A new book “Turbine Power” by Walter Simpson covers steam and gas turbine locomotives and trains, how they functioned, and the technology used from the 1939-2003 era, will be available on Kalmbach Hobbystore next year. Before getting the book, let’s see what “new” photos of American steam turbine engines has been uploaded to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania Railroad’s internet archive:
C&O M-1 Steam Turbine Locomotive ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesapeake_and_Ohio_class_M-1 ):
Yikes! Looks like “under the hood” that thing was a plumber’s and electrician’s nightmare!
Any wonder why it failed in its mission?
Didn’t even make 2 years on the planet before it was converted to razor blades. Wonder how much time they actually spent in service hauling something.
There are some things WORSE than Dieselization?
Thank You.
… and don’t forget the poor Goldfish. ( or whatever fish it was in those tanks)
Now, hold on there. Just because fish tanks would turn into fishsicles in Canada doesn’t mean the thing wasn’t thought through by the Chessie designers.
As I recall (the story appeared in Trains many years ago so should be checkable from that end) the tanks were to be stocked with South American fish chosen for their hardiness to precisely the kind of slosh and temperature excursion they’d be faced with in passenger-car tanks. As it turned out, they weren’t quite hardy enough… but don’t blame the designers for that.
Reminds me of what they say about the F-117 and the army of “martians” needed to remove, repair and replace the radar absorbing covering every time a repair is needed.
No wonder to me, man. Looking at all that (and I have to say it) over-engineering makes me wonder if the designers were playing some kind of expensive practical joke on the C&O.
Now if any professional engineers out there want to correct me on this go ahead, I won’t be offended at all, but just WHAT is so difficult about designing a turbo-electric steam locomotive? To my admittedly amateur mind it should go like this…
You boil water to make high-pressure steam. You run said steam through a turbine connected to a generator turning at a constant rate to produce the maximum amount of electricity. You run that electricity through a rheostat (think a BIG electric train transformer) to vary the amount of juice to the traction motors for speed control. Direction should be handled by the flip of a switch.
It may be a stupid comparison, but this is how traditional O gauge electric trains work. 120 volts AC to the transformer, variable 0 to 22 (more or less) volts AC to the locomotive. The voltage from the outlet to the transformer never changes nor does it need to. What’s hard about that?
Am I wrong? Am I crazy? Or just plain ignorant? Or should I just saddle up and go riding with this caballero?
My brother’s ex-Air Force. He says the F-117 proves the truth of the old pilot’s saying…
“Anything’ll fly if you put a big enough engine on it!”
Yeah! I taped a Nova series years ago where they went inside the Skunk Works (that’s at area 51) during the R&D for the JSF and one test pilot said during the 117 evaluation flights he’d lost a rear stabilizer and didn’t even know it because the computer was controlling the engine! Fly by wire indeed! [:S]
Becky, thank God there’s on on-board computer on the 117. You can’t fly the plane without it, but in this case it certainly saved the pilots life.
Can’t fly a B-2 without an on-board computer either.
My brother let me in on a dirty little secret about the F-117. The prototype was so secret the test piloting was done by Air Force generals, something that’s usually unheard of. One brigadier general was killed during the testing phase.
This was long-declassified stuff at the time he told me, or he’d have kept quiet about it.
Sayeth Overmod-- " As I recall (the story appeared in Trains many years ago so should be checkable from that end) the tanks were to be stocked with South American fish chosen for their hardiness to precisely the kind of slosh and temperature excursion they’d be faced with in passenger-car tanks. As it turned out, they weren’t quite hardy enough… but don’t blame the designers for that."
What!? Outrageous! Of course it’s the designers fault, what, …you think it’s the fishes fault?
Designers 100%.
As you have pointed out in the past, Baldwin just sort of ‘disappeared’ after they got their loot and the things were delivered. Too bad, I would loved to have seen and heard one actually with a train operating under load. Must have been quite a shock and disappointment to the C&O.
Also must have been entirely hopeless as they were scrapped so quickly.
Something tells me there is a bit more to the story… personal , bet there were some nasty phone calls.
There is very little actually ‘strange’ about this, especially when compared with the PRR V1 design that was under consideration about the same time. As I think I’ve noted, this was a hurry-up Baldwin project from the immediate postwar years intended to ‘steal a march’ on the (presumed) market for noncondensing turbines that PRR thought it had a commanding lead (and some pending patent protection) on. Apparently much of the development was conducted in a ‘hush-hush’ atmosphere and this probably contributed to some of the ‘unanticipated consequences’ issues with the locomotives as built.
The design is remarkably conservative: the pressure used is ‘only’ 310psi which is ridiculously low for a 6000hp turbine. Cumulative losses in the transmission, and back EMF concerns at speed, eat up a surprising amount of the nominal horsepower, just as they have in every DC turboelectric since the French built the first one in the 1890s.
The first problem Wayne’s merry control system runs into is the biggest: Imagine that in your O scale analogy, the 120V supply from the wall is powered from a steam turbine, like a version of a Pyle headlight generator. Whether or not the AC transformer is pulling coupled power, the turbine is spinning the generator core at a speed corresponding to the 60Hz of the wall power … and passing the corresponding mass flow of steam, and its enthalpy, to exhaust. That’s a lot of expensively treated, expensively heated water mass to throw out the stack.
In any case, in this pre-60s era, the large generators are just that: DC generators, and the voltage they make is proportional to speed. The control system used for the turbine governor is probably a vers
You have forgotten all the coal dust and cinders that would ge
You don’t need a big engine on a Hopeless Diamond, just a whole bunch of low-latency actuators driven by a fairly fast set of processors. The aerodynamic control surfaces are not set to a constant position; they ‘excurse’ and jitter to keep the airframe at a commanded attitude.
One of the theoretical advantages of this is that a battle-damaged airframe may remain not just controllable but flyable (assuming no significant part of the circuitry has been damaged, which is usually a pretty big assumption even with multiple redundancy). There are a couple of F117 crash videos that show aspects of this.
To comment a bit further on the plumber’s nightmare: sometimes if you build something purposely complex to be redundant and help ‘repair itself’ the result may be more effective, and less complicated to actually run, than a control system that involves a ‘plurality’ of simple controls that have to be carefully monitored and delicately kept adjusted – as in conventional oil-fired steam locomotives. Note that many of the Bailey controls on the N&W Big Jawn were comparable to the controls the company was building for nuclear submarines – in fact, there was some speculation about a Claytor connection, which was only dispelled in my case by interviewing an actual surviving Claytor brother (at the VMT ceremony for 1218’s return).
At one point there was some design of the control suite for high-performance aircraft to make the stick input an indication by the pilot of intended vector, not demanded response. In some conditions of high lift or disturbed air, engines might be unstarted by following a high-g stick movement, and the control computers would therefore command motions to bring the aircraft to the command
Video explaining some things of the F117 development
And then there’s this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djdG0TNvPio
What I found most interesting was that the F117 was designed in the way it was, was because there wasn’t sufficient computer power available to calculate the Radar reflectance of rounded objects - they could only calculate the reflectance off flat surfaces. Remember - the F117 was designed and developed in the 1970’s.
Great write-ups Mod-Man, thanks!
A thing that should never have been built, is what it amounts to. I keep remembering the wise words of Mischa Kalashnikov…
“All that is complex is not useful. All that is useful is simple!”
That concept sure worked in his case.