Table 3. Locomotive Performance Comparison: 1972 to 1997.

Charles Lyell was a founder of modern British geology. One of his most important contributions to science concerned the rates at which the earth's internal energy was released to affect the shape and form of its crust and thus to create the landscape we know today. Geological changes such as creation of valleys, mountain formation, deposition of sediments, and the like were not in his view caused by occasional "catastrophes" but rather the results of ordinary geological processes operating over an immense period of time. In other words the release of energy to produce geological change has occurred at a rate similar to that of the present time, and is largely uniform over the earth's long history. This doctrine of uniformitarianism has been rightly attributed to Lyell, though others before him (e.g., James Hutton) had expressed similar views...