Newcomen Steam Festival-Brunel's Atmospheric Caper

About this event

“Brunel’s Atmospheric Caper” follows Isambard Kingdom Brunel as he backs one of the strangest railways ever built along the South Devon coast from Exeter to Newton Abbot and on to Plymouth. Instead of locomotives, trains were hauled by a hidden vacuum based power system in a continuous pipe beside the line, celebrated as the future of high speed travel. Contemporary reports praised its smooth running, yet within months the experiment was quietly abandoned. Was the problem leaky valves, bad specifications, hostile directors, collapsing railway finances – or really rats eating the tallow that sealed the vacuum? The talk pieces together the evidence but lets the audience weigh the myths for themselves. Along the way, it opens a window on mid Victorian technology, boardroom politics and the cult of the “hero engineer”, asking what this bold failure reveals about Brunel’s genius – and his blind spots.