TITLE: Terrestrial Rocket Vehicle - 1830
NAME: David G. Wilkinson
COUNTRY: Scotland, UK
EMAIL: davidwilkinson@cwcom.net
WEBPAGE: hamiltonite.mcmail.com
TOPIC: History
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: dwrocket.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    POV-Ray 3.1e

TOOLS USED: 
    ruler, pencil, compasses and hand calculator.

RENDER TIME: 
    Parse 3 mins 39 Secs
            Trace 38 mins 26 Secs
            Total 41 mins 57 secs
peak memory 86,428,849 bytes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Pentium II 350Mhz 64Mb

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 
    This is a model of Robert Stevenson's famous locomotive
"Rocket" crossing a bridge.  The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the first
public railway using steam locomotives to operate a regular passenger service,
was built by George Stephenson between 1827 and 1830. The directors of the
railway promoted a competition - the Rainhill Trials - for an improved steam
locomotive and this was won by the Rocket.  It was a first for a multi-tubed
boiler and revolutionised steam locomotive design.
The colours are those that the locomotive was finished in for the trials, but I
doubt if the chimney stayed white for very long!
The idea for the scene was prompted by Turner's 1844 painting "Rain, Steam and
Speed" which shows a locomotive on a bridge, although I have used a much lower
viewpoint and unlike Turner's painting you can actually see the locomotive.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 
    The scene has been created using
POV-Ray exclusively.  The locomotive is CSG and was all hand coded. The
dimensions are largely scaled from a poster published by the British Science
Museum (hence the use of the tools above!)  The scale is one POV unit = one
foot.  It was rendered at 800 x 600 using 0.3 AA.
Acknowledgments;
The brickwork was generated by a macro written by Steven Pigeon
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pigeon/ and modified by Nathan Kopp
http://www.nathan.kopp.com/.  This was published in news.povray.binaries.images
on 14 December 98.
The figure was generated by the Blob Man macro by Peter Houston
http://members.xoom.com/HoustonGraph/ based on the work of Govert Zoethout
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/dada/507/.