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.?
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.
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.
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!'
railtrail Crude oil or low grade oil that does not need much refining now there more of it then coal
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
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.
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?
54light15I wonder what happened with that.
Google locomotive '8055' and you'll see plenty...
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.
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.
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