I was just looking at the March '02 MR and the article about Mike Brock’s Sherman Hill layout had a picture of a turbine in front of a Challenger lugging a train.
My questions- 1)Would this mean the turbine was added as a helper? Was this a common practice?
2) The turbine was without a tender, I read they were add on’s, how long did it take before UP realized they were not fuel mizers and add on the fuel tenders? The layout is set in '54,and as it is both beautiful and well researched, I’m guessing Brock knows what he’s doing, it just caught my eye.
Phil, what was the turbine road # ?
not all turbines needed a tender ! the older types did without.
if it was 1954 it could be a standard turbine # 51 to # 60 wich ran from 1952 till 1964 these had a 7200 gallon tank forming an integral part of the structural base of the carbody, UP started adding on tenders around 1955 to increase the range.
It could also be a veranda turbine, #61 to # 75, came into service in 1954 retired around 1964. these had a same size internal bunker as the standard turbines.
Phil
From the location of the turbine it was probably a helper, but in front of a Challenger?
Shouldn’t be necessary, but it is possible. Both the Challenger and the Big Boys were designed to take on that division without helpers, although during WWII I’m sure that even these loco’s were assigned helpers at times due to the traffic density.
I would suspect that everyone was well aware of the proclivity of early turbines to suck fuel at an alarming rate. If they were truly add ons then they were probably designed after some operating data was collected so they could get the size right… or until enough tenders were pried loose from the retiring steam engines.
Jack W
Lupo and Jack- My fault, it’s not a Challenger but a Big Boy. The turbine is #69, a veranda. The caption mentions that the same scene is featured on the cover of MR Planning '02.
Phil I found out that the veranda turbines got their tenders in 1956, so it is prototypical correct that there was no tender behind it on a 1954 scene,
btw turbine #69 was built in July 1954 and retired April 1964.
maybe they double headed because they needed extra traction power (4500Hp),
I’ve seen double heading bigboys as well ( pulling a 7.5 mile train ) allthough they were as Jack stated designed to operate without helpers.
I wonder why a 6000 HP Big Boy would need a 4500 HP Turbine to help it up Sherman Hill? Hmmmm, the BBs were more than capable of tackeling those grades…hmmm…
HP has nothing to do with dragging heavy trains up grades…it is all tractive effort.
FYI Mike Brock hangs out on the “steamloco” group at Yahoo:
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/steamloco
Dear Philnrunt et. all,
I have plenty of photo evidence in my own library showing turbines helping Big Boys, Challengers helping Big Boys, and probably turbines helping Challengers on Sherman Hill. We have to remember that in the latter days of steam power, the emphasis changed from TE to HP for the simple reason that railroads needed to not only move the freight but move the freight at higher speeds. That is exactly the roll for which Big Boy and Challenger were designed. The road wanted to move more freight faster and for that, you need locomotives that can develop more POWER!! (HP) As time passed, even Big Boys and Challengers alone could not keep up with the demand. At least, that is what I have read in the books. This is why one of the most important design features of the Big Boy was the huge firebox and the huge evaporating surfaces. It is one thing to generate steam. It is entirely another to generate lots of steam in a hurry! That was Big Boy! Get hold of some of the books by James Ehernberger and William Katville. They tell the story.
As a physicist and engineer myself, I believe it. I have to disagree with Mr. Misso on that score. TE is a force. Power is energy per unit time. Force is that which produces an acceleration in a body or train, i.e. changes it from a state of rest to a state of motion. However, it is energy that is required to lift a mass up a hill. So BOTH are important. Tractive effort is required to get the train moving, but it is power that tells us how fast you can get the train to the top of the hill. So adding power to the consist makes perfect sense if you want to get more tons up the hill faster.
If we could ever find those frictionless wheels that we all heard about in physics class, it would be possible for a mere human to accelerate a 40,000 ton train on a perfectly level track. Howver, it is your horsepower rating that tells you how many eons it would take you to lift it al the way up Sherman Hill. Of course, in addition to frictionless t
Thanks guys, I always heard UP stood for Unlimited Power, and back in those days they exemplified that nickname perfectly. The only reason I even brought it up was I would have guessed the turbine would have been pulling it’s own train somewhere, not relegated to helper svc. Then again, if all you have is super power, they get assigned where and when you need 'em.
Thank you to all of you fine UP afficionados.
Coming in very late to this discussion, but just having acquired a Veranda model, I have done some research that indicates all the Verandas were made in 1954. I hope that’s helpful.
Lupo, I’m going to have to challenge your “7.5 mile” figure; Guiness’s Book of Railroad Records gives the record for train length to N&W and that was 500 plus cars going DOWN Tug Fork. There were, if I remember right, over ten diesel units on this train. Even double headed, the 4000 class would have had a hard time generating enough air to manipulate the brakes on a consist approaching a thousand cars even if the metallurgy of the couplers allowed such a thing.
Remember, the 4000 class was built with 68 inch drivers for horsepower; Onion Specific was a train-miles railroad and horsepower translates to speed. Onion Specific’s operating headache was not Sherman but the Wasatch and the 4000 class was designed to surmount that operating problem . The Onion Specific had no problem moving trains up Echo Canyon out of Ogden and the Salt Lake basin but not at the 50 miles per hour the Big Boys were designed to achieve with fifty to sixty car trains. An article I encountered somewhere sometime indicated that Big Boys were seldom double headed - I know, I have a calendar picture showing two Big Boys highballing westward out of Rock Springs, Wyo but the caption accompanying that photograph acknowledges the rarity of that situation. Norfolk and Western’s Y6B had substantially more tractive effort than the Big Boy but it had only 57 inch drivers and wasn’t likely to ever break any speed records.
When die