A significant difficulty that will confront the 5AT Project will be the establishment of a competent engineering team to carry out the detailed design of the locomotive.  The skills, experience and knowledge associated with steam locomotive design that were once commonplace in the railway industry, are now rare and there are only a few engineers specialising in the work.  Their number was reduced in 2003 with the death of the most knowledgeable of all, Ing L.D. Porta of Argentina whose name appears frequently within these pages and whose life's work is briefly summarised on this website.

Several practicing steam experts are listed in this section, however their number is not large enough to complete all the detail design work which is expected to be required over 650 man-months of work.  Additional engineers will have to be recruited and trained in the work that they will be engaged to undertake.

The make-up of the 5AT engineering design team will be determined by the management of company that is set up to build it.  No commitments have been sought or given by any of the steam specialists listed in this section.

The specialists listed in this section do not include names of people listed on the Current Personal page of this website who are already engaged in working on the project.