My first forum post, let me begin by thanking all members who are doing a great job in running this portal. I have benefitted greatly over the last few years from this forum.
Question time now, one of our EMD locomotive (with 12 cyl 710 engine) we use for shunting duties has its oil turned to sludge without warning - still early in investigation phase but i am perplexed to have seen something like this for the first time in my relatively young railway career of 17 years. I wanted to throw the visuals out there to get the discussion started. This is the first one for me (i have seen oil breakups in smaller diesel engines but nothing on a rail diesel enigne, guess there is always the first time!
What is the trash in the foreground of the first image? It looks like a piece of gasket material, which would make me suspicious that this was coolant in the oil, but the second image shows too dark for the usual 'mayonnaise' that would result, especially if the oil cooling heat exchanger is plugged (as I suspect it will be; what is the oil pressure measured after the pump?)
I am presuming you have checked for cylinder blowby or other condition that would allow or inject combustion gas into some part of the oil circulation, and that you have not observed the engine to run hot in any part of the circulation.
Is sabotage a possibility?
Now would be a good time for Randy Stahl to come out of hibernation...
What does the inside of the airbox look like?
I'll be quite interested to hear what the test results are from an oil sample.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
From the looks I showed this to our shop foreman he's thinking that you're getting the coolant additives into the oil. We've seen similar things in our past engines when the nalcool additives leaked via pinhole leaks into the oiling system and turned 15w40 into basically jello without forming the mayonnaise of normal water in the oil.
thanks all for valuable inputs thus far. Some further updates below;
Airbox is squeaky clean. No early sign of coolant leak into the oil (at least as of yet). Oil analysis showed high lead, tin and copper (circa 600 ppm) points toward conrod bearing distress and yet on the other hand, high Zinc (273ppm) points towards incorrect oil makeup (mixing of incorrect oil). The locomotive was working on a 4 week stint away from home depot meaning the running maintenance (fluid topups etc) were being carried out by the other depot/staff (food for thought).
i have couple of interesting videos to go with the images i shared in my OP, i am not sure how to attached these with this post. The method of attaching images doesnt work for attaching the videos (unless someone can guide me)
You can't "attach" images or files here; that was a conscious decision by Kalmbach when they configured the "software package" that runs these forums.
What you have to do is 'host' the files on any service that provides a valid URL for each one. You then provide the URL as a link to the file wherever it is stored.
The easiest way is to click the little chain links (get it: links?) button in the bar above the text window, and paste the URL into the 'source' box. That should make the link 'clickable' (in red after posted) and the image will display.
In a kinder, gentler era of the Interwebs, years ago, an 'image' tool was provided (that is the little stylized picture of a landscape just to the right of the 'links'). You could paste the URL into this and it would automatically load a 'correctly sized' version into the message editor for you. The problem is that, in the intervening years, the problem of 'hotlinking' has become important for many hosting sites, and either they don't let the link work or they substitute some nasty little placeholder image.
Some sites offer to format their own link in a way that can be pasted into a post text here and open correctly. We have had detailed tutorials on that for a few different hosting sites over the years -- I believe a couple are in the 'stickies' at the top of some of the Kalmbach trains.com forum pages.
This may work,
https://streamable.com/
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.