you rediscover it.
I’m almost loathe to admit it because I used to mock Richard Hammond, but it turns out that exercise is good for you and cycling is a fantastic way to do it.
It’s low impact and it’s genuinely useful, in a way that jogging isn’t. Jogging is just undignified.
Do you feel responsible for promoting overuse of cars?
No. People were mad about cars long before we started talking rubbish about them on the telly. The second half of the 20th century was a massive love-affair with the car. It’s quite phenomenal when you look at the history.
They’ve always been objects of desire. They’re capable far beyond what is required of them, but then that’s also true of our laptops and wristwatches and trainers.
Okay, but we don’t tend to get killed by our wristwatches…
No, no, indeed. Cars are marvellous things, but we have to use them with a great deal of care and discretion, otherwise they’ll be taken away from us.
And it’s not, the government, it’s not ‘The Man’ — it will end up being legal tenability and the weight of public opinion.
People get very complacent driving cars, because it’s easy, and you are very protected and you’re very isolated inside your car. It’s easy to forget that there’s a huge amount of energy inside a car, even when it’s only going 20 or 30mph.
I saw a bloke the other day driving a Ferrari around town very aggressively, and I wanted to say, ‘You’re going to ruin cars (and especially Ferraris) for the rest of us’.
It’s a massive privilege having a car and you have to take it seriously. That’s why my only remaining ambition, apart from not falling off my bike again, is to get to the end of my life without running anybody over.
We ultimately can’t have self-driving cars then, can we?
Because self-driving cars would have to be imbued with a morality, and once you try and do that you realise that cars are actually immoral. They are ‘kill and not be killed’ devices.
Do you only see cycling as a step on the way to a car?
No. The bicycle is the only thing in physics that seems to give you something for nothing. I’m still amazed by it now.
A bicycle massively improves the efficiency of the walking human being, and on the whole they are much easier to maintain and buy than horses.
It is no coincidence that lots of the world’s great car manufacturers — Peugeot, Škoda, BMW, Rover — started off by making bicycles.
Long time Top Gear and Grand Tour trio: James with fellow bike lover Richard Hammond and fellow pub landlord Jeremy Clarkson – Credit: Amazon Prime Video
“It's a joy to ride a bicycle... something is childlike about it - it makes me feel about eight years old. ”
What should cycle campaigners do differently?
Be more humorous! The cycling lobby can be a bit po-faced. But it’s a joy to ride a bicycle. It’s free at the point of use, there’s no admin, there’s something very child-like about it — it makes me feel about eight years old. Be more fun. Emphasise the fun!
What do you dislike about bicycle infrastructure?
You don’t need vehicle levels of traffic control for bicycles. People on bicycles are really just pedestrians. A bicycle is just an elaborate bit of footwear.
As long as people cycle in a sympathetic way, and pedestrians are still at the top of the hierarchy — the world belongs to people, not machines — then it ought to work.
For example, there’s a bicycle traffic light near me at Turnham Green in Chiswick. But really it should just be a ‘give way’ sign and we should allow for the wit of humanity.
Not every action needs to be controlled. I find it slightly extremist.
What do you want for cycling?
I don’t know what the answer is. Maybe a central government Minister of Cycling?
What do you want for your nearby Hammersmith Bridge?
I live in west London, and when Hammersmith Bridge was first closed everybody said it was going to completely mess up traffic flow.
Possibly it did for a bit, but then after a while nobody noticed. If I was still commuting to the Top Gear studio I’d find its closure a bit inconvenient, but there are other bridges.
If they ever finish mending it, I don’t see why Hammersmith Bridge shouldn’t also have some shrubbery, some benches, a few little cafés and hotdog stands. Like Ponte Vecchio [in Florence] which has no cars on it.
It’s great. That sort of thing was quite common in the medieval era. The original London had whole towns on bridges: London Bridge had about 600 people living on it.
So I’d like Hammersmith Bridge to be more medieval. But with better sanitation. And less plague.
If you were Mayor for the day, what would you do?
I’d bring the bus fare cap back to £2. Raising it to £3 is a 50% increase, which is a lot. And I’d make all people doing roadworks in London accountable.
If you’re contracted to do roadworks, and there’s nobody actually working on it, the managing director has to stand there and hand £10 each to every driver and cyclist and bus passenger that goes past.
That’s their incentive to get on with it.
What about anti-cycling opposition?
Some of it smacks of sheer bloody-mindedness. Kensington & Chelsea Council says it’s not going to have any cycling infrastructure — well why not?
There’s plenty of space. Big wide roads. Why are they being tw*ts about it?
Most of the anti-cycling rage that I read, like that nonsense in the Daily Telegraph about bicycles doing 50mph, is clearly just rubbish. The most I’ve ever managed according to my Garmin is 31mph and that was downhill in Richmond Park, and the world record is something like 40mph.
I don’t understand how the editors and subeditors could have looked at that front page and not thought, hang on a minute. [Ed — legal e-bike speeds are capped at 25km/h or 15mph, but electric motorbikes, with pedals and throttle, can easily top 50mph].
James on his Trek, one of over 25 bikes in his collection
“It amazes me when people go to the shops a mile away in their car - the world has proved that bikes make immense sense in densely populated areas!”
How would you change the driving test?
I was involved in the development of an app for the UK driving theory test.
People go on about all sorts of ways to improve driving training: why don’t we test young people on the motorway, why don’t we retest people over 60?
But I think the best thing you could do with the driving test is make a part of it on a bicycle.
Use with care…
The thing that really bothers me is road sectarianism. Quite a few people in cars seem to be somehow offended by people riding bicycles because they’ve paid all this money for a car and think therefore they should be rewarded for it, but often they’re just not using the car very intelligently.
And some people don’t use their bicycles very intelligently either! I find it baffling that people can’t get on a bit better and have a more of a give-and-take attitude.
You like a fixer-upper too?
I love bicycles as things as well as riding them. They’re relatively inexpensive, you don’t need elaborate tools to maintain them, and getting a bicycle to work really well is incredibly satisfying.
It really winds me up when people treat their bikes like crap. The Dutch treat all their bikes as chattels and end up by throwing them in the canal. I just don’t understand it.
Half an hour with a few Allen keys, a spanner and a can of lube and you can make a bike work beautifully.
You see people riding around on quite tricksy bikes but they’ve got dried-out rusty chains or their tyre pressure is too low, and all I think is you’re wasting energy.
I don’t like seeing any machinery being abused, but there’s something particularly tragic about abused bicycles. It feels like kicking a puppy.
QUICKFIRE QUESTIONS
What vehicles do you own?
About seven motorcycles. Maybe nine cars. A boat. An aeroplane. Over 25 bicycles. Quite a few of them are ones I’ve built.
What bikes would you take for The Grand Tour: Cycling Special?
I would take my Trek. Hammond would go for a gravel bike. Clarkson’s really bad at riding bicycles because he’s inept; he’d want something like a fat-tyred mountain bike with e-assist.
Favourite TV show?
My own — James May and the Dull Men’s Club.
Favourite cycling moment?
Going past something that smells fantastic. The pub on the corner by Olympia on a busy summer evening with fresh beer… smelling coffee… kebab vans… the water in Hyde Park and the mulchy earth after it’s rained.
Highlights of the May bike collection:
- Mayflower: My first bike as a child. It has my name on it!
- Three-speeder: I bought my old three-speeder as a project years ago. It fits me absolutely perfectly. It’s not light, it’s not sporty, but I belt along.
- 7.5kg Orbea: I bought the made-to-measure frame just before lockdown and then added parts from the London Cycle Workshop in Hammersmith.
- Pub bike: I built it out of an old mountain bike frame and painted it in Richard Hammond’s garage. Four-speed hub gear with back-pedal brakes.
- 1980s Moser: It’s in very good condition, with early Campagnolo technology.
Bromptons: I’ve had Bromptons for almost 20 years, before they were trendy. I’ve got three now, which is ridiculous, and I keep one on my boat.
This article was originally published in London Cyclist spring 2025, London Cycling Campaign’s exclusive member’s magazine. Join as a member today for quarterly copies of London Cyclist delivered to your door, free legal advice, discounts in independent bike shops across London, and much more…
I saw a bloke the other day driving a Ferrari around town very aggressively, and I wanted to say, ‘You’re going to ruin cars (and especially Ferraris) for the rest of us’.
Denver, CO
“Obviously I’ve spent a lot of time over the years writing about cars and making TV about them, and I love cars, but I do think in my bones they don’t really belong in towns.”
Washington, DC
There have been a lot of weird engines throughout history. The opposed-piston engine is an oddball, as is the Wankel and the hub-mounted piston engine. But there is an undisputed king of complicated and weird. That engine is the Napier Deltic, and it’s so complicated that it’s hard to summarize in a single sentence. But I’ll try: This diesel monstrosity was an opposed-piston menace that had 18 cylinders, 36 pistons, was shaped like a triangle, and thundered around the United Kingdom in ships and locomotives. That’s only the start.
The opposed-piston engine is a relative rarity in the modern world. Don’t mistake “opposed-piston” for the engines found in Subarus and BMW motorcycles. In a horizontally-opposed engine, you get a piston in each cylinder firing outward and sideways rather than straight up and down like in a typical piston engine. These engines are often called “flat” engines, and depending on the application, these engines can be short and compact.
An opposed-piston engine can also be a compact solution, but these engines work differently than a boxer, a flat-four, or similar. In an opposed-piston engine, two pistons share a single cylinder and instead of moving out, these pistons move toward each other before firing and coming right back to each other again. They also don’t have to be horizontal.
Opposed-Pistons Are Rooted In History
As the Gas Engine Magazine writes, one of the very first opposed-piston engines was the “Atkinson Differential Engine” (shown below) invented by James Atkinson in England in 1882. Apparently Atkinson thought Nikolaus Otto’s four-stroke engine wasn’t terribly efficient and figured he could do better. In Atkinson’s engine, two pistons shared the same cylinder and fired at each other, but each fire happened with each rotation of the crankshaft. As a result, the pistons weren’t really coming at each other, but following each other.
Opposed-piston engines would then begin to show up all over early automotive history. The famed Gobron-Brillié car that hit 95 mph in 1904 did so with opposed-piston power. These engines also found homes in motorcycles, watercraft, and even in some rail experiments. In my retrospective about the Commer TS3 opposed-piston diesel, I noted other efforts:
They weren’t the only ones, the Swiss Sulzer ZG9 was an opposed-piston engine before World War II that found a life powering generators. Meanwhile, the Junkers Jumo 204 of 1929 was another opposed-piston diesel engine and it was bolted to aircraft. There were opposed-piston engines as early as 1905. Scottish car manufacturer Arrol-Johnston had a rope-start opposed-piston engine back then.
The opposed-piston fever even hit America, where Ransom Eli Olds sought to solve the problem of early diesels being so heavy. His diesel [shown below] would dramatically cut down on weight with a radical new design.
Opposed-piston engines have several advantages. By making pistons punch each other in a single cylinder, you can eliminate numerous parts that would be needed in a piston engine with vertical cylinders. Opposed-piston engines don’t need cylinder heads or valvetrains as the movement of the pistons handle the compression of the fuel-air mixture. This reduces material and engineering costs, reduces weight, reduces bulk, reduces friction loss, and in theory, should also reduce complexity.
Early piston engines had a problem with scavenging. When an engine operates, burned exhaust gases are supposed to leave the combustion chamber to be replaced with a charge of fresh air for the combustion process to start all over. This sounds simple, but in practice, early piston engines struggled to scavenge all of the exhaust gases efficiently. Opposed-piston engines were better at scavenging than other designs of their day.
How Opposed-Piston Engines Work
Here’s how a basic opposed-piston engine works. In a single cylinder, there are two pistons, each with its own connecting rod and crankshaft. When the engine is at the bottom of its stroke with both pistons farthest apart, an exhaust port on one end is open while an intake port is open on the other end. Fresh air enters the cylinder as exhaust gases are pushed out. Both pistons begin moving toward each other, closing the ports and creating a swirl of fresh air as the compression stroke continues.
As both pistons close in on eachother and the engine reaches inner dead center (this engine’s equivalent of top dead center), fuel is injected from the middle of the cylinder. The heat and pressure generated during the compression stroke ignite the fuel at near where the pistons meet, starting the power stroke.
As the pistons blast away from each other, the exhaust ports open, blowing exhaust gases out. Once the pistons reach their farthest distance apart, the intake ports open, pushing in fresh air and scavenging the exhaust gases. Then, the cylinders start coming back at each other, starting the process all over again.
Early versions of the opposed-piston engine called for the pairs of cranks to be synchronized with gears. Exhaust scavenging also wasn’t particularly efficient, as early opposed-piston engines exposed their intake and exhaust ports at the same time. Ransom Olds and Commer figured out solutions to these problems. Their designs called for all cylinders to ride on the same crankshaft and for the piston on the exhaust side to operate ever so slightly ahead of the intake side. The changes helped scavenge exhaust gases much better while also making for a simpler engine.
Each company and engineer seemed to have their own reasons for opposed-piston engines. Ransom Olds wanted to reduce the weight of the insanely heavy engines of the 1930s, while others, like Commer, needed powerful engines that fit into smaller spaces.
The Napier Deltic, too, was born out of necessity.
The Need For Speed
The year was 1943, and the world was at war for a second time. According to the Model Engineer magazine, which published a deep dive in 1953, the British Admiralty had learned a few lessons in World War I that it wanted to apply in the second war. Britain saw a need for fast and lightweight torpedo boats, something it was sorely lacking at the time.
In the 1930s, the Germans built several Schnellboote, fast boats, that the Allies called E-boats. These attack vessels were relatively speedy and their diesel engines made them a bit less susceptible to fire than the gasoline-powered attack boats from Britain. But there was another problem. The Brits couldn’t just plop a diesel engine into an attack boat because the diesel engines of those days were usually pretty weak-sauce.
Thankfully, engineers had already been trying to solve this problem. One proposal came from N. Penwarden, a draughtsman at the Admiralty Engineering Laboratory, by D. Napier & Son Limited. Before the war and in the 1930s, D. Napier & Son purchased a license to the Junkers Jumo 204 aviation engine and began developing it into the Napier Culverin.
The Junkers engine was one of the most successful early implementations of opposed-piston technology. The 28.5-liter aircraft engine featured six cylinders, 12 pistons, and punched out 700 HP. Junkers also solved the scavenging problem by timing the pistons to open the exhaust port sooner. But Junkers did not solve the problem with needing two crankshafts for the cylinders. What it did do was experiment with piling on power with engines of different configurations, including a diamond and a rhombus.
The Napier Culverin had the same basic design. This engine featured six vertical cylinders with a total of 12 pistons contained within them. Crankshafts were found at the top and the bottom of the engine and were linked by a gearset. Unfortunately, the 821 HP firepower produced by the Culverin wasn’t enough for the demand of fast attack boats, so engineers went back to the drawing board.
The Napier Deltic
A technical manual by D. Napier & Son explains that the firm’s engineers created the Deltic essentially by taking three Culverins and placing them into a huge, mostly aluminum triangle. From D. Napier & Son:
The basic structure of the engine is formed by three cylinder blooks and three crankcases held together by high-tensile steel tie-rods passing through the cylinder blocks and crankcases and torque loaded to form a basic assembly of great strength and rigidity.
Two important design aspects arise from the triangular lay-out. Firstly, a phase angle different between the inlet and exhaust pistons of one cylinder arises automatically; the exhaust piston leads the inlet piston by 20° and the bottom crankshaft rotates in the opposite direction to the two upper crankshafts. This phasing and engine timing will be discussed in detail in a later chapter. Secondly, in any one crankcase, the crank-pins carry blade and fork type connecting-rods. The pistons attached to the fork rods control the exhaust ports of one bank of cylinders, end the pistons attached to the blade rods control the inlet ports of the other bank of cylinders adjacent to that crankcase. The clearance volume between the two opposing pistons in any one cylinder forms the combustion space. Thus the load on each crank-pin and the power transmitted by each crankshaft is the same, with a large saving of weight owing to the elimination of cylinder heads,
valves and valve operating mechanisms.
At the driving end of the main triangle assembly, a casing contains phasing gears which link the three crankshafts to a single output gear. Connecting each crankshaft to the phasing gears is a quill-shaft designed in conjunction with a vibration damper to eliminate torsional vibration over the engine range of operating speed. These quill-shafts allow differences of expansion and slight mal-aligment between the crankshafts and phasing gears: by the use of differing numbers of teeth at each end of the quill-shafts the vernier combination so formed is used for phasing the crankshafts. The phasing gear case also contains auxiliary gear trains to drive some of the engine auxiliaries, and in certain installations, auxiliaries may be driven directly from the quill-shafts. The means of transmitting the drive from the output gear of the phasing gear case.
Hopefully, your brain isn’t melting looking at that. If it is, I’ll try to simplify this. The Deltic, which is named after the Greek letter Delta, creates one huge engine block out of three engine blocks formed together into a triangle. Remember how the Junkers design has a crankshaft at the top and the bottom of the engine to run the pistons? Well, in mashing these engines together into a triangle, each vertex of the triangle has a common crankshaft. That way, you don’t have a three-block engine with six crankshafts.
The three cranks of a Deltic were linked with phasing gears so that what’s essentially three engines can operate one output shaft.
Here are some more juicy details from Napier:
A ‘geared in’ type turbo blower unit consisting of a centrifugal compressor and a single stage axial-flow turbine, is mounted on a sandwich piece at the free-end of the triangle. Port timing is so arranged that the blower completely scavenges and pressure-charges the cylinders. The engine is lubricated on the dry sump principle, with engine driven pressure and scavenge oil pumps. Certain parts of the engine are supplied with oil at a reduced pressure either through a pressure reducing valve or through restrictors taking their oil supply from the main pressure system. The main oil system also supplies oil to the clutch pumy when a bi-directional gear box is fitted. The oil is cooled by passing it through a heat exchanger or radiator before returning it to the service tank.
A closed cooling system is used, circulating distilled water inhabited with ethylene glycol. The coolant is ciroulated through the exhaust manifolds, cylinder blocks, and where applicable, through the turbine casing, by an engine driven pump. A thermostatically controlled heat exchanger or radiator is included in the system, using a raw water or air supply for extracting heat from the engine coolant.
The method of starting the engine may vary with the type of installation; alternative methods used are air-starting, or by motoring the engine through a generator, where the generator is directly coupled to the engine.For air starting, high pressure from an air reservoir is admitted to one bank of cylinders, by means of a distributor valve, to motor the engine. Mounted on the free end of the bottom crankcase is an auxiliary drive gear box containing a train of gears driven by a flexible drive shaft from the bottom crankshaft, a similar to the blower flexible drive shafts. This train of gears may drive various engine auxiliaries and in certain applications may have an auxiliary power take-off shaft.
It’s noted that one particularly difficult challenge arose from this process of sorta mashing three engines together. The challenge was how to get the pistons to move in the correct sequence. Remember that in the base engines, two cranks moved 12 pistons in six cylinders. Now, the triangle of engines were sharing common cranks.
Note: The technical manual is 15 chapters and long enough to fill a book. Click here to read more of it.
Penwarden figured out that the optimal way to get every piston to move on time was to have one of the three cranks to run counter-clockwise. This required changes in gearing to run that crank “backward” and yep, it looks as wild as you think it is.
The Deltic even kept with the times and was engineered to be efficient at scavenging. For that, engineers made the exhaust piston lead the intake piston by 20 degrees. By doing this, the exhaust port opened before the inlet port, and then the exhaust port closed, after exhausting gases, in time for a charge of fresh air to come in from the compressor. It’s also noted that in terms of firing, a Deltic had an ignition charge every 20 degrees of crankshaft rotation. Oh don’t worry, I have a graphic for the firing order and yes, it’s properly chaotic.
Put it together and you have a comically complex engine with three crankshafts, 18 cylinders, and 36 pistons. If that’s not crazy enough for you, I’ll note that the Deltic also had three compressors to help with scavenging. Curiously, the Deltic also had three camshafts driven by the gear system. Since there were no valves to actuate, the cams were there solely to operate the injectors and pumps for the engine’s banks of cylinders.
As you can imagine, a project this absurd took a while to materialize. The first prototypes didn’t see action until after World War II in 1947. Production commenced around 1950 with the Deltic D18-11B. This 18-cylinder beast was capable of producing 2,500 HP for 15 minutes or 1,875 HP continuously, but that assumed a 10,000-hour time between overhauls.
The spec sheet of an 18-cylinder Deltic was also properly wacky. These engines had a bore of 5.125 inches and a stroke into the next postal code of 7.25 inches. The engine ran at a compression ratio of 19.26:1 and had a displacement of 88.3 liters. Of course, no sheet of numbers is complete without dimensions. A Napier Deltic 18-cylinder was 6 feet, 2.5 inches wide, 7 feet, 1 inch tall, and was 10 feet, 11 inches long. Dry, a Napier Deltic 18-cylinder weighed 8,727 pounds.
The Deltic Goes Into Service
If you’re still wondering why on Earth an engine like this existed, there’s another explanation. The Brits had a captured German E-Boat on hand, a vessel that used a triplet of Mercedes-Benz diesels with power said to be about on the level of the Deltics.
The Admiralty replaced two of the three German diesels with Napier Deltics and the difference was apparently shocking. The crazy Deltics were half of the size of the big Mercedes diesels and a fifth of the weight. Yet, they also just made ridiculously great power for their size.
This was perhaps the apex of the opposed-piston experiment. These were supposed to be relatively compact engines that pumped out huge power numbers. At the time, the Napier Deltic did just that. The engines were also remarkably good at their jobs, and the Royal Navy put these engines into any craft that needed to move swiftly, including countermeasures vessels, minesweepers, and fast attack craft.
A smaller 9-cylinder version of the Deltic was also built and were used in vessels like minesweepers or used for power generation in ships that already used Deltic 18s for propulsion.
Boats, Trains, And Fire Trucks
The Navy wasn’t the only entity to have fun with these engines. From 1959 to 1962, English Electric constructed British Rail Class 23 and British Rail Class 55 locomotives that used Deltic diesels as their prime movers.
The British Rail Class 23, which was introduced in 1959, used a Napier Deltic T9-29 9-cylinder, 18-piston diesel good for 1,100 HP. These 75 mph locomotives, often called the Baby Deltic, were known for operational issues including cylinder liner cracking around the injector hole, turbo bearing failures, and seized pistons. Only 10 of these locomotives were built, and it’s said that most of them had some sort of problem most of the time.
The more famous implementation was in the British Rail Class 55 locomotives that were often called the Deltics. These majestic machines had pairs of Napier Deltic D18-25 engines, together making a combined output of 3,300 HP. When these locomotives were introduced in 1961, they were the most powerful single-unit diesel locomotives in the world.
Keep in mind that “diesel” is the operative term there. In 1961 there were more powerful electric locomotives and Union Pacific also had its insane gas turbine-electric locomotives that were also more powerful. Steamers also made more power. But for a brief period, and by brief, I mean just a single year, the Brits had the glory. I’ll let Curbside Classic explain why British railfans absolutely love these things:
So what makes the Deltic special? The looks and the colours of the prototype; the sheer bulk of the production versions. The impact of these huge engines pulling expresses at a steady 100mph for mile after mile. The rarity – only 22, compared to 200 Class 40s and over 500 Brush Class 47 diesels. But most of all, the noise. Ah, the noise. Compare the noise of any other British diesel to a Deltic and you’ll get it. It’s like comparing a bus to a racing car. The former is slow, steady and chugs along.
But the Deltic spins frantically, emitting huge clouds of black smoke as the engine starts up (a recurring problem caused by oil build up in the exhausts, and source of more than one fire) and settles in a fast, frantic idle; then, the second engine starts (this beast is twin engined, remember), and it all happens again. In the cavernous stations at King’s Cross, York, Newcastle Central and Edinburgh Waverley, an idling Deltic drowned any PA system, and a departing one would seemingly be audible for minutes.
Shutting down the engine was no less dramatic, as the complex gearing around six crankshafts rattled to a stop. Growing up just 100 yards from the ECML, two miles from Wakefield station on the London – Leeds line, we always knew when a train was Deltic hauled minutes before it passed between the houses across the road, and the noise had a direct line of sight to our house.
Amazingly, Napier Deltics even made their way to America by way of Nasty-class patrol boats.
The New York City Fire Department also used Napier Deltic engines to power their gigantic “Super Pumper System” trailers, which were designed to extinguish the biggest monster fires. How crazy was the pumper? It fired 8,800 gallons of water per minute at a blaze. But it was also great as a hub. As Curbside Classic notes, when the NYFD responded to a postal annex fire in 1967, a Super Pumper System trailer was able to provide water to a tender truck, three satellite units, two ladder trucks, and hand hoses all by itself.
A Finicky Legend
Sadly, while the Napier Deltic may have been a super engine, it was also high-strung and difficult to repair, requiring specially-trained technicians. These engines had lots of success in their roles, but operators found the engines easier to swap out and repair later rather than to immediately repair when things went wrong. The Deltics were also somewhat limited in scope. They were small and light for ship and railway engines, but not small enough to be used in highway tractors. Eventually, more conventional diesels also caught up enough in power that operators eventually just moved to those engines instead.
Despite that, the Deltic still lasted an impressively long time. The ‘Baby Deltic’ locomotives were retired after about a decade of use, but the bigger ‘Deltic’ locomotives survived into 1980. Six of the 22 British Rail Class 55s have been preserved, too, which is pretty awesome.
The Deltics fared better on the seas. The last Deltic-powered crafts were the Hunt-class mine countermeasures vessels, which kept their Napier Deltic 9-59K engines until they were replaced by Caterpillar C32 engines beginning in 2012.
Everything about the Napier Deltic diesels was simply absurd, from their crazy configurations to the fact that they were still somehow smaller than equivalent engines in their day. Unless someone protests, I think these engines are deserving to be called the weirdest engines ever made. Yet, the coolest part is that the Deltics weren’t some crazy one-off thing, but an engine that worked well enough to be used well into the modern day. Maybe as the world looks to alternative fuel sources we’ll see something bonkers like this again.
Top Photo: Phil Sangwell/ Flickr / Wikimedia Commons
The post The Most Complicated Diesel Engine Ever Had 3 Blocks, 18 Cylinders, 36 Pistons, And Was Shaped Like A Triangle appeared first on The Autopian.
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You can also watch it on YouTube.
Below is the edited essay version of this video.
Why Notorious is a great example of a culture of data security #
One of the best examples of how to think about organizational data security, access control, defense in depth, how you handle security leaks, and the like, doesn’t come from computer science, organisational theory, or case studies, but from spy media – specifically Hitchcock spy movies.
The idea that you should make sure the Germans or the Nazis didn’t discover any information or secret in the UK that might have been of use to them during the Battle of Britain was ingrained not just in the popular culture at the time, but also in just the general culture.
Not just military and top secret information, but information about like shift changes in a factory, or how production was going on a manufacturing line. All of that was valuable information to an adversary.
This meant that most of the people watched Hitchcock’s World War II movies, or the movies that were made immediately after, would have been intimately familiar with the idea of containment – of making sure that only the people who needed to know were allowed to know, because loose lips sink ships. The more people know, the more likely it is the adversary will discover it.
When you look at a movie like Notorious made in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, you would have to remember that the audience at the time knew what was needed to make sure an enemy didn’t find out information that threatened the security of the nation.
So if you aren’t familiar with the movie, you should absolutely watch it as Notorious is is one of the best examples of a Hitchcock thriller.
You’ve got Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman as the leads. Cary Grant is the American spy, Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a notorious Nazi traitor (hence the title), and he convinces her to infiltrate a group of Nazis that have managed to flee after the war by any means necessary, because they know that the Nazis are planning something.
Because Nazis are always planning something.
And it was vital for the national security of the US and other countries to discover what they were planning and prevent it.
That, right at the start, is a good first example of operational security in that the Nazi group that Ingrid Bergman is supposed to infiltrate makes sure that whatever vital strategic data they’re protecting is only accessible from within the organization.
They’re not keeping it in a mailbox or safety deposit box in London or somewhere where the US can access it. They make sure it’s stored somewhere away from where adversarial authorities can store it.
Similarly, if you’re worried about the US, you don’t store your data on a US-based server or with a US-based company.
This is not a new concern.
The US has a history of compromising the data security of their allies #
From the time I got my first job at a software company, there’s been this concern about the safety or security of whichever data you store with the US server. And that comes down to George Bush, the Patriot Act, and the laws that followed that effectively mean you can trust that if the US authorities are interested in any given piece of data that’s stored with a US-based company or in a US-based server they will be able to access it.
That’s what the law is for.
What many warned about at the time was that we don’t always know that the US government will respect whatever safeguards they might have in place, that this was proto-fascism, or the first step towards the mechanisms of fascism, even though you might not have an actual fascist movement behind it.
That’s kind of what’s happened now.
It also demonstrates one key difference between the security concerns of a European company or organization today versus 20 years ago.
When I was working in a software security company based here in Iceland they hosted all of their data in Icelandic data center, specifically because they were worried about the Patriot Act.
What’s new is that movements have converts #
One of the things that they didn’t have to worry about at the time were zealots or converts. You wouldn’t have an Icelander or a European suddenly convert to “Bushism” and think that the ideals of following George Bush would trump their own current national interests, or the interests of the company they’re working for, or the colleagues they’re around.
But today there is a decent chance that if somebody has authoritarian leanings or authoritarian ideas, or has sympathies to fascist ideologies, they might see the rise of Trumpism as something that they can relate to and follow.
There’s a very real possibility that a security leak would not necessarily come from accidentally hiring a North Korean agent or hiring an undercover agent or infiltration such as the Nazis were facing in Notorious, but from somebody who has been working for your organization who suddenly believes that the cause of Trumpism is more important than the organization they work for, or the country they belong to, or their colleagues that work around them.
The infiltration isn’t just the unfamiliar, or the new, or an employee, or manager getting hacked. It potentially is converts and zealotry.
That’s an aspect of this, that wasn’t the case 20 years ago, 10 years ago.
You didn’t really have to worry about somebody in your organization suddenly converting to Putinism or becoming a Chinese sympathizer overnight. There has nonetheless always been a contingent among tech with fascist and authoritarian leanings.
I remember conversations in companies where I used to work, where you’d ask a developer what they were reading, or talk to them about politics
and you’d end up thinking to yourself “that’s kind of fascist”.
You do actually need to worry about somebody inside your organization turning, especially if you’re in tech.
It’s not just the converts. As I mentioned earlier, people have accidentally hired North Korean agents and executive’s phones or email accounts have been hacked meaning they became an unwitting infiltrator.
It can happen to you.
Access control #
So the first step, if you follow in the playbook of the Nazis in the movie Notorious is access control. Even though Ingrid Bergman managed to infiltrate herself into the household of the Nazi played by Claude Rains, she didn’t have access to everything – all of the secrets of the organization.
Similarly, just because somebody works for you or is a manager, or is allowed in your office,that doesn’t mean they should have access to every database.
Access to any given data store in your company should only be open to those who need to access it.
Even a developer who says, “I need access to the database to develop software that works with it”.
No, they don’t need to work with the production database.
They need to work with something that looks and works like the production database.
They should never ever touch actual customer or client data, because you don’t know what they’re gonna do with it. They could even accidentally leak it, which is honestly just as bad because when it comes to regulatory compliance and your duty and obligation to report on security issues, regulators don’t care that much how it happens.
Unintentional or not, you need to still need to report leaks, so it still exposes you to liability and issues.
Be selective about what you store #
You also need to make sure that you don’t store what you don’t need.
Much of this goes unsaid in the movie, but the Nazis make sure that they don’t name too many names. They don’t store too much detail because they know that anything that is stored can get leaked. The same thing applies to us when we’re developing software or structuring an organization.
The data that you don’t store doesn’t get leaked, it doesn’t get stolen, it doesn’t get confiscated or accessed through a warrant by an American organization who’ve just criminalized a section of their population and are wanting to use you to find people to arrest.
If you don’t store that data, you’re not gonna be a target.
Containment #
Another item from the Nazi saboteur ring playbook is compartmentalisation: they organized into cells where the data that was contained within each cell wasn’t collected at a central point. As each spy cell was discovered, they didn’t know enough to harm the rest of the organization.
In terms of business strategy, that means data should be stored where it can be acted upon.
The more data you control centrally, the more data is stored away it is from where it can be acted on, which is bad idea in the first place.
Centrally storing all of your data also makes you a bigger target.
But the closer you store the data to where it’s acted upon, the tighter the feedback loop is for that part of the organization and that faster decisions can be made.
It’s not just a security issue to keep information at the edges rather than in the center.
It’s a functional organizational issue – a question of maneuverability.
Storing information at the edges makes an organization more limber and more capable of action at a short notice, often even before central management notices the issue.
One example of this were chains of bookstores. An issue that plagued bookstore chains in the UK, for example, was that many of them, decisions about book stock and orders for any given bookstore were decided upon centrally.
They collected all of their purchase data into one big pool and then some hoity-toity manager decided what any given branch would order.
(Borders UK had additional issues, such as an inventory system that required the use of custom bar codes instead of the pre-printed ones, but this central management of stock, if I remember correctly, was also a factor in Waterstones when it was owned by HMV.)
The people on the ground have a much better sense of of what works for their given store. Just because your bookstore is at a train station that doesn’t mean that it should order the same books as another bookstore in another train station.
It depends on what sort of customers come in on a regular basis and what neighbourhoods or employers are in proximity with the station.
When James Daunt, who now runs Waterstones, one of the first things that he did once he took on management of Waterstones, was to make sure that most inventory decisions for a bookstore were made in that store.
That meant that they would be able to focus on their actual clientele, and could respond to changes more quickly.
From the perspective of your average business organization, the logical next step after that is that non-essential data – all the data that doesn’t have to be stored centrally – is only stored at the edges in the branches or offices where it’s needed and not stored centrally.
You’re not gonna be able to apply this idea to every single piece of data you store, but it applies to more than you think.
The software equivalent #
If you’re making software, the equivalent would be to store things in the client, whether it’s in the browser, or in the app, or in the user’s file system.
Anything that the end user stores and controls locally is something that they can act upon quicker, more reliably, and makes you as an organisation less of a a target.
It’s much harder for an attacker to go through all of the edge locations and gather the data one by one.
Anything that slows them down gives you time.
Anything that gives you time gives you more opportunity to notice and react, makes you more able to do the right thing and protect your own interest.
Because this is about pure pragmatism.
There are liability issues for a European company if an outside entity accesses private data. It doesn’t matter if it’s the US government or some fascist leaning employee who leaks whatever to whichever ultra-right-wing website is en vogue at each time.
Make it “shreddable” #
If you have to store data, make sure you can actually delete it.
Or, technically, you don’t need to delete it completely, because that can be difficult when you’re using distributed storage.
But if you encrypt a data item and store the encryption key separately for each user, then deleting the key means you’ve effectively shredded the entire data set for that user.
Making sure that the data is impossible to access is almost as good as actually deleting it, because it can come down to effectively the same thing.
The weakness of Nazis #
But the final lesson is what caused the downfall of the Nazi organization in the movie Notorious.
One of the recurring themes for authoritarians, both in media and in real life, is the need to command and control – the rule through fear and discipline, and the treatment of people as if they were cogs in a machine.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s Star Wars or Notorious, the standard tactic for authoritarians is to punish those who shows weakness.
This is surprisingly common in modern businesses, depsite numerous studies showing that the approach is self-descructive.
When a substantial percentage of a company can expect to get fired every year, and at the same time you have performance reviews and you have management reports, anybody who shows any kind of weakness or mistake or flaw can expect to be at risk for losing their job.
This happens in Notorious, albeit in a more extreme way. The Nazis kill anybody who shows any weakness.
That meant that when the Claude Rains character started to suspect the Ingrid Bergman character, his wife who had infiltrated his organization, he didn’t report it.
Even though that’s what you should do whenever you suspect your organization or your business has been infiltrated, whether it’s because you accidentally clicked a link or an email and your computer started to behave weirdly, or whether it’s the new employee doing weird things, you’re supposed to report it because that’s the only way an organization can prevent bad things from happening.
But if you punish people who report, even indirectly, that means that everybody’s first instict will be the same as that of the Claude Rains character’s in Notorious: he prevented the infiltration from being discovered and tried to handle it himself.
Instead of immediately shutting down the security risk and giving them the opportunity to salvage their operations and basically ensuring victory for the Nazi saboteurs in Notorious, he ensured their doom because he was afraid.
His fear of discovery or of him being purged for having made an understandable human error meant that the good side won.
This is what authoritarians never understand, they never grasp. This iron fist control over the organization, this rule through fear and weeding out weakness, actually makes an organization weak.
Robust organizations understand that people make mistakes, that people vary and that it’s the system of the organization that is the actual decider of the overall productivity or effectiveness of the organization.
The organization that understands that people make mistakes and works—makes sure it’s a safe enough environment for them to let you know that something has gone wrong.
That’s the organization that lasts, that tolerates crises and survives them, even thrives on change.
The authoritarian organizations that weed out weakness create weakness in themselves because you’re always going to need people and people will always make human errors.
You need to create an environment that benefits from human variation, from people noticing the odds and the strange and the weird.
You want people to be human and let you know when they see something.
But that’s not what authoritarians want or managers with an authoritarian bent.
That’s why they lose in the long run.
That’s why the rest of us will win eventually.
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