I missed this last week, and it deserves some further discussion.
Firelock76 OK, stainless steel is actually illegal for boiler use here in the US, it's subject to cracking due to the heating and cooling cycles a boiler goes through. My postulated use for stainless would be in non-boiler areas such as the jacketing over the boiler insulation, the "skins" over the cylinder and valve units, hey even the whole tender for that matter. Possibly even the ancillary piping on the locomotive itself.
Not sure stainless would be as beneficial for jacketing as, say, a copper-bearing, self-healing-oxide-generating material like Cor-Ten. It would be nice and reflective... but would show every little dent and scuff, even if given a brushed finish like some modern appliances, in which case cleaning it would become difficult. (And you still have the chloride problems in a near-'marine' environment.)
Note that modern practice would use one of the structured nanoinsulating materials for lagging under the jackets -- this is essentially multiple reflecting shields kept spaced apart with dry gas between the layers. Higher-temperature film (like metallized Kapton/polyimide, post 1964). This makes low emissivity from the jacket material itself comparatively unimportant.
As far as a layer of material on the flues or boilers innards to prevent corrosion acting like scale, remember a LITTLE bit of scale wasn't a bad thing, it helped to seal the flues and boiler joints. Remember, that's a LITTLE bit of scale.
The heart of the problem was getting the scale to go only in the joints, not other places where it wasn't wanted!
Note that properly-welded flues (and proper technique to fusion-weld, not just seal-weld flues and tubes was becoming mature by the late '40s, cf. much of Bulleid's Leader 'staybolting'') eliminates any particular problem with joint leakage most places. Assume welding of the firebox sheets in this same period -- tested after 1937, legal after 1943 -- there are some details like vacuum envelope that would need working out in a production environment, but nothing contemporary tech couldn't handle.
To the extent small voids or defects in the welding caused leakage -- the electroless boiler sealing would do this far more effectively than any hard scale would, and (ideally) have some measure of self-sealing as well. One significant implication for boiler treatment is a great need to do EFFECTIVE deoxygenation of the boiler water; this becomes even more significant if using Anderson 'recompression' because any air upsets the action of the precondensation. So assume either Wagners or some flavor of Trofimov as required 'replacement' for any kind of shifting, and nothing but steam used as a working fluid for counterpressure braking, in the absence of VERY competent methods of preventing compressed air from getting into feed or boiler water. If you're doing a protocol titrated for oxygen scavenging, you might as well go straight to something like Porta-McMahon treatment, which has a great deal of mobilized TDS in the boiler, but keeps the solids in suspension rather than allowing scale to form...
[Note that I very carefully skirt the issue of whether some flavor of 'stainless' boiler could have been tested, and perhaps legalized, in the presence of effective welding, passivating, and water treatment. Certainly there were enough problems with fancy nickel steels postwar! There's plenty of 'legal' use of stainless-family alloys in stationary steam generation -- but it does pay to recognize where and how that practice, and those operating conditions, differ from what prevails in normal locomotive road service.]
... in my opinion steam locomotive wheel arraingements had gone just about as far as they could by the 1940's, as far as I'm concerned reaching it's zenith in the 4-8-4 dual purpose locomotive.
I think this is just about right, as far as reciprocating practice goes. Eight-coupled engines were a sweet spot. I suspect (as I've indicated elsewhere) that there was a place for properly-designed 2-wheel lead trucks on dual-service power, and also two-wheel trailing trucks with 'appropriate' levels of thermodynamic improvement -- but it's hard to beat the 4-8-4 for general effectiveness, with the only real 'improvement' being use of some sensible method of conjugated duplexing.
Larger articulated freight power deserves some consideration, too: again, as I've said, it's difficult to think of a need for anything bigger than double-eight-coupled power (with asynchronous compounding for auxiliaries and boosting) -- or for high-speed road power, double six-coupled. Anything bigger than that in a single unit would be an articulated turbine.
A significant question might be whether the inflation in production cost of conventional power, with increasing complexity of ancillary systems and components, might have eliminated much of the initial cost advantage of reciprocating power over 'more sophisticated' methods of steam power. It's pretty clear from history that either turbines or motors were a major focus of steam evolution even before WWII; I consider it telling that nowhere (in North America) where Franklin System valves were tried were they both successful and 'follow-on' adopted for major use... it would remain to be seen whether improvements in piston valving, e.g. Wardale doubled valves, or some flavor of Willoteaux valve, would have given additional life to 'dual-service' quality operation of new reciprocating power.
I think any further improvements would have come in the manufacturing and upkeep departments.
Certainly there were many places where this would have been seen, most particularly in welding and fabrication imho. I think NYC and N&W went just about as far as could be gone with conventional maintenance and upkeep -- whether you could get rid of some of the asbestos-suit running firebox maintenance in welded-construction boilers is an open question. Another place for potential improvement was in pressure lubrication that was not 'total loss'. But...
... some of the other issues were not as tolerant of improvement. Note the speed restrictions that had to be imposed over the inline ashpits at places like Elyria on the NYC, for the 'flip side' of operation over long distances even in the presence of high-speed coaling 'shoots'. The 'push' at the end of the '40s into the early '50s to concentrate on good coal quality (washed, 2" sized) was commendable, but whether it would have become a standard (this would CERTAINLY have helped with the PRR T1 minstrel-show problem, for example)is less obvious vs. Lima's efforts at about this time to make huge, slow combustion of wack fuel more effective... and then you have all the paraphernalia associated with smoke and spark abatement, like those WM stack appliances or the various flavors of overtire jetting. No matter what you do, big recip steam is less flexible and more maintenance-intensive even before you get to potential safety issues such as the actual functioning of drop plugs or the 'safety' action of Nicholsons which was anytthing BUT safe in actual situations...
You don't have to be an engineer per se to recognize many of the historical improvements in the '40s and early '50s, although it helps to know enough empirical principle to know how stuff works so you can separate the improvements from the gimcrackery and downright wrongheadedness. For example, if you don't understand the physical interaction between spring rigging and torque, you won't see the duplex high-speed-slipping issue -- or low-speed starting even with 'good' weight distribution, either, for that matter -- coming.
Perhaps the greatest 'improvement' that could be made would have been financial: the development of more 'standardized' power that would give equipment trusts more assurance of trade-in potential, for instance. If Baldwin and Lima had had the access to credit that GM developed for dieselization, it might have been interesting to see how the whole modernization-of-power thing worked out; we certainly have examples of what could have been done -- both pro and con examples -- in the late-'40s 'rebuilding' of SLSF Consols into Mikados. (Might also have helped if Baldwin's corporate financing in our period hadn't been as wild and woolly as Trostel describes, or if Hamilton, and then Lima, and then Baldwin hadn't been drawn into the whole free-piston combustor business... ;-} )
Well done Overmod, now THAT'S what I'm talkin' about! What manufacturing improvements can we postulate as far as steam locomotive contruction. The "what could have been done to save steam" theorys are pointless. NOTHING could have saved steam, the economic advantages of diesels were just too great. Dammit.
HOWEVER, if we suppose the diesel had never been invented, then THAT'S where the "what -ifs" of steam get interesting. Sound like you were on a roll with the last post.
I wonder though, if diesel fuel had (proportionately) cost what it does now back in the 40s and 50s, would dieselization have been as attractive? Diesel fuel was dirt cheap back in those days, cheaper than gasolene as a matter of fact. Now? Someone on the Forum a while back made a "best guess" that railroads are paying about $3.00 a gallon for diesel fuel. It was a guess because no-one seems to know.
Interestingly enough, diesel was NOT as cheap as the numbers might indicate...
Predicate this by recognizing that America was in a gas crisis by the latter half of the 1920s (this was part of what led to the Teapot Dome scandal, too) -- this led to the point of licensing the I.G.Farben (Fischer-Tropsch, I think) patents for some humongous amount of gold-standard dollars about 1928, as future supplies of gasoline would have to be synthesized.
Then the big West Texas fields came in, starting around 1931.
Clessie Cummins gives a good picture of early diesel economics in his book. In the early Thirties, diesel was about 5¢/gallon -- about the same as a loaf of bread. BUT this is uninflated, gold, hard-money currency. Take the Bretton Woods standard of $35/troy ounce, and run the calculation of what 5¢ came to with gold at around $1700/ounce... close to, well, $3 per gallon...
If liquid fuel HAD cost "$3.50" in 1927 dollars, yes, it might have impeded dieselization... for about as long as it took for the various Standard Oil breakup companies to build and start their Fischer-Tropsch syngas and fuel-synthesis plants. Less net hydrogenation needed for longer-carbon-backbone diesel components like cetane (C16H34).
Railroads had a particular interest in diesel: the fire danger involved was very much less than for gas cars. (To say nothing of the amazing smoke and stink of gas cars, and downright abominable fuel efficiency! As a comparison, look at the fuel burn of something like a Hall-Scott pancake motor, as used in the IC-41s, and compare that with an equivalent-power Cummins of same vintage.
The biggest advantages of early diesels were not particularly related to fuel cost, which was almost always 'higher' than railroads could get coal, BTU for BTU; remember this was at a time when Western railroads were torching an enormous volume of fuel oil in steam locomotives that could have been used for 'gas oil' (#2 diesel) synthesis... had the economics of motor fuel proceeded as expected after the Twenties, with very much the same Gresham's-Law opportunity cost for hydrocarbon feedstock...
Instead, you see the ability to idle cheaply; to start without protracted required fuel burn; to run several divisions without stopping if desired; to use very little water; not to let go with catastrophic explosion; to run easily up to 120mph without track pounding -- etc. (This even before we look at fancy financing arrangements, trade-ins, happier perception of collateral by bankers and equipment trusts, etc.)
Now, an interesting question might be 'what if Sloan and GM hadn't decided to buy EMC in the early Thirties'. Would Kettering et al. still have developed what became the 201A and then 567 family? Would there have been the money to build and run early E units (some evidence that yes, ATSF would have been good for it) and then gone on to build freight power at sufficient scale (5400hp FT 'locomotives' of four units) and successful non-customized characteristics? (Would be interesting to see how Baldwin would have developed things if the 412 or 408 genset engines had proven practical, although I suspect the same dismal design details and quality control would have happened with or without competition from GM-EMD...)
Last price I saw for railroad diesel was somewhere around $2.42 per gallon equivalent. That was some time ago, but I think oil per barrel was higher on the spot market then. In any case, nobody particularly cares about long-term excursions of fuel price now, because it's just passed along in the form of surcharges. Back in the post-Hepburn ICC days -- where you'd be forbidden by law to tack on surcharges, and would have to go through political hoops even to have a request for emergency assistance considered -- well, THEN you'd be in more of a pickle. (For an interesting and to my knowledge underreported comparison -- look at all the hurried plans for steam-locomotive oil firing conversions during the threatened coal strikes in the latter 1940s; there are blueprints for oil conversions for class A and J that would be just as 'applicable' today as they were then, and none of those purists over on RyPN could complain that installing the conversion would be 'unhistorical' or whatever... ;-}
I still can't help but think that the free-piston frenzy could have been justified, intake drumming or not. Certainly the free-piston air compressor would have been designed (in German practice) and its application to Lomonosov-type (it appears that's how his name ought to be spelled) pneumatic drive for locomotivesmight havebeen more workable than the (unsuccessful) diesel piston-engined compressor that was used. Not a very great stretch to using the combustion gas for turbines, unless we want to pretend that the whole of military history regarding turbojet aircraft engines disappears along with diesels suitable for railway traction...
... and yes, I still think that mechanical-transmission steam turbines, with Bowes drive, would have supplanted most of the heavier road power in the absence of practical dieselization. And we might have seen some extremely fast passenger running with it, 1947 ATC rule or not...
RME
Firelock76 & Overmod I like where you guys are taking this thread.
Overmod Interestingly enough, diesel was NOT as cheap as the numbers might indicate... Predicate this by recognizing that America was in a gas crisis by the latter half of the 1920s (this was part of what led to the Teapot Dome scandal, too) -- this led to the point of licensing the I.G.Farben (Fischer-Tropsch, I think) patents for some humongous amount of gold-standard dollars about 1928, as future supplies of gasoline would have to be synthesized. Then the big West Texas fields came in, starting around 1931.
<SNIP>
Overmod The biggest advantages of early diesels were not particularly related to fuel cost, which was almost always 'higher' than railroads could get coal, BTU for BTU; remember this was at a time when Western railroads were torching an enormous volume of fuel oil in steam locomotives that could have been used for 'gas oil' (#2 diesel) synthesis... had the economics of motor fuel proceeded as expected after the Twenties, with very much the same Gresham's-Law opportunity cost for hydrocarbon feedstock... Instead, you see the ability to idle cheaply; to start without protracted required fuel burn; to run several divisions without stopping if desired; to use very little water; not to let go with catastrophic explosion; to run easily up to 120mph without track pounding -- etc. (This even before we look at fancy financing arrangements, trade-ins, happier perception of collateral by bankers and equipment trusts, etc.)
As already noted (in numerous places by many writers) diesel-powered locomotives supplanted steam traction for a whole bunch of good reasons. So rather than rewriting history by imagining that X,Y or Z was or was-not invented, I think it would be more beneficial to ponder where it may have gone if world oil-supply thence production had peaked and collapsed between 1930 and 1945?
The whole burning fuel-oil in steam-locomotives or ships would have been killed off quickly. As for the Fischer-Tropsch strategy while that would undoubtedly filled some critical supply holes, I don't think it would have sufficient to precipitated the cultural switch that came after WW2. Especially as the Nazi Germany and South Africa could not scale Fischer-Tropsch up to fully meet either of their respective national needs even with slave (or virtually-slave) labour economic underpinnings.
The other problem with Fischer-Tropsch is ramping up a international coal production to supply all that is being turned into liquid fuel as well as all that already going to coal's traditional uses.
W.Shawn Gray
As my old girlfriend used to say, "Nice... but no dice."
The changes in America involving the automotive revolution, and the expansions in technology by Henry 'Ford, Alfred Sloan, and all the other things happening through the Twenties would have happened with or without the large production of Texas oil. And the only reason Fischer-Tropsch production wasn't implemented and scaled in the United States was the continued existence of very cheap fossil crude.
This leaves aside the finding and use of crude in the Baku/Caspian region, from the Rumaili reservoir, and in places like Venezuela -- and likewise, innovations in drilling (such as the Hughes bit or directional drilling) would have occurred in response to them. The most logical (to me) alternative history -- in which human society rejects widespread release of exhaust from IC vehicles (don't laugh; it was a presupposition at Rainhill and the other early railroad trials; remember 'consume its own smoke'? just extend that to carbonic anhydride (as opposed to DHMO) and *there you are*) will fail miserably for our purposes, as our whole inventive design is essentially predicated on cheap and lavish combustion.
Similarly, "peak oil" doesn't mean the abrupt collapse and disappearance of oil production -- just the point at which increasing consumption crosses available production, or opportunity production from known reserves. Expect no more to be necessary than supply and demand economics to equalize that market in the absence of government price regulation (meaning of course low-price requirement in this context!). I wouldn't expect ICC regulation of freight rates in the presence of known factor price increases to persist very long -- but we could always pretend.
So I might propose just the absence of West Texas up to the period of exploitation of Middle East crude as the determining 'supposition' -- which would push road dieselization forward a couple of decades. Problem then is that Fischer-Tropsch syngas in the United States, from various sources of coal including the PRB, would have become a substantial production industry (believe me, the knowhow and resources were already present in the Twenties!) and one thing this does is put severe upward impetus on coal prices. Which is an interesting influence on things like compounding technology, just as it was in France... but somewhat artificial for evolution of North American road power. It's not wise to extrapolate Nazi economics on American production... or for that matter to underestimate Sasol's technical knowhow when its operations were hampered by world response to apartheid, for example.
Just as easily, much development could have gone the other way -- PRR was heavily into IC power development up to 1927, according to Cummins, when the key proponent died (the others left in management being those folks who advocated the L5 as a fast passenger locomotive and standardized on K4s rather than M1s, but I digress...) One very significant 'key' to dieselization was the engineering skill and promotional ability of Hamilton, dilworth et al, backed up by Sloan and Kettering at just the right time. If EMC had continued as a builder of little railcars, and 'successful' diesel power restricted to things like Baldwin 608s (with no great high-horsepower output potential) and FM OPs (with tremendous potential but with issues to go with that) it's quite possible that development of the 'right' kind of multiple-unit diesel would have been retarded a while, perhaps a great while. Even supposing EMD had delayed going to two-stroke, or kept after fixing the bugs in the 201 (or given up rather than going to 201A, or subsequently 567), there's a window for steam development, but it closes inexorably postwar -- just more slowly and uncertainly, particularly in the (suppositional) absence of GM's influence in exploiting the financial gains of the railroads from WWII. Just thinking about the 'streetcar motors' in the Alco DL109/110, as perceived by Santa Fe, will get you into a discussion of just how practical the early Alco attempts at road power (with 539s) were going to be.
And in my opinion, a consequence of much of the tech forces was to take steam design away from relatively-crude reciprocating designs into motor locomotives and turbines. I am still tinkering with the practicality of Holcroft-Anderson at North American mass flows and turbine pressure drops and practical back-pressure (see http://www.otakimai l.co..nz/ DOWNLOADS. htm for an interesting prospective view on this "decompression") but solving the treated-water-rate issue seen on much late 'total-loss' exhaust systems would have been significant to the sorts of operation that road diesels most successfully filled. Juniatha should be delighted with the resulting picture, as so much of Chapelon's thinking and prioritization would become quickly both valuable and relevant to actual road practice, in the same kind of sense that Woodard's Super-Power did in the early '20s...
Another supposition is to assume the Depression did not occur, or was properly addressed before it proceeded to irrevocable collapse of large parts of the practical economy. One fairly rapid consequence of this would likely have been the New Main Line improvements on PRR, combined with electrification over the Middle Division perhaps all the way through Pittsburgh (and locomotives/motors using 428As) which would have staved off the most pressing need for F-unit adoption early on that road. I would have expected CONSIDERABLE development of lightweight fast steam a bit earlier in the Thirties, probably combined with wider adoption of bidirectional (push-pull) consists to go with them... but use of oil burning in these would be fairly likely. In any case, though, the observed progress with any of the lightweight trains -- from fast motor trains to larger consists requiring bigger road power -- would not have transpired differently, nor would the development pressure on dual-service power have been relaxed. (Judging from what was in the duplex-design pipeline by the middle Forties, with designs under consideration by ATSF, NYC, and ACL that I know of, solution of the slip problems alone would have made these designs popular for high-speed work... and Deem conjugation would have imho done that.)
Meanwhile, everybody is dodging the elephant in the room, which is that steam power was retained, and expanded upon, in postwar Britain. Not all the subsequent suppression of interesting and novel technology could be attributed to Labor predilections, or nationalization details, or to the choice by Riddles et al. to concentrate on improved conventional recip standard designs. This in an environment where optimization of service at 100mph or better was seemingly widespread -- and respected. Just don't go pretending that something like Beeching wouldn't have been necessary or desirable by the Sixties, for all that branch line traffic that's romantic as hell, but not terribly lucrative...
The general case for better interurbans is associated with this... somewhat. Yeah, we grouse a lot about the evil NCL scam, but interurbans as a cost-effective transport technology were well on the way out whether or not private cars could be kept cheaply fueled. Where density justified, you'd get more and better Brill-Bullet-like operations, or CRandIC service; yes, providing interurbans with better amenities like parlor seats and air conditioning would likely have given competitive advantage. But the stranded cost involved in maintaining many miles of track to essentially Class 5 or better, in the absence of practical freight revenue, rather quickly damps this sanguine picture... just as it actually worked out. You'd have to pretend that all the revolutions in bus technology in the Twenties and Thirties didn't happen, or that all long-distance service could have been suppressed as Pickwick's was by Missouri in the early '30s, or a century earlier as Gurney's was in Britain. You might not have gotten four-lane highway construction... but you'd surely get farm-to-market roads, and making those suitable for use with, say, the Yellow Coach/GMC monocoque diesel coaches is not much additional difficulty.
There's a bit of chicken-and-egg problem with the priorities for electrical-power expansion in the '20s: did Insull get into grid power because of all his traction interests, or did it become increasingly apparent that the electricity 'business' had better alternative uses than driving streetcars and interurbans?
In sum: it's probably best just to 'pretend' that the railroad presidents continued to believe that big steam was 'real locomotives' and IC powered stuff was essentially toys for the period of interest. Then we can continue to pick from the best of contemporary technologies, and get round the evolving paradoxes or contradictions as they may arise...
I just came in to flirt with June but after reading all this I feel so inadequate...
Randy
Diesel not cheap? Well, I don't know. I'm old enough to remember gasolene at 21 cents a gallon, sometimes less if there was a "gas war" going on between two competing stations. Diesel fuel, at the stations that sold it, was typically less, say 18 to 19 cents a gallon.
Don't fall into the trap of "adjusting for inflation." The one constant you should look at is purchasing power at any given time. Adusting for inflation works sometimes, but not all the time.
Randy Stahl I just came in to flirt with June but after reading all this I feel so inadequate... Randy
When the engineers get goin' I feel pretty inadequate too! Poor old history buff me! Do what I do, just sit back and watch 'em roll!
Firelock76 Don't fall into the trap of "adjusting for inflation." The one constant you should look at is purchasing power at any given time. Adusting for inflation works sometimes, but not all the time.
There are actually a couple of metrics that can be used; I used two, one of which was indeed a comparable based on purchasing power of a common, fungible household item. The other was to compare to 'market' gold as a reference.
Now, gold wasn't legal for citizens to own (thanks to the Democrats!) from the time of Proclamatiom 2039/Executive Order 6102 to the passage of P/L 93-373 effective at the end of 1974. But during this time came Bretton Woods, which fixed the value of the dollar as a troy ounce to $35, and with the dollar acting as the chief postwar commercial unit of currency... it acted as a de facto standard of monetary value up to 1971. While this obviously doesn't eliminate wage and price creep (the principal driver of American inflation) it does provide a reference point for value.
The problem with alternatives to 'adjusting for inflation' is that many factors in the economy cost much more, or were perceived as higher-value, while others were essentially deprecated or saw economies of scale in production. I remember being amazed when my chem teacher said that common practice through the Thirties was for 'this year's model' to cost less as well as have better quality and more features. (See Vance Packard's books, and 'The Insolent Chariots', for some indication of how this was eliminated in the great age of planned product obsolescence.)
We could always invoke Leonard Reed (something's worth what someone else freely gives you for it... or look at the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses national acceptance of the greater-fool theory in reverse, to squeeze all that surplus value out of the economy. But in the absence of John Law and some external bubble, or 10% margin requirement with gains and deposits defined in dollars -- see the petrodollar issue for a different facet -- people are going to use the value of precious material, most usually gold, as the 'reality check' on comparative value. And you can bet that saprophytic arbs will be working with a wild will to accomplish closures between currency and specie... at least most of the time. The world made better sense with gold around $325.
I was almost old enough to drive when Esso (remember the pre-Loewy Humble Oil?) Extra was thirty-five cents a gallon... and that was a LOT of money to pay for fuel! Needless to say, that was pre-'73.
I am watching the diesel market very carefully. In between fracking-derived natural gas, increased use of heat pump/GSHP improvements, and regulations on nanoparticulates, I'm expecting demand for that famous diesel analogue, home heating oil, to drop -- meaning that that traditional excuse for raising diesel price won't wash, and the oil people will have to fall back on the old 'world demand' excuse. If 'the fix is in' expect diesel price to remain high even with falling demand/greater effective supply. Kind of like how you avoid mortgage exposure even when rates are nominally low, low, low... tinker with the rules instead.
But getting back to the original point, I believe you can do comparison between time periods, especially for defined classes of goods, and have them actually reflect something other than perceived preference.
OvermodAs my old girlfriend used to say, "Nice... but no dice."
Obviously not nice enough as some of my points seem to have been lost in cultural re-framing. That said I do agree with most of RME's logic in the reply. Per the following segments;-
Overmod The changes in America involving the automotive revolution, and the expansions in technology by Henry 'Ford, Alfred Sloan, and all the other things happening through the Twenties would have happened with or without the large production of Texas oil. And the only reason Fischer-Tropsch production wasn't implemented and scaled in the United States was the continued existence of very cheap fossil crude.
Then <SNIP> to;-
Overmod The most logical (to me) alternative history -- in which human society rejects widespread release of exhaust from IC vehicles (don't laugh; it was a presupposition at Rainhill and the other early railroad trials; remember 'consume its own smoke'? just extend that to carbonic anhydride (as opposed to DHMO) and *there you are*) will fail miserably for our purposes, as our whole inventive design is essentially predicated on cheap and lavish combustion.
The most logical (to me) alternative history -- in which human society rejects widespread release of exhaust from IC vehicles (don't laugh; it was a presupposition at Rainhill and the other early railroad trials; remember 'consume its own smoke'? just extend that to carbonic anhydride (as opposed to DHMO) and *there you are*) will fail miserably for our purposes, as our whole inventive design is essentially predicated on cheap and lavish combustion.
So if diesel railway locomotives did not gain popular rail management support as next great thing. Given the historically poor thermodynamics of reciprocating steam locomotives, at what point (especially for coal-mining operation) would railway management view the option of electric-locomotives supplied from a coal fired power stations as more economical usage of coal resources, thereby trumping any lingering appeal that steam traction may still have.
Otherwise what attributes would any steam locomotive feature such that it was functional preferable to the economies of coal fired stationary power and electric traction.
Else in this scenario would North American have followed the European rapid switch from steam to electric traction.
Enough for now. Shawn
W.Shawn Gray So if diesel railway locomotives did not gain popular rail management support as next great thing... given the historically poor thermodynamics of reciprocating steam locomotives, at what point (especially for coal-mining operation) would railway management view the option of electric-locomotives supplied from a coal fired power stations as more economical usage of coal resources...
So if diesel railway locomotives did not gain popular rail management support as next great thing... given the historically poor thermodynamics of reciprocating steam locomotives, at what point (especially for coal-mining operation) would railway management view the option of electric-locomotives supplied from a coal fired power stations as more economical usage of coal resources...
In North America, effectively never.
Only transcon with extensive electric applications, Milwaukee Pacific Extension, never recovered the cost even of the two blocks of electrification. N&W had to utilize electrification over steep parts of its grade, but spent a fair amount of improvement money to replace the electrification completely with... steam. PRR went to a great deal of time and trouble electrifying as far as Harrisburg, but then stopped without stringing wire over *precisely* the part of the railroad that ought to benefit most from heavy classical electrification -- ginormous cost on top of what had already been spent was the probable reason. Someone, perhaps Bezilla, said that if the electrification had been attempted west to Pittsburgh, it would have put PRR in the hole sooner, perhaps much sooner, than was observed. The principal example of new heavy modern mainline construction other than Virginian -- the Lackawanna Cutoff -- was not electrified even though Lackawanna made considerable investment in electric service for the suburban lines... some of which went quite some distance.
Look up the history of the Kaufman Act, and the impetus that gave toward diesel-electric power (anyone remember the Winsor McCay cartoon in Trains, years ago, about this?) Successful where mandated, but not beyond.
Well-established as early as the 1880s (with the Weed system) that ten-hour service between New York and Chicago... electrified by necessity with contemporary technology, and operating essentially as mail and package service at reduced scale... would get 'every bit' of that business. But the capital wasn't there long enough to put it all in, and every time it was tried (for example with Miller's Air Line Railroad after 1906) the capital cost brought it down, perhaps as quickly as the next economic 'panic'.
Meanwhile: most distances much longer than those seen in Britain or Europe; no organized Government or public financing to put in the enormous cost of the electric transition (cf. Britain, France, etc.) -- in the French case, including nuclear power to make the electrification pay better than it would if ordinary sources had been required...
So yes, something that had 'most' of the advantages of electric power without requiring the infrastructure would have been perceived early as a priority, and I suspect it would not have taken long before the shortcomings of the Heilmann locomotive had been addressed.
...thereby trumping any lingering appeal that steam traction may still have.
Well, no. Use of steam was practical as long as the cost was lower than the funded alternatives. It's only in the early '70s that US-American government started an organized push to reduce major emissions from localized coal combustion. People complained about smoke, soot, general awfulness, but there wasn't much they could do in the Fifties to overcome the stuff. Certainly easier, and Chapelon certainly recognized it, to improve thermodynamics somewhat, and push out the older and more wasteful power ASAP with modern and better designs, than to eliminate steam rapidly and modally.
Otherwise what attributes would any steam locomotive feature such that it was functional preferable to the economies of coal fired stationary power and electric traction..
Well, its enormously lower capital cost compared to what was then-dedicated coal-fired stationary power and the infrastructure required to distribute the power and then consume it in more-expensive locomotives. In our period, it still wasn't practical to run single-phase 60Hz (or 60cps as it would have been called then!) for heavy locomotive service... so the power plant and distribution requirements were heavily skewed toward being stranded cost for the railroads, ever more so as industry converted away from using 25Hz. You may recall that paying for this power *even with much of the generation and distribution costed-down* was a major factor in Conrail shutting down a very successful, even rather necessary electrification. ATSF looked at electrification very carefully around 1916 -- rejected it. Even Morgan's money couldn't get New Haven wires east of New Haven... and all this before the advent of practical Dilworth-style dieselization, or much of the promise that such a thing could be made cost-effective relative to steam..
When I was younger, I thought about what would happen if Progressivism had used Wilson's takeover of the railroads in WW1 as a permanent mandate for Government operation -- would there then have been investment on the necessary scale, with the necessary political will? There was CERTAINLY enough money being thrown at things during the War to have permitted more electrification. Later, the kind of investment strength brought to bear in the Tennessee Valley projects -- never mind that it was Insull et al. who were building this stuff in the Twenties and were stymied by the Depression, not lack of intent -- could certainly have been extended so that some of that power could be diverted to all sorts of rail operations that would have benefited... but that could never, ever justify actually producing that capital by assuming financial obligations or debt.
The actual choices the American electorate made after the War, even while Wilson was still in power, went in a radically different direction. We were sick of big Federral spending, sick of ultimately-pointless foreign intervention -- then locked into eight to 12 years of national government as small as possible, with the least tax-sponsored footprint. We even see the Federal push for automatic train control abandoned in 1928 (nominally in favor of 'better grade crossing safety' , but I suspect I know better). There's quite a bit of scholarship about this, and the primary sources are not that inaccessible.
Going back to take a nibble at Overmod's earlier observation;-
Overmod ... Meanwhile, everybody is dodging the elephant in the room, which is that steam power was retained, and expanded upon, in postwar Britain. Not all the subsequent suppression of interesting and novel technology could be attributed to Labor predilections, or nationalization details, or to the choice by Riddles et al. to concentrate on improved conventional recip standard designs. This in an environment where optimization of service at 100mph or better was seemingly widespread -- and respected. . . .
... Meanwhile, everybody is dodging the elephant in the room, which is that steam power was retained, and expanded upon, in postwar Britain. Not all the subsequent suppression of interesting and novel technology could be attributed to Labor predilections, or nationalization details, or to the choice by Riddles et al. to concentrate on improved conventional recip standard designs. This in an environment where optimization of service at 100mph or better was seemingly widespread -- and respected. . . .
Wondering about the reason why railway management made the choices (between diesel and steam traction) they did at the time (1940s & '50s) I recalled that Sir Oliver Vaughan Bullied did all his work in exactly this context. O.V.Bullied commissioned, designed and built both diesel and steam locomotives to fit specific operational roles he was responsible for addressing.
Some interesting snip-bits first from Kevin Robertson's book "The Leader Project".
Page 34 "It is estimated, that if a batch of 25 engines of this class were built, cost per engine would be £17,000. If one prototype was built, the cost would obviously be greater, dependant upon the development work found to be necessary during construction, and might reach £25,000". Page 44 talking about the Leader Project;- " . . . regular reports being expected. One of these concerned the spiralling costs; quoted in July 1948 as being £87,000 for the fives engines, was increased by 17% to £100,000, just two months later."
Then the Irish Experience.From Ernie Shepherd's book "Bullied and the Turf Burner"
p13. ". . . of Denmark, who had successfully supplied steam turbines locomotives . . . on the Ljüngströms principle. . . . Dundalk turned their attention to gas turbines during 1946, believing these offered greater possibilities than steam turbines. . . . the smallest viable locomotive in terms of thermal efficiency would be of 2,500hp. They offered such an A1A-A1A unit with a total weight of 112½ tons, the maximum axle load being 18¾ tons, and with a maximum speed of 90mph. The price complete and ready for service was quoted at £100,000 with a delivery in three years."
The primary factor seems to be singularily the captial aqusition for new locomotives. The diesel versus steam traction debate reduced to what could do the the job for £xxx delivered by when.
All the best, W.Shawn Gray
Yes, but in Steam's Last Chance it's pretty well covered that the whole Leader business was a contrivance, essentially Missenden et al. indulging OVSB. No question the thing was not a shunting engine, and never would be justified as one. No question the thing was completely impossible as a putative replacement for an M7 -- its very length, alone, would disqualify it. Needed to be single-ended, needed to be oil-fired, needed better crank-axle fabrication (and less sabotage!), needed chains both ways from the crank on each side (OVS eminently misunderstanding a cardinal point of roller-chain design all along, which is that the load can't reverse direction if you want it to work any length of time...)
And then BR throws large amounts of money at it; Riddles doesn't can it; despite all that scrap metal piled up in the corridor, and the amazing whoosh out of the firedoor every time the thing goes under a bridge... I'm not going to comment on that stated construction estimate other than to note that optimism is British understatement of the finest water.
Leader didn't work. The gas turbines didn't work well (just as they didn't except in niche markets in the States, and even there disappeared very quickly once the ultra-cheapness of their fuel went away). Any residual point of gas turbines in general work went away after 1973, just as seen in the APT-E and original TGV (and in America the UA Turbotrain and, later, the Frangeco/Rohr sets and that MTA commuter thing.) That's not to say that the perceived advantages of gas turbines were imaginary... just that for ordinary rail service, particularly low-margin slower-speed stuff at low tare weight... theory and reality had a massive disconnect. Even before we get into exotic materials and techniques -- the turbines in the APT-E were adaptations of a supposedly costed-down truck engine project, and even then couldn't be produced or maintained cost-effectively.
The free-piston engine... well, that was never going to be something British industry was going to excel at, even if it could solve the noise issue nobody else could. British diesels in general, with the possible exception of the Deltic, were comic-opera (up to the 66, which is essentially an EMD American locomotive in shrink-wrap). The steam standards, on the other hand, were developed and adopted not just out of necessity, but in assurance that services would be covered while R&D on more modern power continued (and a good thing, that! electrification on a scale probably unfeasible in the United States turned out to be the only real answer...)
I think a great oart of this discussion really hinges on how crippled the British postwar economy was; after Leader, there was not much political will for rapid improvement of railway locomotives, and other 'drivers' such as coal production, general labor supply and wage rates, and changes in cost-effective-traffic patterns largely drove motive0power decisions... certainly up to the point that steam was given the heave-ho in the Sixties. (I am of the opinion that this was just as pointless as replacing steam in China, and done with the same sort of bogus political reasoning, but that's just an opinion...)
One of the fun assumptions of Juniatha's original exercise is what has to have happened to give steam a longer practical lease on life. No small part of that involves wider concerns than locomotive engineering! As I mentioned, if we take gas-turbine research completely out of contention, and then further ignore the whole Second World War push to develop it for military purposes... we cut much more out of history than it will bear, and we cross singularities that don't give us anything deterministic on the other side. In other words, the whole structure of society shifts to something unrecognizable as contemporary history... or unpredictable deterministically from the stated conditions, which in practice amounts to the same thing.
(I was going to get into the parallels between alternate history/reality and practical economics, but I won't. You can all thank me now, or thank me later... ;-} )
Could the fact that Britain held on to steam engines have had something to do with domestic coal vs imported oil?
The sources I have seen on Leader specifically mention that the relative cost of oil importation was a factor in rejecting that fuel relatively early on in Bulleid's design process. There were iirc also some political aspects to retaining coal fuel use at the time, such as the National Coal Board takeover in 1947. Lower cost for the domestic coal, while the labor-related cost of 'typical' steam maintenance remained relatively low, would be an advantage for steam for a while... as, perhaps, would be the opportunity use of imported oil stock for higher-perceived-value uses, particularly automobile and lorry (truck) fuel.
On the other hand, the relatively higher heat efficiency of the diesel engine, and the simpler line maintenance of IC-engined locomotives, would decrease the relative economy attributable to using coal. I would have to leave discussion of this to someone more familiar with the actual British history and timelines involved. Part of what I observed was a dramatic reduction in 'legacy' steam usage following the great Beeching reduction in service, followed by a politically-driven (or so it seemed) push to get rid of steam in minimum time between 1963 and 1967-8, out of all seeming proportion to remaining locomotive value. But this is right around the time that domestic coal production started a very steep decline. I can't say how much of the decline contributed directly to abandonment of steam, but I suspect there are people here who can.
As an aside: It does seem clear to me that some form of sabotage was involved both in Leader's development (the intentional reversing of #1 engine at high speed when under air test, and the clever omission of packing between the main crank webs when the wheels were pressed on, for instance) and in the fabrication and testing of 71000 -- there couldn't be that many errors, all pointing in the same direction, and then retention of the problems without amelioration. At least not in my opinion.
Overmod (I was going to get into the parallels between alternate history/reality and practical economics, but I won't. You can all thank me now, or thank me later... ;-} )
Thanks mate! OverMod appears to have a higher opinion of The Leader fiasco than I do. What the Brits did with their railways post-war was not what I was wishing inject into the thread. I was from the Irish experience simply trying to point out that decisions about rail motive power seem to be just that steam was simply the cheapest upfront (forgetting running cost) solution.
". . . It is estimated, that if a batch of 25 engines of this class were built, cost per engine would be £17,000. If one prototype was built . . . might reach £25,000" [Page 34 "The Leader Project"].
" . . . gas turbines during . . . was quoted at £100,000 . . ." [Page 13 "Bullied and the Turf Burner" ]
What would have been the relativities (USA$ to £-Sterling / Irish-£) of some the big steam and diesel new locomotive purchase costs in the USA.
Just a thought, W.Shawn Gray
Overmod . . . I would have to leave discussion of this to someone more familiar with the actual British history and timelines involved. Part of what I observed was a dramatic reduction in 'legacy' steam usage following the great Beeching reduction in service, followed by a politically-driven (or so it seemed) push to get rid of steam in minimum time between 1963 and 1967-8, out of all seeming proportion to remaining locomotive value. . . .
. . . I would have to leave discussion of this to someone more familiar with the actual British history and timelines involved. Part of what I observed was a dramatic reduction in 'legacy' steam usage following the great Beeching reduction in service, followed by a politically-driven (or so it seemed) push to get rid of steam in minimum time between 1963 and 1967-8, out of all seeming proportion to remaining locomotive value. . . .
A large slice of the motivation there may-be this at a guess;-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Smog_Disaster_of_1952
The Great Smog of '52 or Big Smoke.
Shawn
In the early years of dieselization in North America (remember these are $35 gold-backed dollars before you consider 'low cost' vs. modern pricing) the cost of diesel hp was considerably greater than for steam. ISTR there are hard numbers in Kiefer's 1947 comparison but I don't have the reference at hand; I remember a modern 4-8-4 cost as being around $185,000 and its 'equivalent' in three E units being around $600,000.
However, the original capital cost of the diesel was not as critical (1) because of better access to financing options, and (2) because equipment trusts were more willing to pay for diesel power since it was more likely to be used elsewhere in the event of a default. I have not been able to establish whether this specific point was a factor in Hamilton & Dilworth's decision to standardize EMD's production with only a bare minimum of special-order accommodation (about the most radical being the stainless trim on the E5s, and that 1/2 a B unit with a cab that RI used out of Limon). It should be clear that NYO&W would never, never, never have qualified to acquire a bunch of F units if there were not a robust market for 'foster homes' for those units when, not if, NYO&W hit the skids.
Several sources, notably including Brown in the early Sixties, have written that much of the 'advantage' of early dieselization was tantamount to a scam. On the other hand, the enormous and by almost any standard dramatic collapse of the steam-locomotive production market in less than five years is an indication that not all the advantage was hype, and perhaps even that despite the shortcomings and problems of first-generation diesels, there were very substantial real-world advantages to expensive dieselization. (Now, as I noted before, the railroads' state of financing was very high coming off the traffic peaks and deferred road competition of the war years, and the easier access to credit was certainly something that favored additional equipment-trust purchasing now for great infrastructure-cost improvements, and operating improvements of various kinds too, going forward.
One might note that the Turf Burner, although according to what I've read a successful system, was 'not proceeded with' because the Crossley-engined stuff (one of the most pathetic designs from one of the pathetic-design capitals of world locomotive engineering!) was more suitable for general CIE traffic requirements (this if I recall from Bulleid's son's biography, so scarcely a hatchet job). Of course the GM-engined stuff worked infinitely better out of the box... enough so that many of the older engines got 645 retrofits. Again -- the diesels just had more overall advantage to justify the expense in them, and the money was likewise there to replace bad diesels with better ones on similar large-scale and rapid transition...
Yes, I think the Turf Burner was thrown away prematurely and needlessly. But if there were any place for it in competition with the (oh so appropriately named!) 001 class, there was much more doubt when faced with La Grange tech, and while I don't find it surprising that the prototype Turf Burner languished at Inchicore for a while after its testing ceased, it was never resurrected even for application elsewhere. (I still think its boiler design has great promise, but no one else seems to have agreed with me on this over the past 50 years!)
Now, we do have some indication of how things might have progressed if credit for diesels hadn't been offered after 1945 -- that being how the various coal-turbine projects were carried out, and more particularly, what the response of the railroads to BCR's mooch (or racket, depending on how strong you consider the scheme to be) was when the design verged over into where motive-power manufacturers could be expected to take up the detail design and debugging. It's sort of fun even at this remove to watch the railroads peeling off like rats leaving the sinking ship, and interestingly enough there is a somewhat direct link between 'last of the Mohicans' UP's interest in the project and its own foray into Amazing Coal-Burning Turbine Power in the '60s (if you haven't seen what happens when you couple a large electric locomotive chassis between a PA and a Centipede tender, you really need to look!)
On a slightly less heroic scale: look at ATSF's experiment in gas-turbine power (the Blue Goose, which I think was also going to be the test-bed chassis configuration for the free-piston Lima-Hamilton effort in that timeframe) and how it compared with contemporary dieselization options. Don't assume that diesels were the only contender for 'steam replacement' -- or for that matter that steam was in fact preferred to many of those fancy options in many cases for almost a decade. One thing that impresses me is the 'second wave' of mass steam abandonment, resulting in everything including N&W dieselizing quickly from the middle '50s to the end not much later than 1960. Including replacements made at the depths of the 1958 recession, if I'm not mistaken...
Some of the decline, yes, was due to so many suppliers falling below the critical mass of shipping product they needed to remain in business. But one alternative for them was diversification. Note how well that worked for Alco, which was making the big push to be a nuclear-energy supplier rather than a locomotive company early on...
On the subject of Mr. Bulleid's "Leader" locomotive, there may have been too many new ideas tried all at once instead of one at a time. What was this fascination with chain drive, of all things? What was wrong with siderods? They appeared to work well on everything from turbines to early electrics.
The boiler was supposed to be innovative and very good, except in the ways that it was not.
The idea of eliminating the stay-bolt-o-rama of the water-wall firebox and using firebrick walls seems like a good idea, that is, until the firebricks wouldn't hold together in the shock and vibration environment of railroad service.
And what is the story behind (no less than four) thermic siphons (also seen spelled syphons)? They seem to dramatically increase direct fire-to-steam heat transfer, and the Leader for all its faults was said to have a compact but free steaming boiler, free steaming until it wasn't, owing to some char removal hatch in the firebox that leaked air and killed the boiler draft.
But isn't a thermic siphon pretty much a kind of watertube (and a watertube with staybolts in it to allow for the flattened surface that that), and I thought watertubes were regarded as bad for locomotives. That is, in all circumstances where they are not, such as the thermic siphon, which seems like a gosh-awful mechanical and geometric complexity, but even Chapelon loved 'em?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
The point of the four syphons in the Leader boiler was to restore some of the 'lost' radiant uptake surface eliminated by the dry-back construction. It also has the effect, although I have not seen this explicitly described, of producing enhanced circulation in and from the convection section.
Perhaps needless to say, the dry-back construction was mandated by the design decision to preserve a walkway by the boiler while keeping within the applicable loading gage. (This is why I mentioned the original design, single-ended (no passage, so full-width boiler with proper legs) and oil-fired (so no blowback through open firedoors, etc.)
Likewise, the weird firing angle was attributed to the boiler having to reside far inside the closed carbody. Single-ended firing would have addressed this in the same manner as for any other British locomotive of comparable size, even if separation between driver and stoker were required for other packaging reasons. I would note here that the same intercommunications systems that were applied to push-pull consists using steam power would have been applicable to a Leader with one cab at the opposite end of the boiler from the fire door... although how ASLEF et al., or the general run of Southern and then BR engine crews, would have reacted to that situation is an interesting subject for conjecture.
The thermic syphon is notable because it produces (vigorous!) circulation without external pumping. I have already noted the point that Bulleid-style welded staybolting works admirably in syphons, as there is little if any differential expansion that the 'staybolts' can't accommodate gracefully. This may change the pattern back from arch tubes in the radiant section (which many people, including at N&W, felt was a better solution than syphons). If you look at the late era of boiler construction (including at least one boiler design for ATSF 3463) you will see some evidence of the joy with which designers embraced the idea of better radiant surface combined with enhanced circulation.
(Note that syphons when present do not eliminate the use of the Cunningham circulator, which is intended to optimize flow in the 'shielding' water legs)
Another cure for the stayboltorama (love that term!) is as noted the use of an appropriate system of tube waterwall, on locomotives requiring forced circulation (a la Mont, if I may be permitted a poor pun), which then gives you the opportunity to do enhanced steam separation (if you have the packaging space) due to the inherent speed of the overcritical water as it enters the separator.
Returning to Leader: the automatic ash hatch issue was (according to Robertson at least) rather quickly addressed by sealing it off (the open hatch was imho a silly idea anywhere it was tried; alert readers will observe that no few American locomotives in the late 19th Century had a variant of this approach under their smokeboxes! but the idea then died out with increasing size). Ironically enough, the thing that finally killed Leader was the incident where the smokebox door 'just happened to be' left open, and accumulating char started to set the floor on fire, the door warping to where it couldn't be sealed again. (I think Robertson is right that a replacement door could easily have been taken from one of the uncompleted Leaders... but I see instead a face-saving way to abandon the situation. (Did it ever get resolved whether it's paranoia when they are in fact out to get you...?)
Free steaming wasn't the issue so much as inability of the boiler to supply enough mass flow for the many, many steam leaks that would form as the rings cracked, seals failed, etc. etc. etc., combined with the wretched combustion arrangements; the situation was not at all helped by the closing-in of the available grate area when thicker firebrick arrangements had to be put in.
If you want to hammer something about Leader, go to the sleeve valves on the engine (a detail notoriously if quietly 'corrected' on the Turf Burner!). A bit of careful reflection will establish that the putative advantages of the sleeve-valve arrangement as designed (even with the antiseize 'wobble' that was so fascinating to watch!) gives comparatively few advantages relative to good conventional valving... although admittedly not in the very close confines of an inside-cylinder motor to fit 4'8.5" and British clearance conditions! In part, much of the trouble came from poor materials availability; I am not going to comment on the Meehanite sleeves (be sure to correct this spelling in your copy of Robertson!) or the metallurgical alternatives available for rings, seals, coatings, etc. in that era -- other to note that they were insufficient either on Hartland Point or Leader in accomplishing anywhere near what they had to do. Contemporary diesel practice, in my opinion, didn't have anything at the time that could be utilized in a wet environment; it's possible that Doble or Besler could have come up with something workable in place of the ear drive and rings as Bulleid did them, but that will forever remain a supposition that can't be answered...
Something to remember about syphons is that they tend to quench ongoing 'combustion' oxidation reactions in the gas that contacts them, unless equipped with some form of resistant surface, or operated with poor enough heat-transfer coefficient across the wall, so that the wall metal remained above the transition temperature for the chemistry in question. That is not practical for carbon particulate combustion, of course... and I suspect that the four-syphon arrangement and the char throwing may have been hand-in-hand. (In a larger firebox operating according to Woodward's/Lima's preference for very large relative GA, the effects of syphons on late combustion may be of less practical import...)
Bulleid and his biographers go into some detail regarding the chains, which for one thing completely eliminate the usual rod-angularity issue in the final drive. Apparently Bulleid had seen industrial machinery using the Morse chain drive and was impressed with its silence, ability to remain lubricated without critical wet, immunity to many kinds of misalignment, etc. Unfortunately, it appears that he didn't recognize some key requirements of chain drive, particularly in the absence of something like a Weller tensioner. (I will keep the oiling and lubrication issues, including those relating to the valve gear, separate for another thread)
Side rod engines, even with jackshaft drive, will have lateral augment forces akin to the INERTIAL forces inherent in suspended quartered drive. If you phase the cranks at 180 degrees instead of quartering, you have a dead center problem. Bulleid's design eliminates the fracture, overconstraint, and lubrication issues inherent in large close-tolerance gearing, and also the issues with main bearing lube and so forth on rods. It was a reasonable idea... just not in detail design, or when high-powered reversing (or back driving!) is involved. Indeed, if he had been allowed the room to put both fore and aft chain sprockets on BOTH sides of the engine, many of the deflection and loading issues of the design as built could have been fairly easily solved (with tensioners added, of course... ;-} )
Better approaches to final drive, of course, are found in the quill-drive world, and I would even point to the arrangement on the Henschel motor locomotive as a guide for what can be done with limited offset. The Besler drive for the W-1 is more troublesome, but there is no single showstopping reason why it could not have been built and run with better effective performance than an 'equivalent' 2-cylinder simple.
Overmod . . . Yes, I think the Turf Burner was thrown away prematurely and needlessly. . . . I don't find it surprising that the prototype Turf Burner languished at Inchicore for a while after its testing ceased, it was never resurrected even for application elsewhere. (I still think its boiler design has great promise, but no one else seems to have agreed with me on this over the past 50 years!)
. . .
Yes, I think the Turf Burner was thrown away prematurely and needlessly. . . . I don't find it surprising that the prototype Turf Burner languished at Inchicore for a while after its testing ceased, it was never resurrected even for application elsewhere. (I still think its boiler design has great promise, but no one else seems to have agreed with me on this over the past 50 years!)
IMHO the Turf Burner boiler was intriguing and I would like to know more (beyond what is in Shepherd's book I mentioned before). As to the Turf Burner applicability elsewhere I believe it has a lot in common with Porta's Prometheus Project LVM800 {quote self}
<< A Standard Gauge 3 Cylinder Porta-type Compound 0-6-2t (tank-engine). One of the last projects that Porta had been involved when he died in 2003 this little engine, could yet prove to be very important for the future of at least the Australian Sugar Cane industry in a post-carbon world. A very practical little work-a-day 2nd Generation steam locomotive. With highly-efficient burning of carbon neutral biomass (like sugar-cane waste) this design would easily beat any completion using more expensive fossil fuel, or some other synthetic fossil-fuel replacement. [ http://www.martynbane.co.uk/modernsteam/ldp/lvm/lvm800.htm ]>>
The common thread with both of these machines is the need to tweak the design of the locomotive to the peculiarities of the particular biomass fuel. In no way a trivial exercise as Bulleid's experience with peat in Ireland showed.
I think there's very little overlap between the technical design of the lVM800 and the Turf Burner; even the characteristics of the biomass fuel are different. (I will leave out any discussion of whether you could actually use renewable fuel in a reciprocating locomotive by drawing 'BIOMASA' on the bunker...)
Keep in mind that much of the turf-burning system was in fact tested using a reciprocating locomotive, and there's no particular reason a Porta-optimized locomotive couldn't be built to use peat. It just wouldn't be bidirectional, it wouldn't have high-speed-capable drive, it wouldn't have all adhesive weight on the driven wheels, and it wouldn't have had the sophisticated boiler...
Meanwhile, we are avoiding a key design-principle difference. Bulleid's solution is a sophisticated locomotive, using high-grade materials in many places, for a First World railroad system with skilled maintenance labor and shop equipment. Porta's design was particularly designed with 'small is beautiful' principles, to be easy for folks in embargoed Cuba to keep running "forever" at minimum cost and without compromising safety. I say this as far more than a nit-pick -- but not to dispute the actual point you're making, which is that the design of the locomotive should follow the fuel-cycle choices, not be Procrustean the other way...
You are already raising one important point about Juniatha's original supposition: most of the posts so far have concentrated on large, fast, powerful steam locomotives (with the tacit assumption that newer power will bump off older power until old inefficient teakettles are all gone). Where were the niches for things like the 44-tonner (a steam equivalent might have been Sentinel-style fueled single-man under contemporary labor law and precedent) or for explicit branch-line use all those places diesel-electrics were too heavy to go, assuming there were a reason to continue using such branches instead of going to truck hauling?
Overmod wrote a lot of good stuff I have no dispute with. Going on;-
Overmod Meanwhile, we are avoiding a key design-principle difference. Bulleid's solution is a sophisticated locomotive, . . . Porta's design was particularly designed with 'small is beautiful' . . . I say this as far more than a nit-pick -- but not to dispute the actual point you're making, which is that the design of the locomotive should follow the fuel-cycle choices, not be Procrustean the other way...
Meanwhile, we are avoiding a key design-principle difference. Bulleid's solution is a sophisticated locomotive, . . . Porta's design was particularly designed with 'small is beautiful' . . . I say this as far more than a nit-pick -- but not to dispute the actual point you're making, which is that the design of the locomotive should follow the fuel-cycle choices, not be Procrustean the other way...
The colloquial saying here in Australia (from the horse racing tradition) is to pick your "horses for courses" [race-track]. The point being that any choice (design methodology, technical sophistication, materials used) has to match the context it is expected to perform in. Which slides easily into RME last paragraph;-
Overmod You are already raising one important point about Juniatha's original supposition: most of the posts so far have concentrated on large, fast, powerful steam locomotives (with the tacit assumption that newer power will bump off older power until old inefficient teakettles are all gone). Where were the niches for things like the 44-tonner (a steam equivalent might have been Sentinel-style fueled single-man under contemporary labor law and precedent) or for explicit branch-line use all those places diesel-electrics were too heavy to go, assuming there were a reason to continue using such branches instead of going to truck hauling? RME
While the aspect road transport competition is fairly irrelevant to this thread's contextual scenario, it was the very question about the future that sucked me into exploring these things.
For the TL;DR community, jump to the end.
W.Shawn GrayWhile the aspect road transport competition is fairly irrelevant to this thread's contextual scenario, it was the very question about the future that sucked me into exploring these things.
I'm glad to see we're coming back to the point behind Juniatha's 'reboot' of this thread to focus better on the hypothetical situation she proposed. But for that trick to work, we have to be better at considering the complications, and implications, of changing the assumptions.
Road transport competition is very relevant to the contextual scenario, in that its technical development (and hence likely social 'provision of amenities' such as better roads of various kinds) runs parallel to the technology creating better steam power. It would be nice to 'wave it away' by, say, a modern-day version of the Red Flag law directed against Gurney et al. but you really can't do that. Which brings us back to practical truck motors -- makes better sense to use heavier oil than gasoline, and a wide variety of developments (including some very useful later ones involving steam) were under way. Even with the higher price of fuel synthesis, the 'future' of light steam belonged to oil firing of some flavor or other. Cummins was a useful figure in adapting yacht motors to road service, but even in his hypothetical absence it isn't likely that someone else would commercialize compression-ignition power, or start refining it, for road applications.
One of the fun things when writing alternate history is that you have to try to keep the 'world' consistent -- not only in details, but also in development. There's a science-fiction story, for example, in which isotopic uranium doesn't fast-fission with thermal neutrons. A good plot device... but barring a deus ex machina (which, to be honest, that story did include) you have to go back and change all the rest of physics, cosmology, etc. to reflect the changes in structure that non-fissioning 235 implies.
As I tried to indicate in a couple of places, the 'retention of steam' past the Fifties is more likely to involve political concerns than engineering options... on several levels. It would be nice to agree that if Churella is correct about EMD's leading the dieselization initiative, changing history so that -- for example -- Dilworth and Hamilton were squeezed out of EMC early, or EMC was acquired by Baldwin or GE instead of GM, or the company gave up on two-cycle after the detail-engineering failures of the 201, the subsequent course of effective dieselization would be retarded 'enough'. The problem with this approach is that it presumes that other builders were not working on diesel power, especially in the wake of the Thirties fascination with compression-ignition engines in general. One might look at the CP locomotives with Beardmore motors and just as easily extrapolate that line of development into early acceptance. Or that either Baldwin or Alco could have done their own engine design instead of adopting modified tugboat motors with limited horsepower upgrade potential. (Or conversely that high-horsepower expansion of slow-rpm designs might have been conducted more quickly, as was the case for FM in the early Fifties, and truth to tell in the locomotive-HP potential for the "FM" OP engine even today...
So we'd get 'dieselization', with diesel and not distillate engines, (i.e. straight compression ignition rather than assisted) in about the same timeframe that was historically observed, just not as effective in the long run, and perhaps with a very different outcome for the 'predominant' locomotive builders. "Perhaps" indirect injection or the Ricardo Comet chamber might 'not have happened' as they did, but it's just as easy to postulate that convergent development came more quickly. You could postulate the absence of EMD experience with engines during the War (e.g. 567s in LSTs) in favor of things like the Chrysler quads and quints (which almost have to be seen to be believed, like the Napier Sabre) -- but even there, the pace of dieselization would not have been *that* different... even in Britain, the land of dotty detail design in those matters. The absence of the War itself changes too many things in too random directions not to make the result a singularity: for one thing, recovery from the Depression might not have taken place effectively; for another, the massive industrial expansion from the Cold War would almost certainly have been absent (inconceivable for Stalin to get away assimilating Eastern Europe or Asian countries without the Axis threat, isn't it?) and there goes much of the impetus to expand the aircraft industry with respect to large, fast turbojet aircraft. (How much wartime development went into the Comet, or could have applied to something like the Brabazon, or assisted Boeing and other builders in building 'cost-effective' turbine airliners, is a whole 'mother set of alternative-history issues to be wrestled with or at least explained away)
It would appear that Alco honestly expected orders for new steam to continue for a long period after the War, and was surprised by how things turned out, rather than intentionally transitioning the company to focus on diesel traction. Baldwin was not exactly caught flat-footed; they had by far the most innovative (and, imho, meaningful) idea for steam-replacement power in 1941, which only failed because their small-motor detail design proved defective. While Trostel sheds useful light on what was actually wrong with BLW, and then BLH, it doesn't help eliminate the factors against steam in the railroad marketplace. "Steam" might have persisted, but it would be continuing motive-power improvement. Interestingly enough, there IS a demonstrated practical road to 'modern' power, one which is demonstrated by the Reading T1 and those Frisco 2-8-2s like the 1351 and 1355 -- driven by provisions in applicable law and tax procedures. (Incentives to rebuiild existing locomotives, even so extensively as to make them essentially new, rather than buy new... and 'pad the bill' with all sorts of fancy conveniences as you go)
A world in which independent motor transport didn't develop for technical reasons is less possible to contemplate. Too many possibilities, and too many smart people developing those possibilities. Hard to believe that 'society' would artificially retard development of an improved road network because of the pre-existence of organized transit interests or prevasive coverage by interurbans -- it could be argued that light-steam approaches (a la Doble or Besler in the USA) or on a somewhat greater scale the advanced-locomotive group (turbines) at GE in the Thirties, or developing at Westinghouse in the '40s, would have produced a better or more flexible approach to railroad steam motive power. But one might also note that White, Doble and the rest were not able to compete with logical development of IC engines for a host of reasons other than fuel availabity/cost or willingness to spend money to perfect IC-engine shortcomings in an established market.
The general issue of coal-burning 'prospective' power is interesting. Pulverized-coal firing of the usual sorts is even more of a 'non-starter' than exotic high-pressure boilers *as a practical day-to-day instantiation on typical railroads*. StUG in Australia worked well, technically -- but even there, in a carefully-monitored environment with everyone on their best behavior, you see a couple of little 'incidents'. Coal turbines wouldn't work then, and are only borderline-workable now. I happened to like the coal-burning Eldorado (look it up!) a great deal, and would have liked the idea even more with GTCC-style bottoming; however, applying the fuel system used (SRC and fine grinding) at locomotive scale might have been ... interesting. (Consider the Flixborough explosion, then compare the ignition and combustion characteristics of the material involved there to the Japanese SRC product...) . We could also look at what sank the Lusitania and the Britannic so fast... but I digress from the point.
All this is sort of 'academic' to the original topic, and I do apologize for that. We don't need historical consistency for a hypothetical discussion; it just creates additional verisimilitude .. which we really don't care about. The point she was making is how steam locomotive practice would have evolved in the absence of any game-changing influences, and if we remember to focus on that, and not the system in which it would be operating (or being supplanted), we should have more fun.
Overmod One of the fun things when writing alternate history is that you have to try to keep the 'world' consistent -- not only in details, but also in development. There's a science-fiction story, for example, in which isotopic uranium doesn't fast-fission with thermal neutrons. A good plot device... but barring a deus ex machina (which, to be honest, that story did include) you have to go back and change all the rest of physics, cosmology, etc. to reflect the changes in structure that non-fissioning 235 implies.
The underlined portion doesn't make sense - "fast-fission" usually refers to fissions induced by fission energy neutrons, average energy ~600 keV and peak energy ~15 MeV. Not having read the story, the author may have been thinking either that the threshold energy for fission of 235U was higher than zero (e.g. 238U having a fission threshold energy of 600 keV), or that the "nu" (number of fission neutrons released per neutron absorbed by a fissile nuclide) was too small to sustain a chain reaction.
The only way I see long distance motor transport not developing is if petroleum was so rare that it was only cost effective for use as a lubricant. This would also meant that IC-engines would not have been practical for railroads either and would have to run on either steam or electricity. Local motor transport could have been furnished by electric trucks.
Motor transport in the US got a couple of major boosts from WW1, one being the record of motor transport to the front lines and the other was the US Government urging people to ship by truck during the mess of the USRA years.
- Erik
erikem The underlined portion doesn't make sense - "fast-fission" usually refers to fissions induced by fission energy neutrons, average energy ~600 keV and peak energy ~15 MeV. Not having read the story, the author may have been thinking ...
The underlined portion doesn't make sense - "fast-fission" usually refers to fissions induced by fission energy neutrons, average energy ~600 keV and peak energy ~15 MeV. Not having read the story, the author may have been thinking ...
No,that's not the author's fault, it was mine, for not reading after multiple edits. I was getting at the idea that 'nu' for U235 with thermal-neutron-induced fission is sufficient to produce prompt criticality (which is the chain reaction in the original Hiroshima 'gun' device). IIRC it was that property of uranium that the author postulated as nonexistent. What I wound up actually saying was incomprehensible...
The only way I see long distance motor transport not developing is if petroleum was so rare that it was only cost effective for use as a lubricant. This would also meant that IC-engines would not have been practical for railroads either and would have to run on either steam or electricity. Local motor transport could have been furnished by electric trucks...
This was not too different from the situation toward the end of the 1920s in the United States, and the answer then (in fact paid for with the better part of $1B in $20 and-change-to-the-ounce-of-gold pre-FDR-scam dollars!) was hydrogenation of carbon (coal) followed by liquid-fuel synthesis. In a hyphenated word: Fischer-Tropsch. It's the obvious chemical approach to generate combustible hydrocarbons from coal. Now, the resulting fuel is not as cheap as US-Americans had become accustomed to... but supply and demand would have equalized just as they have in recent years around the higher factor price. Nowhere near a factor price high enough to retard acceptance of motor vehicles in all the areas they proved successful -- and in my opinion a spur to developing more fuel-efficient technologies early.
I would also expect to see an early adoption of piggyback, with or without tractors attached, in an age of higher motor fuel cost -- this would be run exactly as modern services are, not LCL between rail terminals but origin to destination, with the truck being inherently better suited to the vast majority of short-final and last-mile service, even at high marginal cost...
Motor transport in the US got a couple of major boosts from WW1, one being the record of motor transport to the front lines and the other was the US Government urging people to ship by truck during the mess of the USRA years
Not to mention the effect that WW1-era truck experience gave a young officer by the name of Eisenhower, who quickly developed a vision of fast capable highways (by 1919) that stuck with him for many years... and could be put into practice after 1953.
Alluding to another thread now running in General Discussions: a large part of trucking-industry development involved Government suppression of direct railroad ownership or control of trucking 'connections' -- that is what killed the early LCL container schemes, and forced railroads to divest trucking subsidiaries (I believe P-I-E and SP represents an example, but don't have my reference at hand). Hard to believe, but early on some railroads were using combination train and airplane service to speed transcontinental traffic -- if you think about it, it's logical for railroads to become involved in the 'big mainliner - hawk with silver wings' approach to transportation, particularly in the age before safe all-weather nighttime flying, where you would fly by day at high speed, then sleep through the night in a comfortable berth... STILL 'a consummation devoutly to be wished' if we had not developed high-speed (meaning faster than DC-6) long-distance aircraft, and the guidance and control (ATC) infrastructure to give it safe high performance...
Another interesting thing to postulate (I've mentioned it before):
What if Missouri hadn't passed heavy restrictions on bus weight and length in the '30s, killing off Pickwick and others "prematurely"? Railroads giving up unprofitable service and instead operating Pullman-quality accommodations with rubber-tired coaches over the public road network would have been a better alternative than stinky rail motors -- but not a disincentive to very fast lightweight motor trains, even those using 'superleggera' construction like the Railplane, Schienenzeppelin, or original Pendulum Car. ATSF, among others, was tinkering with some interesting large bus designs just before WWII. Imagine if railroads had been able to replace branch-line and other unprofitable trains with these -- only one man to operate, very low comparative tare weight, no Class 3 or better track requirements... the list is long, and we might remember that rail operation of these things (on the Evans principle) was fully possible by the late 1930s (the issue of tire life that killed the early Michelin cars here being solved by the possibility that better alignment and surfacing of track in the absence of pounding steam, and better construction in the sidewalls and shoulders to accommodate the greater tread flexing). You might need a modicum of active suspension, or faster proportional damping combined with longer suspension travel, to accommodate the residual bounce... but the guiding in the Evans principle, in which the flanged wheels don't have reboundable elastic tread, deals effectively with the bounce and sway issues *for light enough vehicles*...
G'day all,Resently in the chat about the LVM800 by Porta, the Leader and Turf-Burner work by Bulleid, Overmod noted;-
Overmod . . . Keep in mind that much of the turf-burning system was in fact tested using a reciprocating locomotive, and there's no particular reason a Porta-optimized locomotive couldn't be built to use peat. It just wouldn't be bidirectional, it wouldn't have high-speed-capable drive, it wouldn't have all adhesive weight on the driven wheels, and it wouldn't have had the sophisticated boiler...
. . . Keep in mind that much of the turf-burning system was in fact tested using a reciprocating locomotive, and there's no particular reason a Porta-optimized locomotive couldn't be built to use peat. It just wouldn't be bidirectional, it wouldn't have high-speed-capable drive, it wouldn't have all adhesive weight on the driven wheels, and it wouldn't have had the sophisticated boiler...
NOT having "all adhesive weight on the driven wheels" is a well recognized historical shortcoming for steam. Thus I've been musing as to possible solution that may have arrisen without going down the box over electric-motor power-bogie path. Given the earlier work by Sentinel does anyone think that steam-powered leading bogie and/or trailing would have been considered to augment large drivers set in the ridgid frame? But that still leaves one with messy flexible steam-pipes to feed the Doble or Bulleid steam-powered bogies. Alternative (my favourite) would to be follow a geared locomtive strategy, where the front axle of the big coupled drivering-wheels has a power-take-off via Quill-drive prop-shaft with a couple of universal joints (or other fancey constant velocity [CV] joints) along the way. Yes friction in such a drive-train is an obvious issue, the question is do the benifits of full-traction trump the energy cost?
PS: Just loved that coal-burning Eldorado dream-car.
W.Shawn Gray NOT having "all adhesive weight on the driven wheels" is a well recognized historical shortcoming for steam. Thus I've been musing as to possible solution that may have arrisen without going down the box over electric-motor power-bogie path. Given the earlier work by Sentinel does anyone think that steam-powered leading bogie and/or trailing would have been considered to augment large drivers set in the rigid frame?
Yes, but in the United States the cost and complexity of this system might be out of all proportion to the benefit gained. As a thought experiment, compare this to a Franklin high-speed (two-speed with clutch engage able at speed) booster of the usual kind, which has a simple horizontal two-cylinder motor with (usually) fixed cutoff for robust endurance. Carrying controls from the cab to (perhaps multiple) steam motors will be nontrivial, more complex yet would be synchronizing them by hand in realtime. Servo systems... let's just say I'd prefer not to go there if I have any option, including the zero hypothesis... ;-}
The trailing truck is directly under the ashpan, neither a location where complex steam machinery could be expected to thrive nor a location where easy access to the working parts of Sentinel-style motors could go. To eliminate sync problems, you MIGHT gear the trailing-truck wheels together, and pass a Cardan shaft forward or backward to the motor. But at that point you might as well go straight to a Lewty booster and be shut of all those problems.
Add to this that most of the Doble, Sentinel, et al. engines were by necessity high-pressure uniflow engines. I doubt that you could cost-effectively rig high-pressure flexlines to motors mounted on the trailing truck (think of the risk if one develops a leak almost anywhere in that area!) Of course, we're begging the question of where the 600 to 1200psi steam is going to come from in the first place...
Situation is worse on a typical lead truck, which is going to be something with an Adams-style center pivot and directly between the cylinders. There isn't any point in putting motors in there, particularly if it increases the polar moment of inertia of the truck! Remember that this truck isn't dynamically the same as a motored B truck on a locomotive; it is required to handle fairly severe shock and guiding loads *by necessity* -- the greater the lack of overbalance, the more and quicker the forces.
So again, you're looking at geared axles (much like the SPV2000 original truck that was coming up in another thread!) with a shaft to a frame-mounted motor. Workable, I suppose; close enough to the superheater header to eliminate long lines, no ash problem, no cylinder cock problem, hard steam lines so no joints to leak. But crappy service accessibility.
Alternative (my favourite) would to be follow a geared locomtive strategy, where the front axle of the big coupled drivering-wheels has a power-take-off via Quill-drive prop-shaft with a couple of universal joints (or other fancey constant velocity [CV] joints) along the way.
This is very, very close to one of the booster schemes Porta was promoting on his 2-10-0 proposal (the one with the cyclonic 'furnace' and the exotic Winterthur boiler (firetubes at nearly 900psi effective pressure, as I recall!) This had a firebox in the rear so no internal shafting. He proposed just what you do: a gear on one of the driver axles being driven by a (relatively small) multiple-expansion engine, probably with some kind of soft-engaging but positive locating clutch.
Yes friction in such a drive-train is an obvious issue...
No, it isn't obvious. In fact it should be no more than for a Franklin booster when disengaged at the bull gear, and not much more if disengaged further up in the reduction train. Very little if any backdriving concessions for the gearing unless the engine is full bidirectional and being boosted both ways; if so, the effective loss in backdriving won't be less than about 3% which could be handled with a bit of added cooling even at highest practical shp for two axles (that's the Bekenstein bound for this particular application; aren't those useful!) Loss in the gearing while driving is going to be reasonably low, particularly if the gears are properly hardened and Superfinished. Which leaves the lubricant viscosity in cold weather ... but sitting literally inches away is a lavish store of ... nicely hot water to keep the Krater or whatever at the right lubing temperature for any cold-climate use. I see nothing here that could possibly qualify as a meaningful additional resistance, particularly compared to the benefits.
I do think that a hydraulic-motored Lewty booster is a better idea, in principle at least; here you have simple hydraulic motors for the axle drives, and high-pressure hoses and fittings for the oil. All the fancy pressure-shifted gearbox stuff is available for you to use, say with air clutching driven off the brake reservoir pressure. Motors still on the frame, so minimal if any flex lining, in your configuration. Tom Blasingame had a trailing truck with Gates-belt drive between the two axles and an enclosed motor; again, you can use liquid cooling and modern shielding/insulation to protect a hydraulic motor against adjacent firebox/ashpan heat more readily (and almost certainly more cheaply) than an electric motor, its blower and ducting, etc. etc. etc. in the same location.
The Russell Brown 'asynchronous compound' can be set up for hydraulics, but I really do feel it's better as a means of electrical generation; the assist motors are on the tender (trucks derived directly from locomotive/road-slug practice, and able to take traction power from diesel slug mothers in MU behind the tender in the consist. I am agnostic when it comes to whether you want both systems on one locomotive. I also strongly believe in some form of change-speed gearing.
I think that the 4-8-6 Lima designed (see Diesel Victory, Classic Trains special issue 4, page 80) would have been built and tested. A double boilered locomotive is quite intreeging. As to matching a diesel's availability and operating costs, it could go either way. If only Lima had built a demonstrator like they did with the Berkshire. Maybe another look into Triplex locomotives, this this with an Archimedes screw, simple expansion cylinders, perhaps even a larger boiler and/or firebox.
Blue Alert! We're at Blue Alert! Aw crap, it's a nondescript GEVO... Cancel Blue Alert!
That's not a "double boiler", it's a Double Belpaire boiler. It has only one firebox, and only one chamber -- but the chamber is not roughly cylindrical, its corners are flared out roughly like four Belpaire crownsheets joined obtusely at their edges. This gave all-equal-length staybolting in the chamber, but allowed MUCH more enclosed gas area, and hence more tubes and flues -- free area is good. There is a 1/4 scale model of the boiler design at the Museum of Transportation in St. Louis -- I believe it is not presently on public display but it's safe... and there are some pictures on the Web that will show you exactly what's involved.
I will let JUNIATHA comment on exactly why the larger free-gas area is necessary for the larger firebox and grate area that the six-wheel trailer is needed to support. WHEN SHE COMES BACK. (Subtle hint)
Lima was trying to construct the demonstrator well into 1949 and perhaps 1950 -- if you have ever seen that "Long Compression" ad, you will know what was involved. Some of the critical sliding-cam Franklin drive design was patented as late as 1950. It wasn't that Lima didn't want to build a demonstrator, it was that they had nobody interested in the demonstration...
Triplex is not going to benefit from any of that Lima-larger-grate business because the drop is not there. The firebox needs to be entirely above the drivers, as on most simple articulateds, and while you can of course accommodate a humongous grate there, you don't have the vertical rise to get best efficiency out of the combustion by the time luminous radiation ceases essentially a couple of inches into the tubes. A Double Beplaire chamber might help, though, by providing larger radiant area for absorption plus the larger free-gas area to allow lower net vacuum draft speed, and hence pick up the fire less.
Simple articulated Triplex makes no sense whatsoever, in my opinion. Compound it and use Chapelon modulated IP injection to make all the cylinder thrusts equivalent, little cost in balancing, higher road speed, and better water rate. 'Tain't your granddaddy's compound' -- oh wait, yes it was, but it's still better than throwing the exhaust from rear simple cylinders away...
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