With a falconette and a wheellock I've always considered the flint lock to be modern tech...

 Geared Shay steam locomotives still in service in 2014.

And you thought your forge produced smoke (grin)

 

 

My favorite Locomotives, those and the Hysler and Climax.  Not many ever run in our area but have always intrigued me. 

 

Are you very close to the Cass Railroad Glenn?  On my Bucket list of soon to do. 

 

Old Technologies story.  In Central Vermont there is only one main highway running East to West and it is US 4.  there is an old RR bridge from around 1900 that became the road bridge when the Woodstock RR was torn up in 1934 and still used today over a 168 FT deep Quechee  Gorge.  It keeps on working but all the bridges much smaller either side are in constant repair.  A few miles from the gorge is a stretch of RTE. 4 that is forever sliding down towards the river and the State and Feds repair is to go down about 200 ft to the old abandoned RR roadbed which has never moved and start building up from there to hold the Highway up for many hundreds of car and trucks a day..  That roadbed was hand built in the 1870s without engineers with computers, PHD after names, or big salaries and designed for 3 rounds trips a day of 14 miles each way.  

 

Also in front of my house there is a 200 yr old stone arch bridge  that was designed and built to handle horses and wagons the most weight being lumber wagons.  It is the link between 2 towns and today it gets everything you can imagine, dump trucks towing excavators, rubbish compactors road graders and 2-3 hundred cars and pickups a day.  I've known it for 60+ years a other than repointing the stones from time to time they have never rebuilt it or it's sister bridge about a mile away but every other cement bridge are always getting something fixed.

 

If the picture adds to the post ?? it shows the bridge behind my grandkids this past June.  It also was in one of the Budweiser Christmas Commercials until they stopped using the horses this past Christmas the hitch driving over it.      

Having crossed over roman bridges not to mention the "iron bridge" at IronBridge Gorge I figure the old methods of "make a guess and then beef it up by a *factor* of 10" seems to work for the long view of things...