I’ve been looking for a new AI experiment side project for a little while now, but all my ideas were either too ambitious or I didn’t have enough time to sink into planning it all out properly.

Recently, some friends of mine came to visit for the weekend and, with them, came their four year old son. He’s an awesome little fella, full of curiosity and a hint of mischief. He’s also massively into trains, tractors, steam engines and all those sorts of things. Which got me thinking…

I decided I wanted to build something, not specifically for him but, educational adjacent. I revisited an old idea of turning my Haynes manual collection into interactive 3D models (something which turned out to be far too complicated and definitely too ambitious), and adapted it slightly to steam engines.

The Little Engine That Could

I started out with the King of the traction engine himself, Fred Dibnah’s “Betsy”. I wanted to test this to see if it would even work. So, with some reference images, and a few websites of information, I tasked Astra with building me a 3D model “based” on Betsy.

It didn’t do too bad a job. Now, I will say that this wasn’t a one-shot result. It took a few iterations to get through it but the end result isn’t too bad at all.

I Think I Can, I Think I Can, I Think I Can…

I also tasked it with providing some “child friendly” background information and compile it all into a website. I gave it some design direction (blueprinty, victorian) and let it do it’s thing.

The content isn’t perfect, and I’ll probably rewrite it at some point, but it’s good enough for this experiment.

Cinders and Ashes!

With that roaring success under my belt, I got a bit cocky. I drew up a list of important / famous British steam engines, from industrial power plant, to trains, and asked Astra to do the same for those, too.

Now, this is where it sort of came undone. I think I overwhelmed it with instructions and, really, I should have known better. What it really needed was a proper plan. So, we reset and I asked GPT Sol to plan it all out for me. I fed it as much information as I could, and asked it to ask clarifying questions.

Surprisingly, it not only asked questions but also suggested a few things to add. We’ll go over those later. But, plan in hand, back to Astra I went, handed it over, set it to “Auto”, hit go and went to bed.

The next morning we had a result.

18 historically significant engines from the steam age, including Thomas the Tank, background information on each one (simplified, but with reference links), historical photos AND the best part – animation! The models “run”, demonstrating how the piston and gears and everything else work. But this gave me an idea.

The exploded view! This took a few passes to get right, but Astra did a pretty good job of breaking it down into components, and exploding them out to show how they all go together.

I spent a good evening refining a few things here and here (I won’t spoil it all), and added some improvements, cleaned up the models etc., and then I decided that the suggestions it made were worth adding in.

You’re a Really Useful Engine

So earlier Astra had suggested some simple child friendly quizzes and games. Fun, interactive elements that get them engaging with the models. So, I asked it to add some in, but gave it clear instructions to keep it all very simple – the idea is to encourage not frustrate.

Again, these are simple and while they all follow the same sort of pattern, they are different enough for each engine that it shouldn’t be boring and too repetitive.

Overall, I think it turned out quite well. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. Is it accurate? As accurate as I could coax Astra to make it. Do the engines run in a realistic manner? I think so, but I did also rope my Dad in to provide feedback and he said it all looked good, so that’s enough for me.

It’s not an engineering reference by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it turned out quite cool considering I didn’t even open a text editor.

If you would like to check it out, it’s over here: https://antonydoyle.com/experiments/steamworkshop

I’ve sent it to my friends now, so the real test is how does their son like it? Weirdly, I think I’m more anxious about this feedback than any other I’ve had in my entire career!