Water Towers aren't just for locomotives

[SD70Dude]

From the RYPN forum (which I am blatantly plagarizing here), this is too beautiful to not share here:

http://www.rypn.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42228&sid=12e378ed97fd40047cbe54d1799b3322

[Firelock76]

You're right 'Dude, too beautiful not to share, both the steam cars and "you know what!" 

[zugmann]

Some more photos and videos for those interested:

https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/stanley-steam-automobiles-roll-into-strasburg-rail-road-video-and/article_40ed0578-85df-11e8-bd07-cfa946ca2354.html

[SealBook27]

Yes, I'm interested! Thank you both. I was born and raised just five miles from Tom Marshall's estate. My mother told me about a little steam train he had and would open up his estate for visitors to ride on it, but only once a year. Never seemed to work out for me to see it. In the seventies, while I was working nearby at Hockessin Supply Co. I became acquainted with Tom. He seemed like a quiet, gentle sort of person and even looked like someone from the past by wearing "granny" type glasses. Once he brought a Stanley Steamer that I think resembled the mountain car in one of your pictures, but with the canvas top up as it was a drizzly afternoon. The Wilmington & Western had brought up their steam train and stopped right beside one of our warehouses, with Tom's car parked in front of the fire company. I went over to take a picture of the car thinking it was shut off. Tom got in and just that quick drove off. That was a shock! It hadn't made a single sound until it moved.

[blue streak 1]

What is the operating steam pressures ?  Do some owners do hydrostatic tests as well ?

[54light15]

Stanleys are all well and good, but have a look at the Doble- the ultimate steam car. Jay's was owned by Howard Hughes. I once crawled under one at a show in Michigan- it was something! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUg_ukBwsyo&t=40s 

[Firelock76]

If I remember correctly, Bill Lear (of Learjet fame) took a crack at a steam car design around 1970 or so.  Nothing came of it, though.

[Overmod]

Firelock76

If I remember correctly, Bill Lear (of Learjet fame) took a crack at a steam car design around 1970 or so.

A fundamental early design mistake (in my opinion) was his choice of an ORC (organic Rankine cycle) using a material other than water for the heat exchange -- his was a set of "proprietary" formulas he called 'Learium' (and we called, predictably, 'delearium').  Think of all the usual reasons the air around steam power is somewhat moist and hot, and then imagine you have something akin to a Freon instead (study the history of the power-station mercury turbine for alarming parallels) and when it has leaked out of your power loop you have to go back and pay for a working-fluid recharge before you can move.

Thermodynamics not really calculated properly, either.  But I digress.  You can read all you probably want to know about this on the SACA 'phorum', including where all the development equipment went after Lear gave up the effort.

[timberlane1]

If I remember correctly Stanley Steamers operated at around 400 or

600psi. Here is a link to some technical info: http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/GeneralTechnical/GeneralTechnical.htm 

Don't know about hydrotesting on a regualr basis. 

 More on Stanley boilers: http://www.stanleymotorcarriage.com/Parts/Boiler.htm 

 

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

I get the impression from the link that the operator of a Stanley Steamer had to perform the functions of driver, locomotive engineer and fireman all at the same time.  That kind of complexity would have doomed the steam automobile as designed despite the wishful thinking of the website owner.

[Overmod]

CSSHEGEWISCH

I get the impression from the link that the operator of a Stanley Steamer had to perform the functions of driver, locomotive engineer and fireman all at the same time.

But don't forget that contemporary internal-combustion cars required fiddling with manual spark advance as well as throttle, choke, gearing, and the vicissitudes of several kinds of brake.  And they stall easily, jerk, and have trouble, either pulling or stopped, on hills -- all of which are trivial issues for any steam car. 

Any modern steam car burned gasolene or some equivalent, and these burners would not require much adjustment to stay 'blue' during a run; water was not something difficult to keep adjusted, and Stanley boiler construction was notoriously insensitive to low-water problems (Doble monotubes for a different set of reasons) -- if I recall correctly a good Stanley or White was less complicated to drive than a contemporary car of equivalent capacity and performance.

A more likely dooming involved issues with which there are modern equivalents.  The need to find feedwater at relatively frequent intervals was a simpler issue in the days of horse troughs and unsophisticated boiler metallurgy; using the right water for sophisticated condensing rigs would involve the same kind of perception of additional expense as DEF/'blue diesel' in modern compression-ignition cars.  In the days of F-head engines and low compression the fuel economy could be reasonably close for high capacity vehicles ... does not take too much R&D before the understood thermodynamic cycle advantages of gas engines make internal-combustion motors FAR more fuel-efficient than the usual range of cost-effective external-combustion plants.  (You may note that the ZEE, which I have always thought represented about the peak efficiency possible from a small Rankine-cycle plant, was never even fully developed as an automotive alternative powerplant even though extensively developed and tested as such...)

And then there is the loss implicit in startup and cooldown, one of the tacit reasons why monotube flash steam became popular from the late '20s on.  It would be interesting to see if a small version of 'direct steam' analogous to a BEV high-efficiency charging station could have been developed for overnight steam raising and rapid charging and blowdown for driving.  Was never done back in the day to my knowledge, and I was never quite sure why not.

It's fun to read over some of the surviving Doble papers to see exactly how far intelligent people could implement automatic firing and other servo systems in the days before even relay logic was implemented in control devices.

One place the steam people have had what I consider a long-established blind spot is in the absence of any kind of multiple-speed transmission in a steam car.  The usual claim is that the weight and complexity of a transmission is not required given the inherent flexibility of many kinds of steam expander (motor) where high pressure is available.  However, there are advantages to keeping steam motors in a reasonable powerband just as there are for many kinds of IC motors, and (for better or worse) most of the issues involving practical manufacture of good automatic transmissions have been well solved.