Miniature Live Steam

[Stuart Down Under]

Does anyone else remember Arthur Sherwood, an engineering professor at Sydney University? Working in the 1960s and '70s, he developed live steam locos in H0 scale. Sadly he skipped N and went on to build two live steamers at 1/240 scale - admittedly they were large US-outline models. He built an extensive 1/240 scale electric-powered layout, before building some electric-powered 1/480 locos - all from scratch, including the motors. Quite remarkable for the times! There is a small piece about Arthur by Cyril J Freezer in the March 1973 "Railway Modeller", and "Google" reveals a few old photos on the web. Years ago, some of his models were reported to be on display at Sydney University.

[Bealman]

Never heard of him! 

[The Q]

Yep I've come across his work in a couple of articles.
http://www.zen98812.zen.co.uk/aasherwood.html

Not quite as small there is Brian Canton who will build you an 009 live steamer, but they aren't cheap as each takes 65 hours to build.
https://paxton-road.blogspot.com/2016/09/live-steam-009.html

There are others who build 009 live steam.

[zwilnik]

I have been wondering if it's feasible to make a low pressure steam cylinder with an electric heater as a 3D resin print.

The idea is that you'd drop a tiny amount of water into the hot end of the cylinder, which would flash to steam, giving you pressure for one stroke of the piston. The pressure should be low enough for it to be relatively safe as a resin print without needing to be too thick a cylinder for N gauge (assuming it's an internal cylinder hidden in the body of the loco) and you'd take power from the rails.

It might wear relatively quickly, but you'd just print another one to replace it

Power would be from the rails of course. You probably wouldn't get much more than an on-off unless you also somehow used the power level to control the water droplet rate.

All just wild ideas stage at the moment though