Last train to Penzance - A black and white photo of a train on the tracks

Steam Machines, Engines, Locomotives. In 1781 James Watt patented a steam engine that produced continuous rotary motion. Watt's ten-horsepower engines enabled a wide range of manufacturing machinery to be powered. The engines could be sited anywhere that water and coal or wood fuel could be obtained. By 1883, engines that could provide 10,000 hp had become feasible. The steam engine was one of the most important technologies of the Industrial Revolution.

A humorous 1889 novel by Jerome K. Jerome of a two-week boating holiday on the Thames from Kingston upon river Thames to Oxford and back to Kingston, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), was thought to be a serious travel guide but slipped into a brilliant specimen of humour (humor). The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff: the time when commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity. This collection is a fictional set of illustration to the book as it was initially intended.

This exhibition of photographs from The National Archives was produced in 2000 as part of a larger exhibition put together by partners in the Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA) project. Institutions from across Europe provided images from their own holdings showing transport of all kinds across the Continent. The collection shows the technical development; the marvels of design and construction that improvements in transport spawned. Transport has fundamentally altered the world in which we live and these images cover everything from horsepower to airpower.

This image dataset is generated from our world's largest public domain image database. Made in two steps (manual, and image recognition), it comprises of more than 35,000 images of all types and sizes - an astonishing number if keep in mind that the total number of steam locomotives ever built was just one order of magnitude larger. All images are in the public domain, so there is no limitation on the dataset usage - educational, scientific, or commercial. Please contact us if you need a dataset like this, we may already have it, or, we can make one for you, often in 24 hours or less.