Your passion apparently obliterates any objectivity. The Ketterings, father and son, were instrumental in the development of diesels at EMC/EMD/GM. To play the "out of context card" is the typical refuge of someone who refuses to face facts. Gene Kettering knew the 210A and 567 far better than you. His comments are an indictment of the poor design of the former.
Additionally, your "foamer" tendencies and grudges against the restoration group apparently have limited your ability to understand and discuss others' comments rationally.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Schlimm,
Josef Mengele "foamer" tendencies? I miss understand? Possibly you could complete your former thought?
Doc
Dr D Schlimm, Josef Mengele "foamer" tendencies? I miss understand? Possibly you could complete your former thought? Doc
Mengele? Now that is a casebook example of a tangential cognitive process.
C'mon people, this is not the Passenger Trains thread. It is not like our international standing in relation to our major trading partners hinges on having a network of streamlined articulated trains powered by Winton Model 201A 2-stroke Diesel engines.
This place is getting to be like that "Sunday morning" TV program that ends with Bill Kristol grinning that he "scored a point" and Juan Williams sulking because no one listens to him? Can't we discuss the "engineering tradeoffs" in historical restoration without criticizing fellow Forum participants' character and integrity?
I mean, the stakes are not that high. Decide one way, and a generation of passenger-excursion customers will have the mistaken impression that the "stack talk" of a 567BC is anything like a 201A. Decide another way, some restoration project may end up having burned through its donation money with their guys sitting in a pool of lube oil all over the engine room floor.
The fate of the Free World doesn't hinge on the decision going either way. Running restored trains is essentially a form of recreation and entertainment with a little education thrown in. Folks should just chill.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
schlimm ..... 1. You apparently have no idea of whether or not there is any significant difference in the sound of a 201A vs 567. ......
1. You apparently have no idea of whether or not there is any significant difference in the sound of a 201A vs 567.
......
That certainly applies to me, and probably most of us. That is why it is important when preserving history that the correct prime mover be used if at all possible. Would you please enlighten us as to how the sound of a 201A compares with a 567.
And in the interests of reliability, why not make it a 710 instead. A Caterpillar engine would have the advantage of a better local pool for mechanical support.
Some interesting and relevant history from Al Sloan's memoirs:
http://www.curbsideclassic.com/trackside-classic/the-birth-of-the-gmemd-two-stroke-diesel-engine-very-well-ket-we-are-now-in-the-diesel-engine-business-excerpts-from-my-years-with-gm-by-alfred-sloan/
cx500 schlimm ..... 1. You apparently have no idea of whether or not there is any significant difference in the sound of a 201A vs 567. ...... That certainly applies to me, and probably most of us. That is why it is important when preserving history that the correct prime mover be used if at all possible. Would you please enlighten us as to how the sound of a 201A compares with a 567. And in the interests of reliability, why not make it a 710 instead. A Caterpillar engine would have the advantage of a better local pool for mechanical support.
The 567(used in SW-1s) followed closely after the 201A. Both are 2-stroke diesels designed by the same team, the 567 design only slightly after the 201A. The major differences are in the former's enhanced reliability. Finding a good recording of a 201A would be the key here, as recordings of a 567 on an SW-1 should be possible. You can hear the Pioneer Zephyr's 201A on the 1934 movie starring it, "Silver Streak." However, that seems to have been pulled from YouTube. However there is a brief clip at around the 13+ minute mark in this awful movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89RPmzzCHu0
schlimm The 567(used in SW-1s) followed closely after the 201A. Both are 2-stroke diesels designed by the same team, the 567 design only slightly after the 201A. The major differences are in the former's enhanced reliability. Finding a good recording of a 201A would be the key here, as recordings of a 567 on an SW-1 should be possible. You can hear the Pioneer Zephyr's 201A on the 1934 movie starring it, "Silver Streak." However, that seems to have been pulled from YouTube. However there is a brief clip at around the 13+ minute mark in this awful movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89RPmzzCHu0
I suspect the sounds were more from the sound editor's 'sound bin' than they were from actual Zephyr sounds.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Paul M. hit the nail on the head with his comment. Personally I got sick of those "talking head shows" a long time ago, it was like someone threw a switch in my head.
"No more" I said to myself. "Besides, if you folks are so smart why don't you get off your butts and run for office?"
But I digress.
With respect to the Sloan memoir, it is very informative and enlightening to learn that the development of the diesel locomotive was one of fighting for enough power-to-weight ratio -- even in the railroad application where you need locomotive weight for traction.
This explains why switch engines were among the early applications, where you needed traction at low speeds without the demand for high horsepower. Even though this was achieved with a fearsome expenditure of fuel, much of it going up the stack as sparks and cinders, Superpower steam was achieving 6000 "single-unit" HP a half century before this was achieved with diesels.
The question I have is that Winton/EMD (and also the Fairbanks-Morse OP) was doing 2-stroke for power-to-weight considerations whereas everyone else (ALCo, Baldwin, later GE) was doing 4-stroke?
You would think that for the same engine displacement and RPM that the 2-stroke would get double the HP of a 4-stroke, but it is not that simple. The 2-stroke has to do all of the scavenging -- out with the bad air, in with the good air -- at the bottom-dead-center dwell whereas the 4-stroke has those extra 2 strokes to expell the burnt charge and take in fresh air. So the 2-stroke is really a "two-and-a-half" stroke because you need that extra appliance, the Roots blower -- the extra "half" an engine.
It is amazing the amount of HP out of a small number of cubic inches they get out of 4-cycle car engines these days, so I guess you can put the extra 2 cycles to good effect.
The 4-stroke GE FDL engine seemed to get the same or more HP out of the same number of cylinders of slightly larger displacement than the 2-stroke EMD. So what was their "trick" -- was it just a good "breathing" engine, or did this depend on using a turbocharger? Were there any normally aspirated 4-stroke engines in railroad service, or were they all turbos?
Adding to the debate regarding actually running a Winton 201A vs a 567BC, I found this university master's degree thesis at
https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/14389
The discussion of the 201A and later 567 starts on p. 76.
(I think this on p. 86) gives a 201A aluminum piston as good for no more than 100,000 miles whereas a 567 cast iron piston could go maybe up to a million miles.
Maybe I am stretching the analogy, but the innovative aluminum engine the Chevy Vega was an automotive step backward because it was good for maybe 30,000 miles whereas late in the product offering, they offered the cast-iron "Iron Duke" engine from the earlier Chevy II. The Iron Duke was regarded as indestructable (although I had an Iron Duke in an 80's Chevy Celebrity that was replaced under a warranty extension at . . . 30,000 miles).
Has anyone (in their right mind) restored a Chevy Vega? I mean it was a significant part of automotive history of a giant US automaker beginning to face the import competition in small cars. And if you substituted an Iron Duke for the original aluminum engine, would you really be restoring it in a historical sense?
In other words, for all of the hate of the aluminum Vega engine, it was a pretty solid performer if you were OK with the oil consumption going sky high at 30,000 miles owing to the aluminum cylinder bores not holding up.
I suppose you could use all of your CNC machine and 3-D powder-metal printer wizardry to restore a Winton 201A to operation, and it would run for occasional use just fine. I suppose a person could restore a Vega, if you could find one that hasn't been reduced to constituent atoms, and run that for occasional use.
But I guess what people are saying is that eventually some part will break, or the engine will operate until it just plain wears out, and then what? The engine probably won't be reduced to a pool of molten metal and slag, but it will be simply "restored" to the non-operating condition in which you found it. Folks are saying that you may not be able to get it going again without Scotty from the 23d century Star Trek having access to a matter replicator to create new parts.
Thoughts on the Pioneer Zephyr discussion!
First LAMBASTING the successful 201A Winton seems odd! - which should be praised for the unique and powerful motor it was! - which by the way only produced 600 horsepower and propelled an all stainless steel diesel streamliner to speeds of 112 mph TRULY REMARKABLE! - and also FAMOUSLY ran full throttle full 13 hours from Denver to Chicago - and for a general maintaince life of 100,000 miles.
IN COMPARISON General Motors diesels in the 1950s were in the 1,500 horsepower range for the FT and 2000 horsepower for the E. Today's GM diesel powerplants are much larger and in the 3000 horsepower range. The WINTON you can see was a real powerplant to get the train speeds it did on a mere 600 horsepower - a good car or boat racing engine is equivalent to this today.
-----------------------------
Let me compare this the the famous Chevrolet Corvette 427 cu in, 454 cu in, 502 cu in automobile engine which put out 425 horsepower. This can be souped to 1,500 horsepower for use in race boats like my Donzi ZX offshore hull. The GM 502 car engine used by Mercruiser - which is highly successful as a powerplant - has a life expectancy of a little over 400 hours of operation. The Mercury Racing motor made today for performance boats is one that produces 700 to 1,500 horsepower has a life expectancy of about 150 hours of operation.
When GM produced the VEGA engine it was of the cheapest sort of construction - if you got 30,000 miles it was a real accomplishment. My current Chrysler 300 engine is all aluminum block with cast iron liner cylinders - forged aluminum pistons and forged steel rods and crankshaft - I have over 250,000 miles on it - and much time over 100 mph here in Michigan. It produces some where near 245 horsepower. Much of the improvement in modern technology is not in the performance parameters of the engine - such power was available in the past - but in the low cost of production and the long service life and ease of maintaince areas.
---------------------
The age of the aluminum piston started in the 1920's. Engineers were glad to get rid of the heavy iron and steel pistons. Iron cylinders with aluminum pistons like the Winton are a design common to all motor construction today and evolve around the inherent compatability of two disimilar metals. Such quality bearing surfaces are always common between two different metals to preclude siezure and surface destruction. Bronze against steel, aluminum against steel, copper babbitt against steel - always two compatable metals.
-------------------------
General Motors violated these engineering rules in thel aluminum VEGA engine.
The General Motors idea behind this ludicrious attempt of the VEGA engine was cost cutting - they thought to do away with the iron cylinder liners - and use instead a high silicone aluminum engine block - then to "acid etch" the surface of the cylinders to leave a SILICONE surface upon which the aluminum piston would ride. This may have worked in ideal conditions of the GM test laboratory but it was a total failure in the hands of the AMERICAN pubilc. The thow away CHEVROLET VEGA was indeed a throw away car - to go the 30,000 miles GM planned was about all the VEGA was good for. When the cylinder surface wore it "scored" with large scratches which in turn lead to compression loss and oil consumption. The General Motors Vega was A VERY POOR DESIGN for long term reliability.
The VEGA engine could be restored to full functioning by installing the iron cylinder liners the factory left out - it could also be restored by chrome plating the cylinder surface of the engine block and then grinding the cylinders round again. The car actually was not worth the effort - hence the "throw away car."
--------------------------------
I often wondered if a restored PIONEER ZEPHYR or FLYING YANKEE would ever travel the 100,000 miles necessary to wear out a rebuilt Winton 201A prime mover?
The GM Winton 201A designers used aluminum pistons in the reengineering of the GM 567 and 567BC the piston design was changed to cast iron. This 567 was redesigned into the 645 which still kept the iron pistons. Service life of the Winton 201 was 50,000 miles the Winton 201A was 100,000 miles and the 567 and 567BC was uped to 500,000 miles.
The engineering TRADE OFF here was elimination of the cracking of the aluminum 201 pistons for similar problems found with the inadaquate lubrication of the 567 iron pistons. Would a reproduction modern aluminum alloy pistons give the 201A the durabiliity the original engine never had? Would the 567BC perform even better with reproduction modern aluminum or alloy pistons?
MODERN designed diesel engines of the past 60 years have been variously using BOTH steel and modern alumimum alloys for pistons. The highest quality aluminum pistons have always been FORGED ALUMINUM - the trade off is that when the combustion temperatures reach 400 c the aluminum degrades and steel becomes the better alternate design. The steel vs alumimum piston controversy focus is on the better heat transfer of aluminum and its required bulk vs. the strength and lean design of the steel piston. Also in this decision are the light weight of alumimum vs the heavy weight of steel. Both types of pistons can be very similar in weight when the amount of aluminum needed for strength becomes close to the weight of the steel piston. Further design issues are that hot running steel pistons are not so compatable being similar metals - running against iron cylinder liners - hence do not have the long life wear advantage of the aluminum against iron. These engineering design decisions have always been intense. They do not belong from the days of Winton 201A they are part of engineering today.
The GM Winton 201 design with aluminum pistons produced 600 horsepower - its replacement the GM 567 redesign with iron pistons this was eventually upped to 645 horsepower in the iron piston 645 model - ALL THESE GENERAL MOTORS TWO STROKE DIESEL POWERPLANTS had multiple redesigns of EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE DIPSTICK!
The GM 2 stroke Winton 201 and its deriviative the 567 were remarkable diesel power plants - the GM VEGA was not so much!
Quoting Dr. D--"... and also ran full throttle full 13 hours from Denver to Chicago ...." --except for the short time that the engineer mistakenly stopped the engine when the air supply was depleted by exuberant blowing of the horn. There was trouble in restarting the engine because an electrical connection failed; this was remedied when one of the men on board held the ends of two cables together to make the connection, amid many sparks.
I cannot, at this moment (I am in a hospital), cite the source of the above exactly; I can only say that the account of the trip is in an issue of Trains from the mid-fifties.
Perhaps they should have put Zephyr, the Rocky Mountain canary, that was on board to work, braying for the crossings?
Johnny
I've seen several accounts of the trip, the first one I ran across was in Freeman Hubbard's book, Great Trains of All Times, published in the early 1960's. There were a couple of high pucker factor moments in that run, first was the night before trying to get a replacement bearing and requiring holding the speed to 50 MPH for a half hour or so. The second is what you described, the enggine stopped and a cable, severed by a door closing on it, needed to have the ends held together to get the engine restarted.
A couple of records from that run. First was traveling over 1,000 miles non-stop. Second was averaging 77MPH in the process.
Paul Milenkovic Even though this was achieved with a fearsome expenditure of fuel, much of it going up the stack as sparks and cinders, Superpower steam was achieving 6000 "single-unit" HP a half century before this was achieved with diesels.
That's silly; Baldwin had one before the Second World War. See patent 2317849 and some of Will Davis' online discussions -- there is a good article in the Trains Complete Collection on it, too. Note that this 6000 hp locomotive was at least a car shorter than an equivalent Super-Power locomotive ... net of its required tender ... and had enormously higher effective starting TE.
Sure, it wasn't economical to manufacture and sell at the time ... but it was certainly built (with half of its power modules, anyway) and could most probably have been modified to be fully practical (perhaps by allowing one 'module' to be switched to more than one traction motor if needed)...
Don't lump those two engines together - nearly the only thing they share is the nominal two-stroke cycle. The OP engine, for example, completely dispenses with valves, at the cost of a whole second crankshaft and set of pistons, and its scavenge geometry is very different (and more direct).
... the 2-stroke is really a "two-and-a-half" stroke because you need that extra appliance, the Roots blower -- the extra "half" an engine.
Note also that this is not 'supercharging' in the normal sense of the word ... or in the sense that Detroit 6-71 bus blowers would become infamous in the world of drag racing. The Roots blowers produce quick exhaust, much quicker than characteristic of a four-cycle exhaust stroke, using positive displacement at high volume. Later use of a 'motored' turbosupercharger to perform this job as well as give charge-air overpressure was not as effective at low governor positions.
As noted, the principal reason for going to two-cycle was the lower weight that was tolerable for a medium-speed engine. We aren't talking about light engines here, just 'lighter' than things like the De La Vergne tugboat engine Baldwin developed into the 606/608 family -- which flat out was turning just over 600 rpm and which produced enough electricity at idle to run the locomotive at appreciable speed. (For a good early light-engine example, look at the prime movers in the Krauss-Maffei Amerika-Loks, one of which is now in the very late stages of full restoration at CSRM)
The 4-stroke GE FDL engine seemed to get the same or more HP out of the same number of cylinders of slightly larger displacement than the 2-stroke EMD. So what was their "trick" -- was it just a good "breathing" engine, or did this depend on using a turbocharger?
ANY practical modern diesel engine will have a turbocharger, which produces meaningful addition to the charge oxygen for combustion in each power stroke using what is essentially waste energy in the exhaust. Accomplishing the same thing with an engine-driven supercharger would sap power better sent to the main generator (or even the shaft- or belt-driven auxiliaries).
Alco's approach to turbocharging was something of a joke, even right up to the end, as some combination of the degree of turbo lag and the speed with which the generator/alternator loaded produced massive amounts of effective overfueling during normal throttling up. GEs appear to get around this mainly by ridiculous slow loading -- as long as 30 seconds in some infamous models.
A historical GE trick, of course, was to spec the power at higher RPM than EMDs used ... as high as 1050 RPM, I believe, in some cases, with frequently predictable results on engine longevity. If I remember correctly the Cooper-Bessemer engine uses a master-rod arrangement (where only one connecting rod of a pair of cylinders bears directly on a crank journal) so the bottom end is a bit more tolerant than the EMD fork-and-blade arrangement.
Were there any normally aspirated 4-stroke engines in railroad service, or were they all turbos?
Turbos were expensive items, and as other threads have indicated were early on sensitive items as well. If I recall correctly, there were both turbo and non-turbo 539 Alco engines (there was a recent discussion on RyPN concerning some details), and of course Baldwin had 606NA and 608NA (the letters standing for 'normally aspirated') if desired. Part of the 'backstory' is the work done by GE with aircraft turbocharging during WWII which provided a strong tech base for railroad developments (see Will Davis again for some of the 'fun' involved with how the early turbochargers were lubricated and cooled, though...)
Basically any attempt to get higher specific HP out of a given diesel-engine displacement is going to involve pressure charging, and turbocharging is by far the best way to accomplish this at high output. The one drawback is that if you use a large turbo instead of several smaller ones (or a staged or sequential arrangement) you have a problem speeding the engine up enough to get the exhaust volume that generates enough boost to speed the engine up ... result, poor throttle response and lots of rolling-coal smoke. (And then we have the lube-oil follies, and the bad-injector overfueling into the exhaust, and all the other reasons we see flaming GEs on YouTube, but that's another set of stories, I think...)
Hoping you feeling OK johny.
ROBERT WILLISON Hoping you feeling OK johny.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.