"You may recall that some of our earliest correspondence was about the railway terms that were difficult to translate. The word "bronce" was one of them. It means bronze literally, but in railway terms it seems to have referred to the metal bearings used on the axles. I have attached a small photo of one of the bearing housings on a Chilean locomotive at the Quinto Normal railway park in Santiago. The lid, which is normally closed, is lifted here to show the grease that was packed into the bearing housing. This might not be of much interest except as a glimpse of what Thomas Shakespear might have seen on a daily basis."  Robert Runyard