Longest train pulled by a steam engine

[Anonymous]

"the last of steam" by joe collias shows the class a 1213 with 213 cars of mixed freight, not a coal train.

[timz]

We naturally assume UP never hauled a 10-km train with a 4-8+8-4 or anything else. But don't forget-- if you assembled such a train on the main line just east of Archer, and if you could somehow control it, gravity would be more than enough to cover two or three hundred miles eastward. No need to pull it at all.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by gabe
[
Sure its possible. Just make sure she's pushing instead of pulling the train.

Gabe

P.S. However, perhaps one should reference the 500-car N&W coal drag. Apparently there were 250 cars without an engine behind them, I wonder how long that would be? I do know that broken knuckles did occur with some regularity on the N&W though. Apparently, they would just bull doze the car right off the tracks and worry about it later so as not to tie up the main.

If you remember the 500 car N&W train was operated in the 1960s when the coupler drawbars were 6 by 8 inches or larger, not the 4 by 6 inch common in the 1940's and early 50s. The doubling of drawbar size, in addition to the improvements in the metalurgy allowed the longer trains to be operated safely.

I do not in any way see how one could possibly justify a statement like a 10 kilometer long train being pulled (or pushed) by one locomotive. People we are talking about a train in excess of six miles long. Put another way, this train would have had over 800 forty foot long cars in it. Very few, if any, would have had roller bearings like most of the N&W hoppers had in the 500 car demonstration train.

Maybe the entire run was downhill with a 50 mph tailwind. But then why use a Big Boy, an 0-4-0 would have done just as well.

[feltonhill]

I don't have the exact figures, but each FT unit should be able to generate about 60,000 lbs starting TE, four would be 240,000 lbs. A BB generates about 135,000 lbs starting TE. A typical 4-8-4 is good for about 65,000 lbs. You can see why the FT's would be more proficient at pulling drawbars out at low speeds (5-10 mph) than the other two. I believe the FT developed a maximum of 1350 hp each unit, about 5,400 hp total. This is not the same as drawbar HP either.

[gabe]

QUOTE: Originally posted by rdganthracite

QUOTE: Originally posted by garyaiki
I pasted a whole paragraph from a website I found because it claimed a BigBoy "kept moving" a 10km long train. A claim no one in this thread has confirmed or denied. The rest of the paragraph was full of errors and it was a mistake to paste them.

I don't see any way that the UP could have kept a 10 Klick long train together. Contemporary to the Big Boy, the Reading had to remove the 4 unit FTs it was using on 100 car or less trains on the Catawissa grade in Pennsylvania because they kept pulling the drawbars out of the ends of the cars. The internal reports found that the 4 by 6 inch shanks on the couplers of the era were not capable of absorbing the stress of a long train being pulled up the grade and would snap when there was a change in tension.

Now the FT was described by EMC as being the equivalent of a modern 4-8-4. The Big Boy is at least the equivalent of two 4-8-4s. So are you going to tell me that Union Pacific was able to defy the laws of physics and get metals to safely handle loads well in excess of their failure limits? A 1.0 km train i can believe even a 2.0 if the engineer was careful. But not a 10 km train with one locomotive on the head end.

Sure its possible. Just make sure she's pushing instead of pulling the train.

Gabe

P.S. However, perhaps one should reference the 500-car N&W coal drag. Apparently there were 250 cars without an engine behind them, I wonder how long that would be? I do know that broken knuckles did occur with some regularity on the N&W though. Apparently, they would just bull doze the car right off the tracks and worry about it later so as not to tie up the main.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by garyaiki
I pasted a whole paragraph from a website I found because it claimed a BigBoy "kept moving" a 10km long train. A claim no one in this thread has confirmed or denied. The rest of the paragraph was full of errors and it was a mistake to paste them.

I don't see any way that the UP could have kept a 10 Klick long train together. Contemporary to the Big Boy, the Reading had to remove the 4 unit FTs it was using on 100 car or less trains on the Catawissa grade in Pennsylvania because they kept pulling the drawbars out of the ends of the cars. The internal reports found that the 4 by 6 inch shanks on the couplers of the era were not capable of absorbing the stress of a long train being pulled up the grade and would snap when there was a change in tension.

Now the FT was described by EMC as being the equivalent of a modern 4-8-4. The Big Boy is at least the equivalent of two 4-8-4s. So are you going to tell me that Union Pacific was able to defy the laws of physics and get metals to safely handle loads well in excess of their failure limits? A 1.0 km train i can believe even a 2.0 if the engineer was careful. But not a 10 km train with one locomotive on the head end.

[timz]

It seems N&W ran the 450-car train in October 1967and the 500-car train three weeks later. 2/68 Trains says the longer train did have 3 SD45s cut in.

[feltonhill]

I was going by the description and photo in Trains. There's an arrow pointing to what looks like 5 units in the middle of the train. They definitely stand out from the hoppers surrounding them. However, the photo was taken between Iaeger and Williamson, and according to the caption, it was a 450-car train, so it looks like I erred, not Trains. It was probably a different train. Did N&W do this more than once? Or did they change power west of Williamson and increase the load to 500 cars.

[Anonymous]

Feltonhill -

That account of the N&W 500-car train you read about errs - the power was 3 SD45s on the point and THREE more 300 cars back, not five. The train did not have to go up any steep grades; the only hill in the way was the .3% climb over the Ohio River Bridge at Kenova, which was a momentum grade that the six '45's were easily capable of handling.

N&W's class A 2-6-6-4s handled 16,000 ton trains over that grade in steam days, after the use of auxiliary water tanks eliminated a water stop that killed any chance for running for the "hill".

Old Timer

[timz]

Steepest main line, you mean. Is that spur to Boeing's Everett plant still used?

[espeefoamer]

QUOTE: Originally posted by HighIron2003ar

Ok OS, what is the steepest grade that a straight rod job ever faced in revenue service?

(I dont know the answer but that Saluda would be my next guess if Madision wasnt it.)

Saluda was the steepest mainline grade at 4.7%.Madison hill was on a branch,and was 5.89%.
Today the steepest grade is BNSFs ex Santa Fe line over Raton pass at 3.5%.

[Anonymous]

Kalmbach published a really great book entitled "Faces of Railroading" not long ago. One of the lead stories in the book was by an AMTRAK engineer talking about his grandfather, who suffered a broken neck when slack ran out of his coal train. (Yeah, I know. I was supposed to be looking at the pictures, not reading the stories.)

As a kid I had a book (entitled "Trains") which had a picture of a "mile and a half long" coal train- it might have been a C&O train. The implication of the photo was that this was a routine run by C&O.

Erik

[Anonymous]

Being originally from West Virginia the couple of references to the Cass Scenic Railroad brought back pleasant memories. My wife's roommate in college was the daughter of the last manager for West Virginia Pulp and Paper in Cass before the mill and railroad were shut down. Having visited Cass during its operating days was a great experience. The railroad ascends the mountain on a series of switchbacks with a grade of 11% (yes-eleven percent). From the tourist car it does look steep and is. Shays were the motive power of choice for the line.

As a kid growing up in the northern panhandle of WVa I observed a lot of mighty power on the Pennsylvania. I remember counting one coal drag (loaded) with 125 cars. Unfortunately I do not remember the motive power being used, however, it was steam.

I remember hearing a steam train starting upt with the slow frequency of "chuffs" which often would rapidly momentary go into fast chuffs. Wheel slip. I also remember the steam engine backing up to remove slack before starting forward. You would hear a repeated series of bangs as the slack was removed from each car. The crew in the caboose had quite a ride as the caboose would go from stopped to 8-10 mph in less than a second. I have heard of desks and pot bellied stoves being torn from their mountings when the slack was pulled out in such a manner. The crew had to really hold on or they would have been launched. This might be a good location for a back surgeon to practice.

[timz]

Okay-- how about a carlength?

[Anonymous]

Short as in less than a carlength!

Do you have a definition for the minimum length over which an average is taken to qualify as "steepest grade"? Because if no minimum is set, I'll go look for a really bad rail joint stepping up in the direction of travel.

OS

[timz]

"If you're willing to entertain a very short distance as the "steepest," there are plenty of grades in the region of 20% -- on short spurs."

Are? Where?

[Anonymous]

HighIron: How short a distance do you want to consider? If you're willing to entertain a very short distance as the "steepest," there are plenty of grades in the region of 20% -- on short spurs. Think of the grades running up to the old elevated coal trestles!

Some notable steep grades of greater than one mile in length operated with rod-type adhesion engines include:

1. D&RG's Calumet Mine Branch, in central Colorado, with 2,700 foot rise in seven miles, an 8% grade, was said by A.M. Wellington (the dean of locating engineers) to be "undoubtedly the heaviest grade on any regularly operated railroad in the world."

2. B&O successfully operated 10% grades for two months over the top of Kingwood Tunnel by Benjamin F. Latrobe in 1852 (for an account by Latrobe see Railroad Gazette, Dec. 5, 1874).

3. Uintah Railway successfully operated a five-mile 7.5% ascent on Baxter Pass in northwestern Colorado until 1938, with 66-degree curves.

Madison Incline was for a time the steepest main-track sustained gradient in the U.S. on a standard-gauge steam railroad (what a mess of caveats!) Because it's now a short line, one would have to go survey the short lines and see if there's one steeper. I would not be willing to award the purse to Madison until I'd canvassed the short line community.

OS

[Anonymous]

Ok OS, what is the steepest grade that a straight rod job ever faced in revenue service?

(I dont know the answer but that Saluda would be my next guess if Madision wasnt it.)

[Anonymous]

I lived in the Mississippi - Yazoo Delta where the town was split by the tracks, and train length was an issue because we only had one firehouse. I remember losing count on one train at a hundred and fifty cars. Got no idea what was pulling it, except I can pretty much guarantee it was steam, maybe a double header. Long freight trains were pretty common because the land was absolutely flat.

[feltonhill]

Well, the 7,500 figure for the Allegheny is actually a peak dynamometer reading at about 47 mph. The full scatterplot is in Huddleston & Dixon's book, The Allegheny Lima's Finest, pg204. If you have access to this graph, you can see that the dyno readings become erratic as speed increases, and at around 45 mph they range from 6200 to 7500. Although I understand the test report has survived at C&OHS archives, I haven't checked the underlying conditions that produced this peak reading. The train could have been coming out of a sag, or something like that. C&O did not correct for acceleration, and not doing this would produce artificially high readings under those conditions. The sustainable DBHP at 47 mph is closer to 6,600 based on my read of the scatterplot data, still a very good figure.

I always thought the S1 should have done better, but I've never found the figures to support much above 5,000-5,500 dbhp. Strange.

Fun with numbers......

[GP40-2]

That 7200 HP figure came from steamlocomotive.com. Probably is a bit too high, just like the Allegheny's 7500 HP figure.

However, with 300psi, 132sq.ft. grate area, 5661sq.ft. evaporative heating surface, and 2085sq.ft. of superheater, I would suspect the S1 was over the 6000 HP range.

[feltonhill]

Replying to a bunch of subjects above -

PRR's S1 did not develop 7,200 DBHP as far as any account that I've found so far. The source of this number would have to be extremely suspect. They were usually credited with low to mid -5,000s over the road. The only known thorough history of this locomotive was written by the late Charlie Meyer, and published about 15 years ago in Friends of the Railroad Museum of PA magazine Milepost. Most of what was learned was negative. However, Big Boy engine length was greater than the S1.

BB 85.8' + 47.0' + 132.8' total e+t
S1 80.5' + 59.7' = 140.6' total e+t

See, it just depends on the standard of evaluation, like how high is up?

The PRR T1s had their problems to be sure, but they were not as bad as we've been led to believe. Check PRRT&HS magazine The Keystone for the past 2-3 years. The 50 production units were not as troublesome as the two prototypes. They were also tested on C&O and N&W and , contrary to popular opinion, worked well within their design capabilities. There's more coming on this subject. Watch "the literature".

The old guys were better than we think. I suggest at least two books for anyone seriously interested in locomotive and train performance:

1 - The Steam Locomotive by Ralph Johnson. This is available in used book sites, but the price is usually way too high. Check libraries.

2 - Railroad Engineering, Volume 1 by William W. Hay. Also available from used book sites, sometimes at reasonable prices.

If you're a glutton for punishment, I also recommend a third:

Mastering Momentum by L. K. Sillcox. This has reasonable prices as low as $20.00

These books give methods for estimating train performance using tools available in the 1940s and 50s. Very labor intensive, but they could get pretty close to generally expected performance over a division using locomotive diagram specifications, road data from track charts, and train resistance equations. It's a lot easier to put the various formulas/equations into a spreadsheet and work from there.

[daveklepper]

Regarding the long diesel powered N&W train, as far as I can recall, the first road switchers the N&W bought were GP-9's not GP-7's. I may be mistaken.

The GP-9's were bought to do just about everything. Including the Powattan Arrow and Pokahuntis (excuse spelling please).

I think all things considered, the N&W Y's could probably move the longest and heaviest train. It might take a study of drawbar pull vs speed curves to confirm or deny the point, but I think they would do better than either the Alleghany or Big Boy.

I don't count the Pennsy duplexes. Whatever any of them were in theory, they were all slippery in practice and the tractive effort was thus not converted into drawbar pull. None were really successful locmotives, including maintenance as well as operation. And the old K-4's and H-10's and 2-10-0's (I-5's?) served for many years after the last duplex was scrapped. If I remember, the J's, the 2-10-4's modern as they were, had no real pulling power over the I's. Of course the C&O versions had had booster trailer trucks, and I believe this feature was ommitted on the PRR copies.

The Swiss may have something better in their history, but for electrics it is the New Haven EF-3, in my view the best electric ever built and a further improvement on the GG-1 which had been based on the EP-3. It was equal to four GP-7's and two E-33/EF-4's in pulling power.

[Anonymous]

Garyaki, there's no harm in reasearch.

[Anonymous]

Mr. Foster, you're absolutely certain Madison Hill was or is the steepest adhesion grade on a U.S. common-carrier railroad? Now, or at any time in the past? How are you specifying the minimum distance over which the grade must be measured to qualify as steepest? And must it be in a main track or can it be in a spur, etc.?

OS

[GP40-2]

Drawbar HP is nothing more than drawbar pull (tractive effort) at a certain speed.

The basic formula is:

(Tractive Effort X Speed)/375

For Steam Locomotives, YOU CAN NOT use the listed Tractive Effort, because that is the Starting tractive effort at 0 mph. You need to find the tractive effort graph for the locomotive at speed. As fentonhill stated, the tractive effort will fall off as locomotive speed increases.

So while the Big Boy has greater pull starting than the Allegheny, the Allegheny has more pull at speed, thus more HP.

[GP40-2]

At 140 feet long, the Pennsylvania RR S-1 6-4-4-6 locomotive was nearly 8 feet longer than the Big Boy. At 7200 DBHP, it was also far more powerful.

My orginal statement stands: The Big Boy was neither the longest, heaviest, or most powerful steam locomotive.

[Anonymous]

is that for one thing, so few were tested in any kind of standardised way; and also, that performance varied depending on how well the locomotive was being fired (in other words, crew skill).

Tractive effort is a practical measurement in theory but, for a steam locomotive, a theoretical one in practice! It is calculated as the amount of effort the locomotive's cylinders can produce, given boiler pressure, cylinder size, and an approximated pressure drop-off. It's a static measurement. It measures what train a locomotive can start, but not how well it can pull at speed.

Power is effort over time, or useful work. It was impossible with the technology of the time to estimate a locomotive's power output with numbers, so it had to be tested. Two ways: on a stationary locomotive test plant, which is what the PRR and some others did; or with a dynamometer car, that measures drawbar pull from the locomotive, distance travelled, speed etc.

It's hard to compare the two results.

The PRR Q2 was the most powerful locomotive tested on a test plant. The C&O's Allegheny was the most powerful tested by dynamometer car. It's probable the Allegheny was more powerful.

Both locomotives developed their maximum power at fairly high speed, and were not nearly as powerful at drag freight speeds.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by mac 4884

Garyaiki, no offense but I dont even think a T1 shay could get up a railway that steep, let alone a big boy. A rack railway could, but you probbally know that.

I pasted a whole paragraph from a website I found because it claimed a BigBoy "kept moving" a 10km long train. A claim no one in this thread has confirmed or denied. The rest of the paragraph was full of errors and it was a mistake to paste them.