This must have been an all first class fare train when introduced. Boggles the mind how they made any money on such a small train.......
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Oj-J5kHSM
CMStPnPBoggles the mind how they made any money on such a small train...
It's not a 'train': think of it more as a glorified motor car a la EMC products in the late '20s, but with more seats due to lightweight construction and with better engine and 'transmission'. Same general idea as the M10000 ... or, on an only slightly smaller scale, the Clark Auto-Tram with its Cadillac V-16 or Stout's Railplane.
More seats for a given engine size, and higher speed, due to the Shotwelded construction ... but note the T&P's comparative failure to get performance out of this construction only a couple of years earlier, with somewhat more 'radical' running technology...
An interesting early 'enhancement' for the M10000 was the Overland Trail sleeper ... which really didn't add that much useful capacity to the original 'small' train, even if 'some' additional capacity was indeed there for the engine size. The car was pretty quickly put in with the M10001 set (so there were additional sleepers, but no wider upper berths!) Of course, as with almost all 'successful' streamliners of this kind, the follow-ons to Zephyrs and Streamliners alike were bigger and bigger and had more and more engine capacity, until it got to lightweight full-size cars coupled to familiar passenger-style locomotives, and the lightweight motor trains became themselves specialized (with the Moto-Railer and the RDC being the most famous examples in American practice).
No small part of 'how they made money on the small trains' involved the kind of service like the 'City of Salina' where the train could make multiple high-speed runs between relatively close destination pairs per 'working day'. Here the high speed of the train was less a primary 'draw' as the kind of enablement that makes modern small jet aircraft so potentially useful... the ability to find 'billable' use as many realtime hours out of a 24-hour day as possible.
The T&P ran the rubber-tired, 47- passenger Silver Slipper train in the 30s. It was a Budd-Michelin joint venture. The PRR ran two and Reading also ran one train. All were failures due to derailments.
The Burlington's first Zephyr had 60 coach seats and 12 seats in the observation lounge at the rear. It also had a railway post office, which provided additional revenue.
Johnny
What is with the posts holding what appears to be a wire atop the coaches?
Is that a radio aerial of some sort?
Likely inductive radio -- see the system PRR used. This was not a 'broadcast' system from towers: it picked up RF radiation from a parallel lineside wire.
(This might well have been at least partly used for 'entertainment' from a program carried on the communication wires rather than commercial broadcasts with their fading, static, etc. over long distances... this would prevent need for frequent retuning of entertainment radio receivers on the train.)
What a blast from the past!
And that woman with the champagne bottle had one hell of an arm! Broke it on the first swing! And that was some tough sheet metal too, not even a dent in it!
I liked the shots of the Stinson pacing plane too. At least I think it was a Stinson.
I'm pretty sure that's a Stinson as well. My old man told me how after the dawn to dusk run, it toured the country and when it came to Towanda, PA the whole school was let out to see it and walk through it. It must have blown people away, seeing something that they've never seen before. I wouldn't mind an N scale version of it on my layout. But my layout is set in Germany in about 1970 so I have one of these-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ73DZXLHjQ
Note the "squinty" look of the windshield, similar to the Zephyr- I wonder if there was some consultation... you know the rest.
54light15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ73DZXLHjQ Note the "squinty" look of the windshield, similar to the Zephyr- I wonder if there was some consultation... you know the rest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8VJmHq3YTo
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
54light15Note the "squinty" look of the windshield
I'm tempted to add the 'cab-car' windshields of the LBE push-pull sets. Or the Stout Railplane.
There were some pretty awful things before we got to the sophisticated look of the City of Denver sets. (And some pretty awful things afterward with lightweight trains, too...)
Doesn't change the fun engineering, and some of the achievements of the early trains. I still wish the original 'Germanesque' parabolic nose had been put on the turret-cab M10000; it would have looked very similar to the much later TurboTraineven if the monitor-like little turret windshield panes had been kept.
It's been posted in threads here before, but as they are functionally unsearchable here is a contemporary account with some interesting detail concerning the lightweight train. Note the picture at the end of a 'Fliegende Lubecker' -- going to the other end of the LBE from the Fliegende Hamburger...
If I recall correctly, the Belgians tried this formula in high-speed trains, and the Lyntogs were famously similar. SVTs were and are some of my favorite train designs.
Man, I just love that name "The Flying Hamburger!"
Sounds like what you get if you go through a "Mickey-D's" drive-thru too quickly!
I wonder if there was a "Charging Frankfurter?"
If your railroad is set in 1970, why is that Vertriebwagen still operating (DB retired it in 1957) unless you are running an SVT 137 as a DR train for high-ranking DDR or party officials?
http://www.dbtrains.com/en/trainsets/epochII/SVT_Leipzig
It's a beauty to see in Leipzig.
Flintlock76I wonder if there was a "Charging Frankfurter?"
No, but there was a "Fliegender Frankfurter" as one of the two first services implemented with the production trainsets, in 1935. (Don't ask me why it's 'fliegende Hamburger' and 'fliegende Hollander' in Wagner, but not 'fliegende' Frankfurter ... someone with actual knowledge of Twain-level Germanic minutiae will be required. I had been sorta thinking it was a participle and not an adjective, but who knows if that's accurate...
Of course the implicit humor in the American meanings of 'hamburger sandwich' and 'frankfurter sausage' is not really present in the German language. Although one does chuckle at the prospect of response of someone from America, a Kennedy perhaps, asking at the station for tickets on 'einer' fliegende(r) Berliner...
It was said that Nigel Gressley (and his assistant Oliver Bulleid) combined the A4-class steam locomotive with some lightweight articulated coaches as meeting the challenge of the Flying Hamburger and other lightweight motor trainsets. Does this tie into the A4 locomotive "Mallard" setting the speed record?
A similar thing happened in German with locomotive builder Borsig designing the 05-class 4-6-4 ("Hudson", however, was not their nomenclature for that unusual-for-Europe wheel arrangement), giving this skyline to rail level streamlined casing. That locomotive came close to Mallard's record if not beating it apart from technical details for how such a record was proven.
The thought at the time was that the motor trainsets cost much more than even a custom steam locomotive and set of lightweight coaches. Today, it is a steam locomotive that costs big dollars to design from scratch.
There has been much written about the Flying Hamburger but I haven't seen any depiction, apart from these guys from Milwaukee having a Marklin model, until seeing the video posted here.
Thanks!
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Why am I running it? Because it's my layout, that's why. I can only say that if I have to give the layout a year, it would be 1970 but I guess it covers the time between 1955 and 1975. I will run certain out-of-era things such as a 1910 vintage Orient Express train, but I'm not going to run the ICE trains. On the roads there are lots of split-window Volkswagens but no Rabbits or Jettas. I've seen the one in Leipzig- it is nice- I wish I could ride it someplace if it's still in operation.
Paul MilenkovicIt was said that Nigel Gresley (and his assistant Oliver Bulleid) combined the A4-class steam locomotive with some lightweight articulated coaches as meeting the challenge of the Flying Hamburger and other lightweight motor trainsets.
A little more precisely (it's in Bulleid's son's book Master Builders of Steam) the LNER was looking into using German motor trains 'or the equivalent' to run high-speed services. They found that the trains had insufficient capacity to 'do' what the British operating conditions required. Hence the original decision -- as on the Milwaukee, and in some other places -- to use a properly adapted steam locomotive to make the necessary power.
Now read the section about the 'competition' between the Great Western traditions including full rotating balance via 4 cylinders and proper large long-lap long-travel valves ... and how well an A-class Pacific could run when given that internal detail-design 'beauty treatment. Consider that even the 'light' German and American 4-4-2 hauled train proposals might not have fit the tight British loading gage, so keeping a good high-drivered Pacific layout with the low British frontal area, and at least 'competent' slipstreamlining, was going to give the British a big leg up on the sort of fast trains they might provide. (Note that the "brake" train on Mallard's record run was not small...)
Does this tie into the A4 locomotive "Mallard" setting the speed record?
Yes and no. There is no doubt in my mind at all that the run was a plausible-denial excuse to justify fast running as a response to the German 05 reaching above the magic-on-the-Continent 200kph. There is also little doubt that a great many Poms have inched the record by an ever-so-slight 'appearing' -- but actually pretty substantial in physical fact -- margin -- some all the way to 126.1 which even Gresley rejected. There is also litle if any doubt that Mallard was no more capable of sustaining 125mph than N&W J under test on PRR could sustain 115mph. Several people assert that 'fixing' the big-end detail design was a permanent cure for the damage there, perhaps even an expedient fix for the overrun problem in the practical valve-conjugation arrangement. I see no reason to disbelieve that,but I also doubt that this engine even with low frontal area, wind-tunnel streamlining, and favorable road conditions would reach the 128mph+ that Bruce of Alco attributed to the A 4-4-2s, let alone the speeds reported for a few PRR T1s. Meanwhile, across the Channel, we had some rather wacky mathematics and design decisions made on the 05s (which squeaked by their testing, but an Eastern European dynamic analysis done a few years ago indicated an emerging resonance of severe consequence starting and rapidly amplifying at around 122.5mph. To me this helps explain why the Germans never went back even a single day and made the attempt to crack or even match Mallard's record on more acceptable track profile or without crippling mechanical derangement...
A similar thing happened in German with locomotive builder Borsig designing the 05-class 4-6-4 ("Hudson", however, was not their nomenclature for that unusual-for-Europe wheel arrangement)...
Nor should it have been: the Europeans effectively invented the low firebox over a two axle high-speed-capable truck and named the result Baltic, which MILW dutifully adopted when they reinvented the need for the wheel arrangement circa 1926...
... giving this skyline to rail level streamlined casing.
This was some of the best-thought-out practice for reducing absolute atmospheric resistance in a practical sense; the 'problem' was that much of the design was hampered by some really rather wrong decisions.
Having drivers larger than 90", but not strengthening the driver structure (or making much provision for minimized overbalance and cross-balance in a strong center vs. lacy spoked castings that almost distort when you look at them. Or providing anywhere like enough radiant heating surface, let alone firebox volume, for the anticipated mass flows, a proper multinozzle front end nozzle, etc. -- if you read accounts of the very high-speed runs the engine was wailing like a siren as it approached 200kps, indicating the imminent onset of some kind of flow instability quite possibly dangerous at that speed. At that point in time, even diesel-electric locomotives were capable of handily reaching that speed, with little more than gear-ratio changes; all sorts of awful things could ruin your day if you pushed the design even a couple of mph beyond some impossible-to-predict point.
That locomotive [the class 05] came close to Mallard's record if not beating it apart from technical details for how such a record was proven.
One might also note that rebuilding the 'rear boiler' to permit higher operating pressure, using better ring technology and oiling, implementing 3 gears instead of the Gresley linkage, and perhaps fitting a stoker would have given an A4 with the 'revised' big end at least a few additional high-speed hp or better balancing speed characteristics. Whereas the German design had some fundamental layout issues that might not have allowed higher safe speed without extensive rebuilding.
I encourage you to find the Eastern European modeling of the class 05 locomotive, as you're by far the most qualified person here to critique their assumptions, their methodology, and their conclusions. You might also have insight into the 'best' ways to improve the locomotive to make it more capable at highest speed (assume full mass flow at about 40% cutoff).
Chapelon had a design he thought could reach the equivalent of 150mph; it's illustrated but not really discussed much in LLAV (and you will find it in Carpenter's translated version). Personally I don't think the design would get anywhere near 150mph, and I think if you want to play with steam power at any speed much above 120mph you're really looking at some sort of steam turbine with a constant-horsepower variable drive, quite possibly a Bowes drive or equivalent. (See if you can find any of the design discussion of the old Turbomotive 2 project on the Wayback Machine for a few ways to do this expediently on a non-articulated sort of chassis...)
The argument has been made -- sometimes a bit speciously, imho -- that had the same kind of engineering been put into steam locomotives that was put into diesel-engine design, we'd have some highly sophisticated high-horsepower options (some inherently with near-PZEV pollution, albeit higher carbon emissions per shp) and of course a couple of really interesting alternatives to 'steam turbines', most notably a long-expansion piston or vane motor using ultrasupercritical steam at 'best' engine-shaft rpm independent of road speed...
...yes, there are people that have done them.
54light15 Why am I running it? Because it's my layout, that's why. I can only say that if I have to give the layout a year, it would be 1970 but I guess it covers the time between 1955 and 1975. I will run certain out-of-era things such as a 1910 vintage Orient Express train, but I'm not going to run the ICE trains. On the roads there are lots of split-window Volkswagens but no Rabbits or Jettas. I've seen the one in Leipzig- it is nice- I wish I could ride it someplace if it's still in operation.
Sorry if that sounded critical.Of course you can run whatever you want, but most European mode railroaders are such sticklers for temporal accuracy I wondered if you were portraying an Erich Honecker visit to the west. Unfortunately I don't think that work of art in Leipzig is running but I will try to see if there are any plans. I'm glad you saw it.
If I had to give my layout a location it would be where West Germany, France and Switzerland come together as I have equipment from all 3 countries. It's set in early September as the hops are ready to be harvested. Yes, there is a hop field. And a brewery and a malting silo. Not to mention, several beer gardens. Looks like a nice place to live if you're a half an inch tall.
If I can't ride the Flying Hamburger, I may be able to ride the Brighton Belle maybe this year or next. www.brightonbelle.com Pretty nice isn't it? I saw it being restored at Barrow Hill a few years ago. From what I saw it's just like restoring a car except everything is very heavy.
That's a great area in southern Baden. Wine country also, especially the Kaiserstuhl, because it's volcanic.
In the UK, head up to the NYMR in North Yorkshire. It is really something with a working loco shop that repairs and restores steam. And Whitby is a nifty old seaport.
I've been to the NYMR a few years ago- those Yorkshiremen are serious railway guys. They aren't just playing with trains there. The other one I love is the Keighley and Worth Valley. On both, people ride them as transportation, not just to have a grand day out.
The NYMR has two group sites on FB. I love talking with those guys, though the Yorks accent is sometimes a bit thick. Very friendly people around there. The first time I went to Whitby in college days I got there on a Saturday. I had not realized banks were closed and I was short of pound Sterling . No problem! The owner of the pub chatted a bit, discovered my roots were there as well as middle name, and loaned me ten pounds, which was plenty for days.
Yorkshiremen are my favourite limeys. The rest of 'em ain't bad neither.
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