Steam reigns supreme here

[Flintlock76]

Good guess Father!  I'll be 66 this August 28th.  (Me 66?  When did THAT happen?)

I remember Jean Shepard's radio show, but honestly didn't listen all that often.  I has heavy into aircraft modeling by the time I was in 8th grade and usually listened to an "easy-listening" format radio station, WPAT out of Paterson NJ.  The music soothed my jangled nerves when a project didn't go right.

I think Jean was on a bit late at night if I remember correctly.  Mom set strict bedtimes on school nights.

I have read Jean's great book "In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash,"  a classic!

Anyway, if you remember Jean, I'm sure you remember this great piece of music, it's got a railroad context, just so we don't stray too far off topic.

You'll just love the clouds of "steam."  Yeah, Andre gets it, baby!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJLSQDMyDcs  

Oh, and you can recieve modern digital broadcast TV signals with a conventional antenna, however you need a converter box to process them into something an older analog TV can use.  Those with cable and older analog sets don't have to worry about it, the cable company takes care of the conversion for you.

[NDG]

 

Media.

 

High-End roof antennas had motors and gearing to swivel them to pick up the clearest signals, a Controller w a dial and lights moving around it's rim indicating position of antenna on the roof above.

 

Did not have television reception when I lived out in the bush, Pop. 64 at town with Post Office, and did not miss it. The Mountains were in the way. VCRs just new and no Satellite TV, Yet.

 

Had Dirt Bikes and a Power Wagon + High Hood GP9s, after the H-16s left, instead.  Think SMOKE w a H-16 roused from slumber on a cold day.

 

A few years later I went to the Coast with a guy where he purchased a Satellite Antenna System and we put it on the roof of his shop. The Dish came in sections and was about 8 Feet across.

 

Much better, and unlimited Porn visible from the Hot Tub, another status symbol in the Eighties.

 

Think Water Beds and Video Cameras, Ditto used Wood barrels from Distilleries, and so on.

 

When I followed my Seniority and had to move back into civilization, I got Cable and was stultified.

 

Having to PAY for bad TV thru a Cable Company was an irritant which increased year by year, and then every six months. AND the Commercials!!!!

 

SURE we could now receive 300+ channels on various pricey packages, but many were duplicates, not of any interest.

 

All that was missing was ' The Vauclain Compound ' Channel 24/7/365, repeating every 8 hours, the master tape getting changed every 6 years, or so.

 

Then came the Internet.

 

As it matured, the TV and it's pricey Cable with its Packages became more of a burden.

 

Eventually, just after 9-11, the Provider upped the fee once again. Ten $10 a month more in the last twelve months, alone.

 

Went and bought a computer and subscribed to Internet.

 

More control and less advertising plus so much else.

 

Mais, C'est Moi.

 

Was out to supper last night. Roast. and, after the repast, sat down and watched the News, Flooding in the East, followed by Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy. ( No Law and Order. ) I fell asleep on the couch.

 

Just like the Old Days w Disney, Ed Sullivan and Bonanza on Sunday evening w school the next morning. A 2-8-2 pulling the Grade up from South Jct. at the end of the street, the exhaust easing as he made the summit and on the flat, large prop airliners with their metal fuselages distorting the signals as they Approached to land.

 

Memories.

 

Bought a set of Rabbit Ears for a dollar at the antique store and placed them next to the computer tower. Early WiFi, No one Got It.

 

They love the 1937 Dial Wall Phone.

 

Found this on the Internet.

 

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=sJZOj_1555888393

 

Another Memory.

 

Thank You.

[Fr.Al]

I used to listen to Shep under the bed covers. But that theme "Bahn Frei," did conjur up images of a train in my head. Although, the version Jean Shepherd used was about the race track, as I recall.

     I used to picture a passenger train headed by two steam locomotives travelling the 4 or so miles between North Bennington and Bennington at break neck speed. Although a crossing of the former Rutland was maybe a quarter mile away, no regular passenger train had crossed those rails since 1931. There was one steam powered excursion we rode out of Bennington in Sept '66. Those tracks are dormant now.

[Flintlock76]

Interesting.  I don't know how Jean could make a racetrack connection with "Bahn Frei,"  the phrase means "Highball!" or the equivalent in German, so your mental images of a train  were spot-on.   I can see how it would make one think of a racetrack with the horses going full-blast however.

No matter, he had a good show. 

Oh, that blonde cellist in the blue dress nearest the camera has a killer smile, doesn't she?  Wow! 

I just remembered.  Every once in a great while I used to catch this great lady on late-night radio, when I was a bit older of course.  Maybe some of you remember?  WNEW-FM out of New York?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocvrdHhhNLE  

[Fr.Al]

Bahn Frei, if I'm translating correctly, literally means ,"free road" in German, which is not one of my languages.

    Shep would have the starting bugle of the race track begin his version of "Bahn Frei" which was conducted by Arthur Feidler of the Boston Pops. Plus, something was used to simulate the beating of horses hooves.

  But I doubt that a double header passenger train ever ran that section of Rutland track, unless you count the milk train, which did carry a few passengers. I will be lucky if I ever see a single diesel ride that trackage, it's still there, but dormant. I think Midland Mike described a ride on the remnants of the Rutland. If I remember, he said he was told that line was too risky to chance taking the passengers over it.

[Miningman]

thread starting photo at large: http://i.imgur.com/1ptOvvP.jpg

 

https://ia801709.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/15/items/engineeringjourn27engi/engineeringjourn27engi_jp2.zip&file=engineeringjourn27engi_jp2/engineeringjourn27engi_0030.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

https://ia801709.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/15/items/engineeringjourn27engi/engineeringjourn27engi_jp2.zip&file=engineeringjourn27engi_jp2/engineeringjourn27engi_0031.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0  

https://ia801709.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/15/items/engineeringjourn27engi/engineeringjourn27engi_jp2.zip&file=engineeringjourn27engi_jp2/engineeringjourn27engi_0032.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

https://ia801709.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/15/items/engineeringjourn27engi/engineeringjourn27engi_jp2.zip&file=engineeringjourn27engi_jp2/engineeringjourn27engi_0033.jp2&scale=2&rotate=0

 

Excerpt from Journal, History Museum & Historical Society of Western Virginia, Volume 14 (1999)

 

How Shaffers Crossing Got Its Name

 

It was in the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918.The pealing of church bells, a shrill whistle from Norfolk and Western Railway Company's shops, and the clanging of every bell on every locomotive in the yards announced the end of World War I in Roanoke.

 

The new peace marked the beginning of a period of economic growth for the nation. For Norfolk and Western, this was characterized by the appearance of longer and heavier trains to carry coal, merchandise and passengers over tricky mountain terrain.

 

To meet the accompanying demand for more powerful and efficient motive power, the railway was building its own locomotives. To repair them, it constructed a 40-stall roundhouse and 115-foot turntable in the "Salem Dirt Road" area of undeveloped West Roanoke. It was here that two springs made for a quagmire near the former John Newton Shaver property and a single Norfolk and Western line.

 

Over the next 40 years, "Shaver's Crossing," as the area along 24th Street, Northwest, was originally known, acquired a reputation throughout the rail industry for offering the most skilled personnel, modern equipment and advanced techniques for the maintenance of steam locomotives—most of them designed, built and operated by Norfolk and Western people.

 

But just as the name "Shaver's Crossing" evolved into "Shafer's Crossing" and then "Shaffers Crossing," so did the facility's function change.

 

In 1955, Norfolk and Western began to switch to diesel power—the last major railroad to do so. Shaffers Crossing was retooled and expanded to accommodate the growing diesel fleet.

 

In time, the Shaffers Crossing operation became inefficient due to the excessive number of movements required to get locomotives in and out of the roundhouse.

 

Studies were begun on a replacement. Construction of the Shaffers Crossing Locomotive Maintenance Facility, an in-line servicing facility encompassing 106,873 square feet under roof, began in 1982 as Norfolk and Western and the Southern Railway were consolidating to form the  Norfolk Southern Corporation.

 

 

 

https://www.railpictures.net/photo/454039/

 

[Flintlock76]

Welcome back Vince!  Back on "Classic" where you've been sorely missed!

Wayne

[Miningman]

Thank you Wayne. Yeah I'm pushing it a bit here but how long can you stare out a window at still melting snow. Lots of birds about, coming in squadrons and digging through leaf litter on open ground. Keeping the emergent bug population in check I hope.

So what is this? On page marked 25, ( Railroad Equipment in Wartime) the last paragraph before the 'Possibilitues of post war air transportation' talk, is this:

" the possibility of a combined steam and mercury turbine locomotive which would cut water consumption in half and greatly reduce the fuel cost"

Have I ever heard of this before? Mercury!? I don't think I have.

Putting out the Overmod help signal. 

[Overmod]

Miningman

Have I ever heard of this before? Mercury!? I don't think I have.

Ding! Ding!! Ding!!!

I will need to look up the specifics of any locomotive application of a mercury turbine -- as I think the practical implications (judging by power-station experience with the cycle) would be long-term insurmountable.  On the other hand, at almost the exact time this article was coming out, the B&O was investing 'big time' in front-end stokers (they acquired 74 of them, apparently, before deciding the idea wasn't good, as Frank Black might say) and I'll bet no one here has heard a peep about them, either...

As I recall, the practical mercury turbine cycle was floated by General Electric in the early Twenties (about the time metallurgy produced turbine blading that would stand up to* potential amalgamation) as a more practical expansion of the water Rankine cycle than the use of ether bottoming in the 1850s.  The idea was to use furnace heat to generate very-high-temperature mercury vapor, the expansive force of which is backed up by relatively high specific heat content, use this in a primary turbine (and the usual set of bleeds), then condense the mercury in the equivalent of a HRSG plus superheaters to provide a high-quality Rankine cycle without the issues involved in doing high-pressure heat transfer directly from fire to water.  For a variety of reasons this is attractive thermodynamically, and the mercury turbine itself is valuable as a topping device for a relatively small but intense furnace).  Here is a page from ASME with a linked article on one of the engineers who worked on the idea.

As you might suspect, the inimitable Douglas Self has something good to say about this.  Pay careful attention to the note about the use of spiral bending "to relieve tubing of impact of mercury in 20-ft. drop" -- there is nearly 70 tons oh wait, apparently 90 tons of the stuff circulating in there.

As someone pointed out to me at college, this approach foundered for a relatively predictable fundamental reason.  Anyone who has been around normal power stations knows that the atmosphere tends to be on the hot and oppressive side -- due to various leaks.  Now imagine a similar situation with invisible mercury vapor.  Not precisely a happy thought -- and now imagine you're in a locomotive maintained in the fashion typical of the mid-Forties.  Much less happy ... and that's before we start commenting about the relatively 'safe' use of very high pressure that the indirect-heating method permits.  One of the greatest alleged reasons for the relative 'failure to thrive' of the NYC high-pressure 4-8-4 was that the very large and centrally-located pressure gauge on the backhead was supposed to have its hand on 850psi most of the time: Jacob Perkins et al. weren't afraid of 2000psi pressures, but I'd sure not be surprised if NYC engineers who had risen through the ranks and knew the dread nature of steam well could learn to be so sanguine ... even if they trusted Alco and the management as far as they sanely could.

Erik can probably calculate a reasonable budget in terms of cwt of mercury for a reasonable-size ... call it 6000hp to match a Niagara; not much point in an expensive combined-cycle plant for locomotives much smaller ... coal-burning plant.  Thermodynamicist 'common sense' would try using a cyclone burner as the primary fire, with the usual-suspects Rankine cycle through convection to FWH bleeds and ultimately Franco-Crosti air preheat and final feedwater warming; this design would be able to 'safely' use the very high generated temperature heat flux from such a burner effectively, which I doubt a locomotive-sized direct steam-generating arrangement could manage ... Schmidt certainly couldn't come even close, and heaven knows enough people tried to make that horror pay.

What you use the output to do is another matter: the mercury turbine is probably going to be driving an alternator or generator of some kind (you will notice they solved the issue of shaft seals by encapsulating the whole turbine as in a hermetically-sealed compressor), as likely would at least the initial pass(es) of the developed high-pressure steam.  Seeing how the PRR direct-drive V1 project got corrupted under progressive N&W tinkering, I'd lay even money on a pure steam-turbine-electric implementation with 'all wheels driven'... and it would have to be a LOT more wheels than those on the TE-1 to make the necessary power.

Yes, it would have been fun to watch; no, I would NOT want to have to be found responsible to pay for it, and NO, I would not want to have it operating near me.  Anywhere near me.  (Some of the comments regarding the German experimentation into multiple-nitrogen explosive materials come to mind, rather pointedly...)

Hope springs eternal, though; here is a PDF of a NASA tech discussion of the idea, used for topping, circa 1975, that was one of my introductions to the idea as a freshman in college...

 

*Such was the idea, at least.  As I recall the reality turned out decidedly different over time, worse the longer you tried to run things.  Decommissioning was no fun, either.

Hey, why did Kalmbach remove the functionality to change text size in a post?  It was there, but I can't find it any more.

[Miningman]

Holeee Moleeee, did not know this. Thanks for answering the Overmod signal!

Great reading. Despite the obvious they never really gave up on the idea. I do not think this would ever had actually made it into an operating locomotive any more than the nuclear 'atomic' powered locomotive.

Makes one wonder what was actually built that we don't know about in some far flung secret corner of the world.

Well at least everyone was thinking and applying good science and recognized the reality of the situation.  

These articles are keepers. Our Power Engineering fella will be most interested.

[Overmod]

Here. specifically to help welcome Vince back, is this little piece from The Hartford's house magazine, with a little on the mining aspects of the mercury involved.  And in case you were wondering what a Field tube was ...

[Erik_Mag]

Mercury cycle in a locomotive???? While scary, it does sound safer than using concentrated H2O2 to power a submarine.

I'd be tempted to design the bottoming steam cycle more as a means of making an effective condensor for the mercury cycle. I'm guessing that best efficiency would be acheived by condensing the mercury below 400F, which would limit steam pressure to maybe 100psig. Since the exhaust would be at atmospheric pressure, the low pressure end of the turbine would be reasonably compact.

My main concern would be figuring out the electric transmission on this beast, the sealed turbine generator means AC coming out of the generator. With 1940 technology the least gross options would be configurable cascade connections with wound rotor induction traction motors or a -ahem- mercury rectifier and DC traction motors.

The advances in steam turbine technology pretty much killed off the interest in mercury cycles, though the nuclear generating station in Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" used a mercury topping cycle (written in 1941). What RAH described in his story gets a lot of details close to being right, e.g. being off by only a factor of two of the explosive yield from fissioning 2.5 tons of U-235. One thing he did get right was that "artificial radioactives" would save a lot of lives, without Tc-99m, I probably wouldn't be alive.

Having said all that, it would have been fun to see such a locomotive hauling the NYC's Mercury...