Future historians of our time may find it odd that, as Maury Klein, a professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, notes, scholars in recent decades have expended more effort assaying the social significance of TV’s Brady Bunch than they have illuminating the great impact that the diesel locomotive had on railroading and American life. Klein and his colleagues try to rectify that imbalance in this special issue of Railroad History devoted to "the machine that saved the railroads."

Rudolf Diesel (1858–1913), the Parisian-born German engineer who gave the machine his name, never built more than a few crude prototypes. "The consensus is that his science was ahead of his engineering: he had to cope with poor metal and crude manufacturing that did not keep pace with his ideas," writes Mark Reutter, editor of Railroad History, which is published by the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society, with editorial offices at the University of Illinois. But Diesel’s ideas—first advanced in an 1893 manifesto, Theory and Construction of a Railroad Heat Engine—eventually proved revolutionary. With the steam engine then at the height of its influence, he pointed out how extremely inefficient it was, losing most of its fuel’s heat energy up the stack. He developed a theory of internal combustion, in which the fuel would be mixed and ignited in the same vessel that moved the piston—resulting in a much more efficient engine. His test engines attracted international attention in 1898; St. Louis beer baron Adolphus Busch paid him about $240,000 for exclusive U.S. and Canadian rights.

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