Formerly :
What steam we haven't seen
Short sentence - big question :
W - h - a - t
( you can see me start slowly here )
steam that could have been
we haven't seen ?
- provided steam development had continued beyond 1945 , say into 1952 .. 54 -
might / would / should then have been the next step-up in fast passenger steam power ?
- coupled wheels / wheel sets
- engine unit / units
- wheel arrangements
- boiler configuration
-speed / power configuration .
Lean back and start you imaginations , everyone !
( We leave alone historical facts of EMD diesel invasion for this )
Regards
Juniatha
Hi folks
Probably the title of this thread should be changed from "What steam we haven't seen" to the title above since from page two on postings more and more deal with quite a different aspect of steam - the kind usually assorted under 'Unconventional Steam' . I will re-open the original thread looking for what was in the development line of the builders in 1949 - along the lines steam had developed so far .
This is to make sure title conforms with subject so people who happen to stumble about the thread will know what's being discussed here .
Happy further deepening the discussion which has already brought up some quite remarkable notes and comments .
Happy New Year
Does the concept of a steam-electric have any merit? I know that sounds whacky, but what would the issues be. Water tubed boiler, engine and generator set, with traction motors below. What are the trade offs, or concept limits?
Of course, the diesel electric works beautifully. What would a steam electric give up or gain?
A steam electric really isn't much different then a gas turbine. The gas turbines seemed to be short lived from what I have read about them.
A steam-electric locomotive was first built in France in 1893; two larger and more successful locomotives followed in 1897. All of these obtained speeds of more that 100 km/h, and the trials showed that the loco used 15% less coal than a normal loco. The ride was said to be very smooth, since they rode on two four-axle bogies. Critics of the locos said that it was too heavy, complicated and expensive, the same arguments which were used against diesel-electrics a generation or so later. Try googling "Heilmann Locomotive" to find out more! It was a wonderful-looking beast!! Sort of like a double-Fairlie crossed with a mangled early boxcab diesel ...
gallon Does the concept of a steam-electric have any merit? I know that sounds whacky, but what would the issues be. Water tubed boiler, engine and generator set, with traction motors below. What are the trade offs, or concept limits? Of course, the diesel electric works beautifully. What would a steam electric give up or gain?
A Steam Electric gives up a more efficient energy cycle and less complex equipment for the ability to use fuels (liquid and solid) that are not feasible to use in a Diesel cycle engine..
One of the few "Modern Steam" proposals I've seen in recent years that appeared at all feasible, was from Matt Jansen,who started a firm called Vapor locomotive, which among other activites rebuilt Skinner Uniflow marine steam engines (a type of reciprocating steam engine where the pistons turn a crankshaft). He proposed taking a Diesel electric locomotive and rebuilding it with a firebox,boiler, and uniflow engine connected to the existing alternator/electrical system/traction motors. He wanted to market it to industrial users who generate a large amount of solid "biomass" material in their operations i.e grains processing,forest products industries,sugar manufacturers, etc..
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
I like the idea of a 6-6-6 type, six lead wheels for easing into turns at high speeds, six drivers, and six trailing truck wheels to support a HUGE firebox. We can call it a "Lucifer" type, 'cause it'll go like Hell!
Cool, huh?
Put traction motors on at least the centre axles on both trucks and you have a deal. Otherwise we'll have Hell's chance on a snowflake of lifting a train over more than about 800 tons, especially on a grade steeper than about 0.3%
Crandell
Oh, I don't care if it won't pull more than 800 tons, we're talkin' drag racing here, not heavy-haul truckin'.
I'll go quietly....
Thomas 9011 A steam electric really isn't much different then a gas turbine. The gas turbines seemed to be short lived from what I have read about them.
Steam and gas turbines are not much different? ...Only in the sense that that both types of motive power use turbomachinery to spin the main generator(s). The steam turbines were much more complex than UP's Big Blows needing all the extra machinery i.e firebox,boiler, etc. The UP gas turbines had longer service lives than some of the RR's late production Steam Locomotives but became uneconomical when the fuel they were designed to use, Bunker-C oil, shot way up in price when the plastics industry starting using it in huge quantities as feedstock .
Also, there was something nasty in the "Bunker C" oil UP was using that corroded the gas turbine engines. According to a former UP engineer I met UP bought the cheapest "Bunker C" they could find, and that's saying something, considering "Bunker C" is the bottom of the barrel stuff.
On the other hand, he said UP once bought some Navy surplus "Bunker C" fuel that was top-notch. They thought the gas-turbines did well with the usual stuff, but with the Navy fuel they were like rockets!
The gas turbines were an interesting experiment, but just like with steam, the conventional diesel's versatility won in the end.
Firelock76 Also, there was something nasty in the "Bunker C" oil UP was using that corroded the gas turbine engines. According to a former UP engineer I met UP bought the cheapest "Bunker C" they could find, and that's saying something, considering "Bunker C" is the bottom of the barrel stuff. On the other hand, he said UP once bought some Navy surplus "Bunker C" fuel that was top-notch. They thought the gas-turbines did well with the usual stuff, but with the Navy fuel they were like rockets! The gas turbines were an interesting experiment, but just like with steam, the conventional diesel's versatility won in the end.
Old railroad crew members seem to say a lot of things, now don't they . . .
If the gas turbine locomotive ran OK on Bunker C, ran "like rockets!" on a better blend of "Bunker C" purchased from the US Navy, then one of those locomotives must have gone "like warp drive" with propane?
I can believe that burning a heavy oil would lead to heavy corrosion or erosion of turbine blades from the sulfer compounds or the soot from burning that fuel. But why would a better grade of hydrocarbon (less sulfer, lighter fraction) make the locomotive pull any better? Wouldn't that be limited by fuel rack settings? OK, OK, alright already, a turbine doesn't have a "fuel rack" as in a Diesel with an injection pump, but it has some kind of turbine engine controller that limits the power settings.
And I understand that UP ran some turbines on propane as a way to reduce maintenance, but I never heard that those units ran any better.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Yes, very cool, and not 'entirely' as wacky as it might first appear. Think of it as 3/4 of a PRR S-1 and you get a better picture of the potential. (But add one more driving axle, and perhaps conjugated divided-drive, and think what an engine you'd have, and without shearing off mainpins or needing larger pistons or bearing area in the mains, too...) ;-}
The six-wheel trucks, I assume, are radial steering, like the Flexi-Float or HTCR modified (fairly extensively, I'd expect) to make them stable at high speed. If they aren't, there's little reason to go to six wheels at the front, and you might be well-advised to put the six wheels articulated between tender and cab, leaving the firebox Garratt-deep and wide...
... the approach at the front requires no more than two axles, but the 'right' approach is via a double Bissel with all the three-axis damping at struts for each single-axle truck that the British worked out in the '60s. This gives full and correct radial steering for both truck axles, and allows separate centering force for each axle even if carrying relatively heavy weight. (And not incidentally should provide adequate room for modern traction or hydraulic motors...)
As pointed out, the issue here is pathetic train-starting capacity. You could use a variant of the Lewty booster (a triple-expansion engine driving a hydraulic pump, with motors on the various axles and ancillaries, all supplied through cheap, sealed, and heat-tolerant pressure hoses) to provide the boosting (this keeps both unsprung and truck-frame-borne mass minimized, and wear and shock damage minimized, relative to a Franklin approach... even if you retain two- or three-speed drive to the axle). But perhaps a better approach would be to use Russell Brown's asynchronous-compound idea, which provides a LP motor or turbine instead of 'low-pressure cylinders that have to run in phase with the HP cylinders', and which is amenable to easy and simple IP modulated injection at any power level, or directly for augmenting starting TE.
In my opinion, it makes sense to go with electrical rather than hydraulic asynchronous drive. For one thing, it would allow you to use ordinary high-speed trucks under tenders or other support units, or even distributed in the train. At the very least, this gives you the practicality of a road slug; for true high-speed work, it offers rapid acceleration even at very high speed without slipping propensity.
RME
Short answer: ask Tom Blasingame.
A chief disadvantage is that, for most designs, the minimum practical size for the plant is very large -- not less than a couple of typical C-C diesel-electrics, and therefore the expected power output can't be less than that comparable, say 8800hp for argument. Excess fuel and water lengthen this further, although you have road-slug-like capacity under those units... the difficulty with length is more related to siding length or other operating considerations, where the number of cars you can handle is restricted by something other than available TE or HP.
You have all the servicing problems of a comparable steam cycle -- solid waste handling, fuel delivery and processing, GOOD-quality feedwater and processing chemistry. Contrast this with a good modern diesel servicing regimen (as opposed to much of the prevailing send-it-out-with-up-to-x-number-of-cylinders-dead mentality).
You have to take care with the environmental aspects of things: Tier IV emissions on startup or changes in load; ash handling and disposal; all those lawyer things.
You still have the problem that if a wide range of things happens, the engine (equal to two diesels, remember) goes dead on the road. The problem may not be something fixable by a maintenance crew in a hi-rail truck. (I won't address explosion hazard, although present).
Water-tube boilers require comparatively expensive fabrication. The skills to work on them ARE still available relatively cost-effectively in the marketplace, although you have to look in unusual places to identify them. Maintenance and materials cost, though, are troublesome, and the working environment for a high pressure boiler of any kind is NOT likely to be optimal out on the road. Difficult to package all the high-efficiency systems that make power-station boilers so efficient within AAR plate limits, even as expanded for stack trains.
ADVANTAGES: Very clean exhaust is possible, even to the point the exhaust is cleaner (of things like photochemical pollutants or pollen) than the intake air. (Remember the brief resurgence of steam automobiles in the early '70s?) External combustion allows much higher per-unit engine power, as you're not limited by chamber volume and charge pressure as you are in a CI engine. It's possible to have a large accessible thermal reserve (in the overcritical water in a boiler) so there don't need to be substantial, if any, firing changes for short-term 'overloads' or starting exertion well beyond the rated steady-state rating, but without overfiring.
Bears looking into what a locomotive that produces very high transient power 'free' might offer in dispatching and train-handling...
To Paul M.: "Old railroaders say a lot of things...." Well, yes they do, but you know what, he was there, I wasn't, and in my years of living I've learned when someone with firsthand experience has something to say about a subject the best thing for me to do is keep my mouth shut and my ears wide open, and maybe, just maybe, I might learn something in the process. It's served me in good stead.
I'm reminded of a story where a World War Two veteran was giving a talk to a high school class, but getting on in years he kept getting some dates wrong, and a "know it all" student kept correcting him. Finally the old vet blurted out "Listen kid, I only FOUGHT in World War Two, I didn't MAJOR in it!"
As far as the corrosion from Bunker C, that's what I've read. Again, I wasn't there.
Nothing personal Paul, I'm not raggin' on you or trying to be a wise guy.
Firelock76As far as the corrosion from Bunker C, that's what I've read. Again, I wasn't there.
For those who want to look at this for themselves, start here:
https://torpedo.nrl.navy.mil/tu/ps/pdf/pdf_loader?dsn=355582
which has the discussion of Bunker C starting on p.5
Overmod, thanks for the site you mentioned, but I couldn't get in. Can you tell us in a nutshell what it has to say?
That reference isn't a site, it's a downloadable .pdf file -- I verified that it worked from the URL as posted (on my G4 Mac using 10.5 and Safari) to be sure I hadn't inserted a typo. You can try googling Jones 1983 hot corrosion in gas turbines to see if it gives you a direct download link; the paper is NRL memorandum report 5070.
I am not exactly sure why the forum isn't providing a live link that you could right-click to download, but if you have Word or some other word-processing software that provides clickable links, you could paste the URL there and then right-click the result to download and save the file -- be sure if in Windows that you save it with .pdf at the end.
There's far too much chemistry to synopsize, but the upshot is that the corrosion in the UP turbines was apparently driven largely by sulfur, in two forms: sodium sulfate, and metal sulfide (mainly nickel sulfide) perhaps in the presence of sodium chloride (sea salt). Oddly enough, the role of vanadium, which is what I'd have looked for, is somewhat deprecated (requiring the presence of molten Na2SO4 as a flux to work), and the language dances all around the role of NaCl as a material causing direct corrosion (as it is in some familiar stainless-steel alloys).
Give me an e-mail address that will take attachments and I'll send you a copy of the .pdf if you can't download it.
Overmod Short answer: ask Tom Blasingame. A chief disadvantage is that, for most designs, the minimum practical size for the plant is very large -- not less than a couple of typical C-C diesel-electrics, and therefore the expected power output can't be less than that comparable, say 8800hp for argument. Excess fuel and water lengthen this further, although you have road-slug-like capacity under those units... the difficulty with length is more related to siding length or other operating considerations, where the number of cars you can handle is restricted by something other than available TE or HP. You have all the servicing problems of a comparable steam cycle -- solid waste handling, fuel delivery and processing, GOOD-quality feedwater and processing chemistry. Contrast this with a good modern diesel servicing regimen (as opposed to much of the prevailing send-it-out-with-up-to-x-number-of-cylinders-dead mentality). You have to take care with the environmental aspects of things: Tier IV emissions on startup or changes in load; ash handling and disposal; all those lawyer things. You still have the problem that if a wide range of things happens, the engine (equal to two diesels, remember) goes dead on the road. The problem may not be something fixable by a maintenance crew in a hi-rail truck. (I won't address explosion hazard, although present). Water-tube boilers require comparatively expensive fabrication. The skills to work on them ARE still available relatively cost-effectively in the marketplace, although you have to look in unusual places to identify them. Maintenance and materials cost, though, are troublesome, and the working environment for a high pressure boiler of any kind is NOT likely to be optimal out on the road. Difficult to package all the high-efficiency systems that make power-station boilers so efficient within AAR plate limits, even as expanded for stack trains. ADVANTAGES: Very clean exhaust is possible, even to the point the exhaust is cleaner (of things like photochemical pollutants or pollen) than the intake air. (Remember the brief resurgence of steam automobiles in the early '70s?) External combustion allows much higher per-unit engine power, as you're not limited by chamber volume and charge pressure as you are in a CI engine. It's possible to have a large accessible thermal reserve (in the overcritical water in a boiler) so there don't need to be substantial, if any, firing changes for short-term 'overloads' or starting exertion well beyond the rated steady-state rating, but without overfiring. Bears looking into what a locomotive that produces very high transient power 'free' might offer in dispatching and train-handling... RME
Regarding T.W Blasingame;
I'm in no way a steam expert but I.M.H.O the most glaring problem with his proposals is that he is trying to promote a prime mover that has never been built and is unlike anything available in the power/utility equipment market place.
He has a license to market a steam expander version of the Rand Cam rotary engine. Internal combustion versions of this have been built but they are in the power output category of other rotary engines like the Wankel, not the 7,200 BHP brutes he wants someone to use his designs to build...
Regarding T.W Blasingame; I'm in no way a steam expert but I.M.H.O the most glaring problem with his proposals is that he is trying to promote a prime mover that has never been built and is unlike anything available in the power/utility equipment market place.
This is true. In my opinion, it doesn't help that he promotes the options pejoratively, and to the wrong folks. The point I was making is more that he's worked through the design, drawn the blueprints, calculated the weights and loads, and most importantly, VERY carefully gone over the various alternatives and picked those that should work and rejected those with drawbacks. That's his most particular value when assessing alternatives for steam-electrics, or discussing things like, say, Perry Shoemaker's approach (which someone back in this thread was invoking without naming him) or Prahl's CE635. Tom has looked at all these things, and learned from them.
There is no particular reason why a Rand Cam expander won't scale to the desired size, particularly because the vane seal issues are much easier for steam than for internal combustion. You could be (as I am) mistrustful of the intellectual-property ownership issues related to the Rand Cam, but actual construction and testing of the engine at larger scale wouldn't be a particularly difficult engineering exercise. Funding that exercise, of course, is another matter.
A point to consider, though, is that the economics of Mr. Blasingame's locomotives don't stand or fall on that particular positive-displacement expander -- there are other means of turning efficient generators, some of which have been demonstrated to work at appropriate scale. While you sacrifice some part-load efficiency by giving up a long-expansion positive-displacement engine, a turbine built with currently-available technology by currently-capitalized makers would work nearly as effectively, and is almost a drop-in conversion if you have adequate plenum volume in the exhaust.
(I'll confess here that I think a better bet is a multiplicity of Harry Schoell's Cyclone plants in a common carbody, using AC drive, with attached road slugs equipped to carry the ancillary equipment as necessary. (Think the original 'flex-a-power' Baldwin 6000hp locomotive from the early '40s, or any of the modern genset road-locomotive designs, for the metaphor). But these won't run on solid fuel directly, at least not in a universe where 'practical' has sensible semantics.)
Overmod, thanks for the synopsis! I knew I read about corrosion problems in the gas turbines, you just confirmed it, so thanks again.
When I tried the .pdf file you mentioned it came back at me that I didn't have the "clearance", or some such. Well, I USED to have a pretty good security clearance, but that was 35 years ago, and maybe the info's on a "need-to-know" basis anyway.
When I saw it was a Navy site, I figured well, the Navy's probably forgotten more about corrosion and how to fight it than the rest of the world will ever know. If they say it, believe it's so!
OvermodThe CSR Web site has just put up the first in what promises to be a useful series of 'white papers' concerning modern steam design. This is by L.D.Porta, and the CSR White-paper page also features two free links to Trains articles in the '60s (which were part of Porta's inspiration) that should be of interest to followers of this thread.
http://www.csrail.org/index.php/the-plan/white-paper-series
Bumping this thread, too... has it really been so long since we had active discussion here?
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