I got back yesterday from a Father's Day expedition arranged by my son who lives in Uppsala, Sweden. Our whole family rode the Lennakatten (http://www.lennakatten.se/) from end to end, with a couple of reversals to get onto a greater variety of equipment, in railcars and in trains behind two different steam locomotives. The railroad is what is left of a three-Swedish-foot (about 35 inch) narrow-gauge line running 33 kilometers from Uppsala. My son arranged a personal tour for me of the roundhouse and repair shop at Lenna with a very friendly and knowledgeable mechanic who, like everyone else there, is a volunteer.
Bob Nelson
Bob, Good to hear that you had a nice visit...maybe you can share some photos.
AlanK
Bob - that sounds like it was a great outing.
Alan, my son e-mailed me a bunch of pictures; but I've never been able to figure out how to post pictures here. I can copy and paste pictures from the Internet, but not my own pictures. The times I've tried to follow the instructions that folks post here, I have been led to places that forbade me from using their web sites for that purpose. But I can't even find those instructions now.
My son found a way to post the pictures. This is me examining the valve gear of a 2-8-0 with my daughter. Notice that there are no buffers on the car. They use center-mounted link-and-pin couplers, but with the pins horizontal:
This is me with our mechanic host inside the roundhouse, my wife, and his son:
Riding with our Swedish daughter-in-law in an open car:
In the background, a railcar that we rode:
Examining an ancient Swedish friction bearing:
Checking out the cab over the fire(wo)man's shoulder at a water stop. The locomotives are coal-fired. The throttle is on the left, for left-hand running. Boiler pressure is about 150 psi, but the gauge reads in kilograms per square centimeter, not even proper metric units:
Bob, somehow I feel that 2-8-0 ran better after you left....
Nice trip, thanks for sharing.
Nice pictures Bob, thanks for sharing...AlanK....ps if I figure out how to post pictures, I will post a nice B-25J picture for you...it was one of the planes my grandfather flew..
Alan, my sons and I got those jackets for contributing to retrieving "Sandbar Mitchell" from the Tanana River, near where I used to live. My father flew mostly C-47s in the war and afterwards. Both airplanes are among the best ever built.
lionelsoni Alan, my sons and I got those jackets for contributing to retrieving "Sandbar Mitchell" from the Tanana River, near where I used to live. My father flew mostly C-47s in the war and afterwards. Both airplanes are among the best ever built.
Bob, I read online the story of the recovery of "Sandbar Mitchell", it is good story for an old bomber that was abandon. You are right to say the B25 and C47 were good airplanes. Quite a few of both still flying. Thank you for your help in saving the airplane....Alan
Bob,
Reviewing your pictures...
Checking out the cab over the fire(wo)man's shoulder at a water stop. The locomotives are coal-fired. The throttle is on the left, for left-hand running. Boiler pressure is about 150 psi, but the gauge reads in kilograms per square centimeter, not even proper metric units
So what is the correct metric units for pressure? I looked at Wikipedia and you can find mention of Kg/cm2 and then also
While I agree that *today* gauges are usually marked in kPa, remember that Tominde's question related to steam locomotives -- and steam power in Europe lasted only a few years more than in the U.S., although it was retired sooner in Western Europe than Eastern Europe. So, when talking about steam pressure gauges, we are dealing with the practices of at least 50 years ago. While there were country-to-country variations, countries on the metric system usually used kg/cm2, while Britain and Ireland, of course, used psi (or lb/sq. in.). In later years (IIRC, in the 70's), there was more international pressure to use the units prescribed by the "Systeme Internationale" (SI). However, steam was largely gone by this time, and in any case, the railroads were not about to change out large quanities of steam pressure gauge faces on soon-to-be-retired locomotives.
So what is your thought?
The metric (SI) unit of pressure is the pascal, which is conveniently about 1/100000 of the Earth's atmospheric pressure. The pascal is a newfangled unit, adopted only in 1971, and is just a derived unit equivalent to a newton per square-meter.
The problem with the kilogram per square meter is that the kilogram is a unit of mass, not force. Since force equals mass times acceleration, and the gravitational acceleration is nearly constant over the Earth's surface (about 9.8 meters per second per second), the two quantities of mass and force have historically been confused. There are actually two kinds of pounds, pound-force ("lbf", 4.4482216152605 newtons) and pound-mass ("lbm", .45359237 kilogram). On Earth, one pound-mass weighs about one pound-force, so it's not usually necessary to distinguish the two. But that's not true of kilograms and newtons. To understand what that locomotive's antique pressure gauge is measuring, you need to know not just the SI, but also a little bit about boilers and history.
I think that the SI is a great institution; but I think it's ironic that proponents of the SI sometimes denigrate our non-SI usage, when they are not quite pure themselves. A glaring example is "kilometers per hour" on every European speedometer--not metric, because the hour is not metric. "Meters per second" is a proper metric unit of velocity.
Your a knowledgeable man Bob...that is why I follow your posts..have a great 4th of July. AlanK
Personally I think God put the Atlantic Ocean where it is to keep Napoleon, Hitler, and the metric system OUT of the United States!
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