No, I think you’d be stuck with horse-drawn wagons trains on wooden planks/boards, much like the first mine railroads of England.
Reason is stone & wood do not have the ability to withstand such high pressure in tension - stone obviously can handle high pressure in compression - the basis of most building foundations, and wood can handle moderate pressure in compression and tension, but there was a reason stone and wood cannon, although constructed and tested in the early days of gunpowder, never caught on.
Also stone & wood would rot/corrode/erode crack magnitudes faster than iron (and later steel) - heck, even metal gets metal fatigue, and early steam boiler explosions were certainly not unheard of. Imagine how long a pure concrete boiler (if possible - no metal pipes or duct) would last…
Some of the earliest railroads in North America used so-called strap iron rail, which was a strip of wrought iron about 3/8" thick and 2" wide, spiked to the top inner edge of a hefty timber beam which was, in turn, notched into timber crossties.
It did support the rather light locomotives of the day, but had one fatal (literally!) flaw. After a while, the spikes would work loose and allow the ends of the iron straps to curl up. After a few incidents where a strap iron, “Snake head,” popped up through the floor of a coach and injured passengers, alternatives were sought. The company figured, correctly, that the price of rail imported from England would be less than the price of paying damages and losing public confidence.
Funny you should mention Archimedes, as someone back then did invent the steam engine. Great inventor Heron of Alexandria did. A version of it was employed to open heavy temple doors (seemingly by divine magic to those not in on it). Materials didn’t fail its use for other applications. The Greeks were well aware of pneumatics and hydraulics, and that a steam powered turbine of sufficient power (should be one developed, and in turn such a thing was) could be useful for a variety of applications. The Romans were, too, aware of it later when early steel was becoming more easily available. Now, the Greeks had constructed some rather large seige engines for the time and the Romans built very large cranes for their construction projects throughout the empire. Both of these enterprises could have been the first major application of steam power. However, it was a lot easier to not develop the steam turbine as a powerplant because there was plenty of good old fashioned slave labor available.
Of course, by the time of the Renaissance, they flirted with the technology again but they were effectively starting over with the development and failures were common. No one wanted to fork over the development funds because there were other ways to do it cheaper.
As an aside, when you really start digging into the historical record, its a shock that the industrial revolution didn’t happen 1600 years earlier.
I don’t think that weight is the issue. Its tensile strength. The material has to be able to contain the steam pressure and they had to have the technology to make pipe strong enough to carry pressurized steam. Archimedes didn’t have the technology to fabricate the materials needed for a useful steam engine.
What lead to the development of the steam locomotive was a rising consumer society in England lead people to want windows and the fact they burned a lot of the forests for fuel.
To make windows you needed glass.
For fuel they turned to coal.
To make glass and burn coal you needed to mine the materials.
To work the mines you had to pump water out of them. The pump is baically the same as a steam “engine” in construction.
That led to people using a pump type cylinder to run a staionary engine to run the pumps.
Then they decided to use the stationary engine to move something.
And steam locomotives were born.
Borrowed liberally from a BBC “Connections” episode.
Ceramic? Possibly, but probably not as you might picture it. Brick is indeed a ceramic (and did you know that conventional steam locomotives’ fireboxes contained a brick arch as a gas deflector?)
I would expect an ancient Greek steam engine to have a boiler of cast bronze, or riveted bronze plates. Bronze is quite strong, and the metallurgy and art was well-developed. This would probably be set on a brick firebox. Cylinders, pistons, and valves (we are really getting ahead of ourselves here) would be cast bronze, with rodding and mechanism parts of forged iron or cast bronze.
The biggest problem with an ancient steam engine would be the machining of parts. The Greeks actually did have lathes, as did the Egyptians, and even used them for quite elaborate metalworking!
However, much later there would be a good deal of difficulty adapting similar types of machine work, practiced by clockmakers and the like, to the needs of heavy industry. The problem wasn’t exactly with tolerances (James Watt, or maybe Newcomen,
If you did really need to use so much iron and Bronze, then such an Engine would haveto be pretty small. It would be Narrow gauge, no bigger than 28-30 inches. Metal was a failrly valuable comodity back then, and even using a ton of metal for each engine would probably be prohibitive.
If the engines were light enough, I envision rail to be constructed of a combo of Hardwood and thin bronze protection, with long whole piece of bronze covering the wood on top and inward side. I think upcurling mentioned before could be solved by using lateral pins and thicker metal at the rail joints. to reduce the use of valuable metal. Make each rail section as long as possible.
Not necessarily small. The Colossus of Rhodes is supposed to have been similar to the Statue of Liberty in construction, so large metal structures were possible, if not probable. Of course, it wouldn’t be cheap, but that’s not really the biggest strike against an ancient steam engine, considering the existence of lots of slave labor (as mentioned) and also plenty of water transport for the goods that needed shipping. I would expect this to be a project done by an Archimedes type under the patronage of some visionary and semi-sane monarch. After all, it takes a lot of money to equip an army of 10000 with iron and bronze weapons and armor, or to build pyramids, but they managed…
Also remember that somebody employing engineers and craftsmen with the ability to build a steam engine would probably have the best weapons and armor in the ancient world, if indeed they didn’t have cannons, and plenty of conquered nations to pillage for supplies.
Did ancient Greece or Egypt even have that many trees back then? The wood railroads were built in the US, but there were and are lots of trees here.