Still, going from a stream powered spinning toy to locomotive is a few orders of magnitude. Heron’s “engine” was a little jet engine. Heated water pushed it’s way out of pipes. It’s a far cry from building steam pressure in a tank, using that pressure to drive a crank shaft, and pushing along a vehicle of any kind.
There are a number of industrial era inventions required before you can even start putting something like a train together.
The Romans didn’t even have replaceable parts yet. Every nail was custom made.
If you haven’t seen it, watch Clickspring’s series on the antikithra mechanism. It’ll give you an idea of how hard it was to produce complicated machinery was at the time.
Also there was no need in Italy and Greece. Britain invented steam engines because they needed a better way to pump water out of their mines, people worked out later that they could use these engines to power a cart, a digging machine, a rail machine. They needed mines for heating fuel due to the cold climate, they needed coal fired heat for their metallurgy
You need reasons to invent stuff (necessity is the mother of invention) and you’re not going to get much reason in a perfect climate with all the food you need coming from the sea and land all year
Britain already had rails for human and horse drawn carts
Still, going from a stream powered spinning toy to locomotive is a few orders of magnitude. Heron’s “engine” was a little jet engine. Heated water pushed it’s way out of pipes. It’s a far cry from building steam pressure in a tank, using that pressure to drive a crank shaft, and pushing along a vehicle of any kind.
There are a number of industrial era inventions required before you can even start putting something like a train together.
The Romans didn’t even have replaceable parts yet. Every nail was custom made.
If you haven’t seen it, watch Clickspring’s series on the antikithra mechanism. It’ll give you an idea of how hard it was to produce complicated machinery was at the time.
Also there was no need in Italy and Greece. Britain invented steam engines because they needed a better way to pump water out of their mines, people worked out later that they could use these engines to power a cart, a digging machine, a rail machine. They needed mines for heating fuel due to the cold climate, they needed coal fired heat for their metallurgy
You need reasons to invent stuff (necessity is the mother of invention) and you’re not going to get much reason in a perfect climate with all the food you need coming from the sea and land all year
Britain already had rails for human and horse drawn carts