Crude oil or low grade oil that does not need much refining now there more of it then coal
Difficult to impossible to even consider. There are no facilities remaining to service and maintain even oil-burning steam locomotives plus there isn't any firm around that could manufacture them either.
I do recall reading about a company in Switzerland who upgraded a type 52 Kriegslok 2-10-0 to run on a light oil fuel and other mods to increase efficiency. Still lower than a diesel but cheap to buy and run. Supposed to run with a one-man crew and not need any skilled maintenance. I wonder what happened with that.
54light15I wonder what happened with that.
Google locomotive '8055' and you'll see plenty...
The reason to run an otherwise inefficient steam locomotive on solid fuel is that no other transportation mode uses solid fuels. Using the efficiency improvements of Chapelon, Porta, Wardale, and others, it may be possible to boost the efficiency of a steam locomotive that it pays to burn a solid bio-fuel directly in the locomotive rather than converting it to oil or ethanol and using an internal combustion locomotive. The conversion processes itself is far from 100% efficiency.
That is the rationale behind the Sustainable Rail Coaltion
http://discover.umn.edu/news/environment/sustainable-rail-international-university-minnesota-announce-coalition-develop
who are the people behind the acquisition of a Sante Fe 4-6-4 from a museum collection. Their plan for a high-speed bio-fuel fired steam locomotive garnered a lot of attention and controversy on another thread. My read of who they are and what they plan to do is that they are something like the never-completed ACE-3000 project along with the tests that earlier group did on a C&O Northern.
The new group's plan is to 1) use the historical 4-6-4 as a test-bed for some of their ideas, and 2) use the results to build their "modern" high-speed steam passenger locomotive. The ACE-3000 project according to Wardale was going to do a similar thing -- put a gas producer firebed and an improved exhaust on the C&O loco as a first step before building the ACE-3000, but they never got beyond just running the C&O locomotive before they ran out of money. This group's goal is to get farther along with their test-bed than the ACE-3000 group and perhaps settle on a more doable new-and-improved-modern-steam-locomotive separate from their testbed, perhaps not as complicated as the ACE-3000 by staying closer to Stephensonian principles.
The new group is also conscious of the importance of the Sante Fe 4-6-4 as an irreplacable historical artifact, and they claim to have a plan to restore it to how it was when they are done with their experiments. There was some concern voiced on this forum that they were going to take this 4-6-4 itself and stick preheaters and condensers and every strange kind of gadget on it to turn it into some kind of ugliness like the D&H experimental high-pressure steam locomotives, but they are planning nothing of the kind.
With respect to oil firing, back in the day, the use of heavy oil in a steam locomotive was similar to the use of heavy oil in the UP gas turbine electric locomotives -- use of a cheap fuel in an otherwise inefficient but very powerful locomotive. We all know the story about how the plastics industry found a use for heavy oil and out went the UP turbines along with the economic case for an oil fired steamer.
With respect to "light oil" firing (that is, burning #2 Diesel in a steam locomotive), the reason for doing that is that you want to run a steam locomotive for fan trips or a tourist railroad where a steamer is a draw, but you want to use a readily available (although quite pricey) fuel with none of the drawbacks of coal combustion -- dust, smoke, ash, you name it. If the steam locomotive is the main attraction, you might have an economic case for an expensive fuel if it saves on those nuisance factors.
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Oil firing on a steam tourist railroad doesn't have to be expensive. Send a tanker truck around to Jiffy Lubes, gas stations, car dealerships, or anyone that produces waste oil and has to pay someone to take it away. The tourist railroad operator will take it free! There's your fuel source.
This is how the Morris County Central tourist 'road ran their two steam engines from the mid-sixties through 1980.
railtrail Crude oil or low grade oil that does not need much refining now there more of it then coal
Interesting thought experiment: Would the fuel consumption of a modern designed oil burning steam locomotive offset the lower cost of unrefined/less refined products like crude oil? In other words would fuel consumption be so high that the cheaper cost of the fuel vs. diesel would be negated...
"I Often Dream of Trains"-From the Album of the Same Name by Robyn Hitchcock
carnej1 Interesting thought experiment: Would the fuel consumption of a modern designed oil burning steam locomotive offset the lower cost of unrefined/less refined products like crude oil? In other words would fuel consumption be so high that the cheaper cost of the fuel vs. diesel would be negated...
At this point, for most of the world, the answer is still 'yes' -- it's effectively too high. In part this reflects the well-developed distribution architecture for some forms of refined oil products (reducing the effective delivered cost of. say, #2 diesel with its additive packages below that of a heavier oil like #5 at the point(s) of consumption) and in part it reflects the capability of modern refiners to make best 'cost-effective' use of feedstocks.
One thing that came out of the 52 8055 experiment was the recognition that fuel cost represents only about 5% of the overall expense of running modern 'first-generation-plus' or even 'second-generation' (using Porta's terms) for a 'plandampf' operation. There is far more involved than just the cost of the fuel per BTU or whatever. It follows that even when the fuel is 'free' -- the older model of WVO or waste lube oil firing -- or even slightly subsidized (as when the opportunity cost of disposing of waste oil is high enough that a source might be willing to pay a railroad a 'disposal fee'), the economics of modern steam power don't match those of diesel.
Remember that a locomotive is part of a transportation system, and has to be considered net of all costs. We've had that discussion before!'
Firelock76Oil firing on a steam tourist railroad doesn't have to be expensive. Send a tanker truck around to Jiffy Lubes, gas stations, car dealerships, or anyone that produces waste oil and has to pay someone to take it away. The tourist railroad operator will take it free! There's your fuel source.
You assume places still have to pay to haul away used oil. Nowadays they're more likely to sell it to a refiner that comes around to collect it on a regular basis. There have even been cases prosecuted where thieves have gone around to steal the oil, or even used cooking grease, from the collection tanks.
Even if its free, one has no control as just what is in 'Used Oil'.
If from several sources it could contain brake fluid, anitfreeze, transmission fluid, differentail oil, contaminated gasoline or gas dumped during auto fuel tank removal for repairs, Diesel fuel, battery acid, paint, varsol and anything else that could be dumped in a sump at a dealership or heavy equipment repair shop.
One engine was burning Used Oil' and the plan before light up was to drain lowest point in tender bunker, and, often, a gallon or so of green antifreeze poured out.
Another load of 'oil' made the 'flame' from the the Van Boden burner in the firebox burn blue and the engine left a blue plume of smoke behind it regardless of the firing valve setting, draft and work load.
http://cliffside110.forumotion.com/t59-sante-fe-oil-burner
The engine crew felt louzy at the end of the day.
Various oils burn at different temperatures, and overfiring is possible, causing firebox sheets to receive more heat than they can transmit thru to the water on the other side.
Thank You.
I thought ONE of the downfalls of "steam" was the purchase, storage, and treatment of water for steam power.?Maybe, as others have said, training (or retraining) a workforce for a relatively obsolete trade.Can all the turning wheels on a train be used to generate AC.....or would that be a net loss when the extra drag to do so would burn more power that it could create.?Solar panels on the train car tops.....small wind-mills on each car.? What IS the latest scuttlebutt on the future of locomotive power.?
The previous post sounds a lot like some of the "Gee Whiz" proposals that could be found in the pages of "Popular Science" and "Popular Mechanics". Aside from the mechanical complexities, the first proposal would indeed consume more energy than it created. The others would also be mechanical nightmares.
kenny dorhamCan all the turning wheels on a train be used to generate AC.....or would that be a net loss when the extra drag to do so would burn more power that it could create.?
There is little point in doing this with freight trains, as aside from having to provide 'generators', etc. suitable for use with three-piece trucks, and providing some means of driving them effectively from existing wheelsets, you would need some kind of control and power bus. There have been a couple of threads on here that have advocated electromagnetic track braking, and it is (remotely) possible that some kind of blended AC dynamic brake might be provided to aid in distributed braking and energy recovery. However, I also expect the capital cost of provision and maintenance to be impractically high -- to say nothing of the fun involved in keeping it maintained and working properly.
Many passenger trains, of course, used a variant of this approach, not for propulsion but for lighting, HVAC and so forth. If you google 'Spicer drive' you can see what the arrangement was -- I believe most of the arrangements used DC generators, compatible with battery charging without rectifiers. There is an instructive curve in Kiefer's motive-power test book of 1947 that shows the effect on train acceleration of these generators as they progressively 'kick in.'
[Added little detail: in the April 27, 1901 issue of Scientific American, Fritz Behr (of Lartigue and Behr) mentions how his electric drive motors are going to be used to supply additional braking current to electromagnetic track brakes (thereby providing dynamic braking to the wheels and also friction braking with a pressure of about 200 psi)...]
Solar panels on the train car tops.....small wind-mills on each car.? Smile...
You would need HSR indeed before a RAT would produce enough power to be useful... probably strictly in emergencies. Other methods of providing energy from 'atmospheric motion' are not going to have the energy density to be useful for much. (Note that an air turbine using brake air is often used to keep an EOT running and charged -- that doesn't really 'count'... ;-}) The cost and relative fragility of the solar panels has historically ruled out their use for anything related to locomotive power, and again there are usually better sources of available power than solar for most things (like keeping mobile devices charged, or providing emergency communications power when a locomotive is shut down).
It's hard to beat the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels, or the efficiency of burning them near stoich in a modern IC engine that develops appropriate power at appropriate RPM for best efficiency. GE's recent experience with designing a hybrid locomotive has produced some highly interesting technical material concerning battery design and structure for sinking dynamic-brake levels of voltage and current -- and perhaps sourcing reasonable current flow during acceleration when there may be heavy train run-in. It bears repeating here that as battery energy density continues to rise toward 'hydrocarbon' levels, so too does the battery's predilection to catch fire and release comparable levels of heat to hydrocarbon combustion...
What IS the latest scuttlebutt on the future of locomotive power.?
One thing to watch are efforts to burn 'cheap' natural gas in locomotives that share as much equipment and 'infrastructure' as possible, and which involve the least possible additional training and maintenance costs, and that do not produce colossal critical-mixture explosion or BLEVE hazards... <ducks!>
To LNER and NDG: Good points, both of you. It never entered my mind there was a possibility of selling waste oil. I HAVE heard of grease theives, however.
And NDG, certainly what you say is true about the possibilities of various "nasties" being in waste oil, but the Morris County Central never had that problem. They had other problems in the end, a long story...
How about this: If you're running a steam tourist 'road turn yourself into a waste oil recycling center. Have the stuff brought to you instead of going to get it?
ndbprrI can not come up with one technology that was replaced with another technology that was ever ressurected and used again. This too is DOA.
ndbprrI can not come up with one technology that was replaced with another technology that was ever ressurected and used again.
Acetaminophen.
Yes, there's nasties in waste oil. It' cleaned with a steam-heated centrifuge and all is well.
Yes, "steam engines that can burn Oil should come back." The short list: UP 3985, SP 4449, SSW 819, SLSF 1522, CBQ 5629 and ATSF 2926. This is hardly unreasonable.
Editor Emeritus, This Week at Amtrak
Hear hear! Well said Mr. Carleton.
One thing about the Sustainable Rail Coalition that raises my ***???!!! pennant is their plan to build, "A modern passenger locomotive."
Isn't that rather like reproducing the Ford tri-motor with gas turbine engines, constant-speed props and a glass cockpit? Or putting a Tiffany porch light on a badly deteriorated pre-civil-war house?
Show me a practical, inexpensive (over its entire operating life) FREIGHT locomotive, and I might be interested. Amtrak is not going to build an entirely new service infrastructure to support the supersteamer that SRC might build.
Note, too, that loading unrefined Tarakan crude as boiler fuel contributed to the loss of several Japanese ships - fuel fumes ignited, sometimes explosively, to change a damaging hit into a ship-killer. We already know that Bakken crude has similar problems. Thanks, but I'd rather not have a rolling bomb in front of my passenger cars.
Chuck
kenny dorham I thought ONE of the downfalls of "steam" was the purchase, storage, and treatment of water for steam power.?Maybe, as others have said, training (or retraining) a workforce for a relatively obsolete trade.Can all the turning wheels on a train be used to generate AC.....or would that be a net loss when the extra drag to do so would burn more power that it could create.?Solar panels on the train car tops.....small wind-mills on each car.? What IS the latest scuttlebutt on the future of locomotive power.?
Right about the water being one of steam's downfalls. In dry regions, water concerns alone would trump everything in a revival of external combustion. Unless some clever inventor comes up with a way to recapture the expelled steam and condense it back to a liquid, this issue alone is a deal-killer, at least for most of the western U.S.
Where the water is both scarce and unfit for a boiler (without treatment) the railroads used to spend huge amounts of money gathering, treating, and delivering suitable supplies to their outposts. Without a game-changer in this matter, it's going to be moot, whether our drought continues or not.
As for windmills , I was recently on a cruise which included a presentation on the technical details of our ship's propulsion, navigation system, etc. One of my fellow passengers just couldn't stop pressing the idea that some windmills on top of our huge (Panamax) ship would be really helpful. Ah, the golden years!
tomikawaTTShow me a practical, inexpensive (over its entire operating life) FREIGHT locomotive, and I might be interested
See Tom Blasingame.
tomikawaTTIsn't that rather like reproducing the Ford tri-motor with gas turbine engines, constant-speed props and a glass cockpit?
Actually, with respect to some of the potential designs for 'steam' - using passenger locomotives (for example, a conversion of the ALPS locomotive to use a bottoming cycle, or an updated version of the V1 turbine with Bowes drive and magnetorheological clutches) the analogy is a bit more like a B-70 or 2707 with modern engines, glass cockpit, AI fly-by-wire instead of Honeywell analog controls, etc.
And in my opinion there's also a 'place' for a modernized replica T1 ... in much the same sense as that proposal out of Europe for a 'replica' Titanic which would be completely modernized below the waterline. Is it a replacement for reliable passenger diesels in normal Amtrak service? no. But is it likely to be able to fill enough seats in enough prospective services or uses to make its physical shortcomings less significant? I think yes.
I don't have the 'right' analogy for a locomotive using a catalytic methanol/H2O2 cycle, but it's (in my opinion) considerably in advance of most anything with comparable performance using a diesel engine, ESPECIALLY something using a 20-cylinder C175... ;-}
Wizlish tomikawaTT Show me a practical, inexpensive (over its entire operating life) FREIGHT locomotive, and I might be interested See Tom Blasingame.
tomikawaTT Show me a practical, inexpensive (over its entire operating life) FREIGHT locomotive, and I might be interested
Love reading the T.W Blasingame stuff that's available online:
http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/news/Steam%20Page%20Release%206-13-2005.pdf
http://docs.stb.dot.gov/?sGet&Dl5YTH1WXw1zAAsKXBdSV0x6Sw1xfAMJXAEGCW4DF3MBe3ILXwgCCmYHGAYDfxVaAlxGcUsOS1FELBVJO1RES0ZcQQ0AfQcMS1dfVEpdTl1VcAEIVAYCCQoBamB0C20xNjgvMy8wME0zOQw%3D
But..AFAIK He has never actually constructed and tested any of hardware or systems he is promoting and I would hazard to guess that this is why the railroad industry does not take him seriously.
The Rand Cam based steam expander he proposes using has never been built, although there are much smaller R.C engines (mostly internal combustion) operating as test beds. I'm sure that a steam expansion version is technically feasible but good luck competing against companies who have actual hardware on the market already if you're not able to raise the capital to build a demonstrator.
I wonder if his solid fuel burning designs would meet Tier IV emissions standards, I suspect not...
As for the LNG/liquid fuel designs, he doesn't seem to make any argument as to what they offer over dual- fuel diesel technology (which he has also promoted, he was trying to interest potential manufacturers in using Dual Fuel O.P Fairbanks Morse diesel Engines in locomotives).
I do give the guy a lot of credit for thinking outside the box....
Its wasn't the fuel type that doomed the steam locomotive but so many other issues. First and foremost was they were labor intensive. They need an extensive back shop to keep them on the road. They generally ( not always) ran shorter distances than diesel thus fewer diesel replaced a fleet of steamers. Steam locos could not be mued thus driving up the labor cost. The early ft's simply out performed many of the steamers operating at the time. The efficiency of these units made it easy for railroad management of the day to begin the process of replacing them. I enjoy today's steam excursions, but the argument of thier operating efficiency was decided decades ago. Cheap oil won't change it.
ROBERT WILLISON Cheap oil won't change it.
Cheap oil won't change it.
Nor will expensive oil. The cost saving in operating diesels was not in the fuel costs, but the costs of everything else required to keep steam engines operating.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
The Back Shop of a Steam Locomotive Fleet was huge. Lehigh Valley steam shop in Sayre PA was bigger then the town itself and employed most of the people there.
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