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Nanaimo73 - Feltonhill has taken care of the poppet valve/N&W question. N&W utilized locomotives with factors of adhesion less than 4.0 by attending to the niceties - maintenance of well-designed sanding equipment; maintenance of well-designed spring rigging to minimize weight transfer; maintenance of well-designed track structure to keep the relationship between driving wheel treads and rail heads at the optimum level; maintenance of well thought out cutoffs and valve gears, to lessen as much as possible the torque variation during the revolution of the driving wheel (it is, of course, impossible to get the variation down to zero), and such details as that. As a result, N&W's front-line locomotives probably (I haven't investigated this, but someone else might want to: I did figure the DBHP/weight on drivers comparison between N&W's Class A 2-6-6-4 and C&O's 2-6-6-6, and it's no contest) developed as much or more DBHP per pound of weight on drivers as any other locomotives on the continent. I'm not familiar with European power. When you're dealing with engines with factors of adhesion as high as a Pennsy K4, poppet valves can do great work; when you're dealing with FA's as low as N&W used, and in mountain service at that, the reduction in back pressure could, and probably would, result in unsatisfactory slipperiness. Don't think Gurdon McGavock couldn't figure that out . . . Some years ago I was privileged to have several lengthy conversations with Vernon L. Smith, author of the autobiographical book "One Man's Locomotives" and a diesel series in TRAINS called "The Diesel from D to L". Smith worked for the Franklin company and was field engineer on several projects, including the Burlington's PV 4-8-4, and the PRR T1s. He was a poppet valve booster; his claim was that while the T1 got a bad reputation for slipperiness, during its service life it came and went and took what it stood for with a lot more aplomb than its reputation. My own feeling that, in the hands of a capable engineer, the T1 would do what its designers intended. But it must be understood, that the T1 was intended to replace doubleheaded K4 Pacifics on the west end of the railroad, and engine crews have never taken kindly to that sort of thing, not only on Pennsy but elsewhere. I feel that there were some engineers who didn't want the T1 to do well, and saw to it that it didn't. Mr. Sol - I asked for you to list for me the rail bankruptcies caused directly by the additional costs of dieselization, and to see your substantiation thereof. You haven't done it yet, although you've provided much more rationalization to back up your claim. Don't you think, down in a corner of your mind, that you've taken some selected statistical material and chosen to put your own spin on it? You've even invoked the name of the old consulting firm of Gibbs and Hill, who were responsible for a lot of electrification projects in the 1910s and 1920s and 1930s; their biggie was the PRR job in the '30's. But that was their last big hurrah, and they've been much less of a factor in the 40's and later, finally going into foreign work and fading from the picture. Maybe the facts you cite had something to do with their going out of the limelight. You've really reached some strange conclusions on this thread. Dieselizaton bad for the railroads? Not on your life it wasn't, no matter how you spin it, no matter how much carloadings dropped, no matter how the ROIs fell. If it hadn't been for dieselization, the drop in ROIs would have been much more precipitious than it was. Sorry. Old Timer
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