It is a misnomer to say these locos had a boiler. They have a steam tank not a boiler hence the size. National Cash Register in Dayton Ohio used one until about 1970. It is now in a park near the plant. Very slow speed. I never saw it move more then 2 cars.
TractionAction1700I know of a new company called Apogee Locomotive Works that produces 3D-printed shell kits of fireless locomotives. They fit on HO scale Bachmann Porters. Last I checked they have quite a few different ones.
https://www.apogeelocoworks.com/home
I know of a new company called Apogee Locomotive Works that produces 3d printed shell kits of fireless locomotives. They fit on Ho scale Bachmann Porters. Last I checked they have quite a few different ones.
Since someone revived this thread my answer to the original question is YES.
For fun, I purchased this fireless locomotive (a European Liliput model) and converted it for the North American context. For some reason, Europeans put the pistons near the cab for their prototypes. So, I managed to reverse the pistons on this Lilliput engine that I found on Ebay, and converted it to DCC with an LED headlight. I also shaved the wheels a bit to make it work properly on our North American rails... Did that with my Dremel with the engine turning upside down. I tried a needle file but that would have taken forever. I gave her a new color and did a bit of weathering. I painted the engine with Vallejo acrylic paint. The first coat did not stick to anything, so I used Vallejo acrylic primer for my second try. That seemed to work.
Simon
0-4-0 fireless_0004_zpsvfwofwpt on Flickr
rrinker Theoretically, anything that generats a gas at pressure can be used.
If you remember the original Fowler's Ghost, you know that 'heat recovery' by condensing exhaust steam into feedwater is a losing proposition in a comparatively short time: the latent heat of condensation being so great that 1lb of condensing steam raises over 6lb of water to the boiling point from room temperature. So a better source to stick the exhaust -- condensers using air being bulky and likely needing fan power -- and condense it quickly needed to be found. The idea is to pass the steam through a chemical that reacts with it... and ideally releases heat in the process. If you jacket a fireless locomotive 'boiler' with this stuff inside, you can get a triple treat: the water exhaust and its residual heat disappear, the jacket keeps the hotter supercritical water charge hot longer, and by passing the (inherently saturated) throttle steam to the cylinders through the hot material in the jacket you can get up to 40 degrees F of superheat at pressure, which cuts down on wall and nucleate condensation just as in fired engines.
Then you can use any applicable heat source to 'boil off' the water from the jacket material -- slowly if necessary -- to reuse it. (It was this part of the process that made early commercial 'soda motors', like the Perkins design earlier, uneconomical ... and of course the introduction of practical electric trolleys 'subsidized' by developing utility companies, and then development of practical-scale gas engines, put the final kibosh on the idea for street transit or subway use...
A fireless steam locomotive UK style. The locomotive is now at the 'Locomotion' Musum, Shildon, County Durham, England.
David
To the world you are someone. To someone you are the world
I cannot afford the luxury of a negative thought
Theoretically, anything that generats a gas at pressure can be used. Some things are more efficient than others, and some do not generate a gas that causes sudden death, but other than that....
One of the options to electric cars is hydrogen - could try that, too. But even more so than in a car, the integrity of the pressure vessel is critical, at the kind of pressures they are using. Plus gaseous hydrogen in the presence of oxygen is rather flammable, as the passengers and crew of the Hindenberg found out to their extreme detriment.
--Randy
Modeling the Reading Railroad in the 1950's
Visit my web site at www.readingeastpenn.com for construction updates, DCC Info, and more.
rrinker Yes, I know they ran on sodium hydroxide.
I still think Perkins gets a gold star for making calcium chloride work...
Yes, I know they ran on sodium hydroxide. The burp commehnt was actually made by the author of the book as part of the caption - also tongue in cheek as I'm pretty sure Fred Westing knew it didn't run on cabonated water either. Or sodium bicarbonate. Hmm, baking soda and vinegar made for good little rockets..... naaah.
rrinkerThere is an interesting bit on a "soda motor" in the Baldwin book I have - seems they built at least one.
See in particular the Honigmann locomotive design here. This is about as good a 'fireless' design as probably any fireless use needed; note the arrangements for light superheat to improve the mechanical performance. The problem with using a more modern high-pressure fireless design is that boiler feedwater in those has to be better purified or distilled, and this would be an additional regeneration cost. Interestingly modern materials have probably solved the cost-effective regeneration of the "soda" without heavy regenerator corrosion... I thought this cycle was a strong contender for the California "Sun Train" project a few years ago.
rrinkerPeople are silly. Groups.io actually works, unlike Yahoo. You can even do proper replies when receiving feeds in digest format!
The second issue is that steam_tech has a very large files and photos section. Hosting even a small part puts it into the 'pay' tier in groups.io pricing; the whole archives involves an upper price tier. The group was founded as 'free' and there is little support in going (like the Civil War modeling group) to a paid membership model.
LastspikemikeCould electric power heat water to steam to power a locomotive and replace the current electromagnetic drive?
Technically it's not as daft an idea as it looks 'thermodynamically'. If you were to implement a fireless cooker, you could use the electrical elements to 'make up' some of the heat lost in the steam consumption, or lost to the environment with the engine standing. Think of it as an active equivalent of what the caustic soda does with the exhaust water in a soda motor...
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be how the engine was designed: it used electric elements in place of the 'fire' and suffered just the lack of efficiency you'd expect from radiant heat misapplied in practice. It has always seemed strange that they'd 'miss' so badly...
The operative principle appeared to me, when I was younger, to be that hydropower was 'too cheap to meter' up where that locomotive was switching, while coal or other fuel certainly wouldn't be. In wartime or postwar conditions where expensive electrical traction gear might be expensive to procure, a bunch of Calrod-style elements might be easier to arrange for a cheaply-available 'preexisting-condition' switch engine.
Now, as an 'optional range extender' for service between fixed fireless 'recharges' ... or for a 'burst of flavor' if doing flat switching, the idea of electrical heat or even superheat might make superficial 'sense'. The catch is in providing the electrical overhead in a yard or industrial facility to make the trick work. A cheap alternative might be to set up a 'dock' of some kind, perhaps with crude electrical contacts, and put the locomotive there to soak instead of using sparged high-pressure steam for recharging every time...
In my opinion making an electrical 'flash boiler' as in the Hornby approach would be a murderous waste of both power and effectiveness, compared to just about any alternative use of electricity for propulsion.
Lastspikemike Could electric power heat water to steam to power a locomotive and replace the current electromagnetic drive? The Hornby OO scale locomotive idea scaled up to prototype.
Could electric power heat water to steam to power a locomotive and replace the current electromagnetic drive?
The Hornby OO scale locomotive idea scaled up to prototype.
WHat would the benefit be? There's a loss every time you change to a different medium, so using the overhead that feeds electrically driven trains to instead boil water to power a steam engine is goign to be many times less efficient than just running the electric motors. And using a diesel engine, to turn an alternator, to heat water to drive a steam engine - that's beyond silly. Less efficient than just burning the fuel oil to directly heat the water, like an oil fired steam engine.
People are silly. Groups.io actually works, unlike Yahoo. You can even do proper replies when receiving feeds in digest format! Can't believe they 'trust' Yahoo but not groups.io. Glad all my groups have been moved over.
There is an interesting bit on a "soda motor" in the Baldwin book I have - seems they built at least one. <burp>
The enormous amount of energy stored in high pressure, high temperature steam seems to be a tough concept to wrap the brain around. Launching parts of an ordinary steam locomotive over a mile after a boiler explosion should be some clue. It's all about the controlled release of said energy.
Does anyone here have further interest in how 'fireless cookers' work -- or what the fun point of a caustic-soda locomotive was?
There were some great and deeply-involved threads on the subject of energy-storage locomotives on the old steam_tech Yahoo group, but the archives died last December and the group itself is slated to disappear at the end of this year along with Yahoo Groups itself. There is a parallel group set up at groups.io but many members of the old group have 'issues' with groups.io, will not join, and don't want their content or old posts archived there.
Harry Valentine did some extensive work on 'modern' versions of the idea, and someone interested in modern modeling might 'do' a version of one of his locomotives, especially now that Progress Rail is trying to flog the Joule as a kind of fuelless switching 'weapons system'.
this might be a shock to you but my great grandfather is the current owner of S-1!
as a matter of fact yes I have made two fireless locomotives in HO scale they are the Somers lumber company's S-1 and S-2.
https://www.tinkercad.com/things/6opT3bDap0k-somers-lumber-co-s-1-ho-scale-shell
this is a link to the custom 3D shell design I have for my wheel chassis
Besides the fireless steam locos, there were also compressed air locos. Many were very small, for use in mines. The Homestake Mine in South Dakota had some Porter compressed air locos in use up until the 1980's.
Larger compressed air locos were often used in explosives plants, due to the obvious need to avoid any sort of flame or spark.
Then there was something called a "caustic soda locomotive", which was also fireless but had some other unpleasant issues and never really caught on.
It seems to me the big problem with these prototypes is the limited power pickup.
Modeling the Pennsylvania Railroad in N Scale.
www.prr-nscale.blogspot.com
These Porters (S1 & S2) worked the GN tie plant in Somers MT. One is on display in Somers, the other in Polson.
.
"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."-Albert Einstein
http://gearedsteam.blogspot.com/
railbaron18 I've actually been working on such a project! A friend gave me a short Bachmann Vanderbilt tender, and I didn't have a use for it. One day I was looking at it and thought that it's rear end ( with ''head'' light and ladder on either side) looked like a loco. After research, I found that it (with work) could resemble a ''thermos bottle''. I've been on the look-out for a 0-4-0 chassis (an 0-6-0 would be tight), but all I can find are ones with open-frame motors. I plan to use a cab I have from an old Lima 0-4-0 shifter.
I've actually been working on such a project!
A friend gave me a short Bachmann Vanderbilt tender, and I didn't have a use for it. One day I was looking at it and thought that it's rear end ( with ''head'' light and ladder on either side) looked like a loco. After research, I found that it (with work) could resemble a ''thermos bottle''. I've been on the look-out for a 0-4-0 chassis (an 0-6-0 would be tight), but all I can find are ones with open-frame motors. I plan to use a cab I have from an old Lima 0-4-0 shifter.
That sounds cool! I hope you'll upload some photos.
If memory serves me some years back one of these "fireless cookers" got first place honors in one of the locomotive categories at an NMRA national.
From the far, far reaches of the wild, wild west I am: rtpoteet
Bob got the explanation just perfect. We had a large furniture and box manufacturer near my home as a kid and they shunted a lot of cars to and from the main ACL off property ready track, back and forth.
They had two Porter "fireless cookers". Porter seemed to be the #1 manufacturer of these pressure bottle engines and most were 0-4-0 and a few 0-6-0. This large multiacre business had steam going all over the plant and a large steam house and generator station attached to the plant. So, there was a lot of steam on hand 24-7. I used to watch the puffers hook up to their steam fill points. They could do quite a bit of work on a fill....A lot more than you might think.
They certainly were not pretty, but pretty is never important when work is to be done. They functioned well, but side clearances were an issue that had to be considered.
Richard
If I can't fix it, I can fix it so it can't be fixed
Sorry for that.
Here is a picture:
Sir Madog rrinker: Certainly shouldn't be too hard to make one, since the 'boiler' is straight and cylindrical, not tapered and there's no firebox to worry about. --Randy ... or you get one from Trix, Marklin´s 2-rail DC brand. Look here: Fireless Steam Locomotive
rrinker:
Certainly shouldn't be too hard to make one, since the 'boiler' is straight and cylindrical, not tapered and there's no firebox to worry about.
... or you get one from Trix, Marklin´s 2-rail DC brand. Look here:
Fireless Steam Locomotive
Swedish Custom painter and model maker. My Website:
My Railroad
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West side models made one in brass....
http://www.brasstrains.com/classic/Product/Detail/036858/HO-WMC-Westside-ATSF-Santa-Fe-0-6-0T-Fireless-Cooker-2299
Guy
see stuff at: the Willoughby Line Site