Did the last generations of steamers have any electricity on board for lighting of the cab (perhapse from a generator attached to wheels or something)?
If not, how did engineers see anything at night? (oil lamps?)
I’ve seen lots of times in movies when steam locomotives start, their wheels start slip, badly, but they are still moving.
Was this really the way steam locomotives started moving, with a serious wheel slip?
Which manufacturer of steam locomotives in 20th century was best known for making reliable and well-built locomotives?
In the last years of steam (40’s 50’s) , did the locomotives have anything that the early steamers didn’t have (any new technology) or were they essentially the same as they always have been?
The US steam locos had a turbine generator (driven by steam), usually mounted on top the boiler, that provided electric for the lighting you’re talking about, plus the head, marker, and tail lamps.
Slipping the wheels at start, be it steam or diesel, happens rarely, and if it happens to a particular engineer a lot, he’s usually fired. Some Hollywood director seems to like the blast of smoke out the stack and noise, looks good on film, but bad for the loco and tracks.
The major loco manufacturers all made a good product. To go into much more detail than that will start the steam fan equivalent of the redneck Ford/Chevy debates.
There were VAST differences in the technology, way too much to go through in just this forum board. There were power improvements, efficiency improvements, adhesion improvements, automatic appliances, to name just a few categories.
I was much easier to generate wheel slip with steam engines than it is with diesel-electrics. Diesels, especially, today have a plethora of electronic and computer systems dedicated to perventing wheel slip and thus loss of traction for the locomotive.
I steam days, the only device that prvented wheel slip was the the engineers use of the mechanical throttle and cut off settings to modulate the power of expanding steam into forward motion. Some engineers had ‘the touch’ and some didn’t and most were somewhere in between. Also in steam days, most engines and cars used friction bearings, rather than todays roller bearings, and thus there was more rolling friction within a train than there is today.
Here are a few of the most important developments and the dates they became prevalent on steam locomotives:
Smokebox (circa 1820)
Leading truck (1830’s)
Driving wheel counterbalancing (1860’s)
Hydrostatic lubricator (1870’s?)
Trailing truck (1880’s)
Air brakes (1890’s)
Knuckle couplers (1890’s)
Piston valves (Beginning before 1900, nearly universal by 1920 on new locomotives)
Superheating (1910’s)
Electric lighting (1910’s)
Mechanical lubicator (aka Force Feed lubricator)(1910’s)
Oil firing (1910’s)
Advanced counterbalancing (1920’s)
Roller bearings (1920’s/1930’s)
Cast frames (1920’s)
Front end throttles (1920’s)
Steam Glory (1960’s) [:D]
sorry to be a bit late on the uptake here… but most of the questions have been answered anyway! One thing – quite significant, but largely unnoticed – was in the metallurgy of the boiler steel (both shell and tubes) and the techniques used to put things together. Resulted in the ability to use much higher pressures in boilers, as well as increased safety. There were some problems (the New York Central’s otherwise magnificent Niagaras used a steel with a slight tendency to hydrogren embrittlement, which would have become a problem had they lasted, for instance) but in general… there were also subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) developments in boiler design and circulation, perhaps best exemplified in the ‘super power’ engines, but all three major makers used the same principles, which sharply improved efficiency.
G’day, Y’all,
It always irks me when I read that Watt “perfected” the steam engine. He didn’t “perfect” it any more than it is perfect today. I think they still have problems with welds and metal but maybe someday they won’t and new steam engines might be built for museums and such that will be more cost effective to run. But nothing is so good that it cannot be improved so I think someone will always be improving everything. I believe metalurgy is greatly improving as we write. The article in Trains about the track and its improvement seemed to me to say that American steel companies are probably trying to come up with a better steel than the Japanese now have. Maybe a Hank Rierdon (spelling?) will come up with a new metal like that in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Jock Ellis
Cumming, GA US of A
Georgia Association of Railroad Passengers
Jock, when they make a historic reference to “perfecting” something, it means that he perfected it to the point where it works. Before his steam engine, there were many prototypes that blew up or just didn’t do anything.
You will notice that one other thing developed: cab comfort. In the 1880’s some cabs would be rather comfortable, others would be absolutely miserable in weather over 60 degrees. By the 1940’s they had adjustable seats. One thing I learned: remember that the brake stand is cut in when you can us the doubleheading***as a foot rest [:)]! It’s true.
I did not put stars above. The forum program seems to have a problem with a valve consisting of a ball or cylinder with a hole or slot through it, which can be opened or closed by turning the handle keyed to the ball or cylinder 90 degrees. I will e-mail Bergy about this.
Just a couple of more innovations along the history time line:
Powered reverse replacing the old Johnson Bar
Tender boosters
Stokers
“All weather” cabs
Rotary poppet valves
Water tube boilers*
Steam Turbine Locomotives*
*The latter two were largely experimental and never saw widespread use.
I would add one more thing about steam in the '40’s and 50’s – a better understanding of water chemistry and its relation to the steaming ability of an engine. Water pretreatments and additive chemistries could make a good locomotive better.
The two largest steam locomotive manufacturers in the 20th Century were Baldwin in Eddystone PA (just south of Philadelphia) and ALCo (American Locomotive) in Schenectady NY. A third, rather builder was Lima. They were much smaller but had inovated with a combination of improvements commonly called “super power” that got them into the game in the 1920s through to the end of steam.
The PRR built most of it’s own locomotives in the 1st part of the 20th century, but fewer towards the end of steam.
Dear Mr. Hemphill,
I must respectfully disagree with your statement. While I agree that a steam locomotive would be in the backshop more days out of the year (average–usually a backshop visit once or twice a decade), they were not prone to unanticipated breakdown significantly more than modern diesels, and certainly less than early diesels.
Steamers depending on their maintenence were reliable machines. Like any machine you have to take care of them. I am sure some were in the shop more often then most but lets look at who the engineer was before the breakdown. Did he have a habit of not oiling around? Banging them along in the wrong cutoff? Or was it simply a bad fix job on the locomotive? some one missed something in the roundhouse?
Machines break, that simple. We have Dash 9’s that die a lot out on the road (great place for them to do that) But we have sd-40-2’s that run cirlces around them and others that are shop queens.So it all depends on the machine I guess. I run a 93 year old Heisler that is not a shop queen and runs great.
I agree with Mark some steamers were not reliable and I will admit they were maintence intensive. However they ran well enough to win two world wars a civil war and lets toss in the spanis american war. Not to mention the fact They were the first machine to break 100 mph, and break the Sabbath.
Mark, didn’t you know to NEVER EVER post reality to the Trainjunky. After all, at the tender age of 10 he knows more about steam locomotives and railroading than the rest of us. Truth is not in his vocabulary, only fantasy.
O mighty Trainjunky29, Master of Railraod Fantasy, we all bow to your vast knowledge.
Just to be clear, I am 16, and volunteer on the steam crew at the Orange Empire Railway Museum on the Ventura County Railway no. 2 (Baldwin 55415, 1922, 2-6-2).