I love the way you can say that with ‘only’ in there, like the Milwaukee with their little understated ‘reduce to 90’ signs and ‘trains pass 100mph’ indications at crossings. In the East, even on supposedly high-speed railroads, that would still be dramatically fast, and C&NW had far better automatic train control than, say, PRR or NYC to make use of it.
And yes, an E-4 would likely run all day at 90mph and ask for more.
Like the Burlington and to a lesser extent, the Milwaukee Road, C&NW long distance passenger services dieselized early, so the E-4s mostly hauled express and secondary trains on the Overland Route.
.
Here is a sort of fun one - the Sunbeam.
It ran between Dallas and Houston on an expedited schedule.
(Photographer unknown)
Not exactly the West Coast, but still the Southern Pacific. (Actually at the time wholly-owned subsidiary Texas & New Orleans.)
Here is one of the San Joaquin Daylight 4-6-2 Pacifics after it had been painted black and had the lower skirting removed, but retained the skyline casing.
https://www.railarchive.net/randomsteam/sp2486.htm
Here is a brass model of one of the San Joaquin Daylight 4-6-2 locomotives as they were turned out of the shops for the startup of the service:
Southern Texas is on the west coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
For Peter Clark and others: I have come to the conclusion that something about the ‘state of the art’ practiced at Alco changed in the period between late 1936-early 1937, when the E-4s were designed and built, and late 1938 for the F-7s.
I have a Swiss published book (I’m away from home right now and can’t check the title or author) on US steam locomotives, in German. It is the second of two volumes covering 1920 to the end. It consists largely of builder’s photos of most types with descriptive captions, but the introduction has a technical description of design changes with a number of locomotive drawings of the type reproduced in the various Locomotive Cyclopedias.
For some reason, drawings of the E-4 and F-7 are reproduced (sadly not on the same page) to approximately the same scale. I’ve spent some time comparing the two and the most significant difference, if I recall correctly, was the connecting rods were significantly shorter on the E-4 compared to the F-7. THis would suggest that the E-4 would have greater vertical forces from the reciprocating masses than the F-7, assuming all other things were equal (but of course, they weren’t - if I recall
I think what you mean is the vertical component of piston thrust here, as the longer rod would have the longer absolute inertial force (assuming comparable alloy composition and section, which I think is plausible for these designs).
I am not sure how these two engines could have had radically different main lengths. Please enlighten me.
According to steamlocomotive.com, there is a possibly-significant difference in the cylinder and piston dimensions: the E-4 has a nominally shorter stroke (at 29", a half inch less than an ATSF 3460) while the F-7 has 30" – but the F-7 piston is only 23.5" diameter while the E-4 is 25".
Incidentally the weight on drivers for both classes is given at 216,000 (and this is 2-1/2 tons more than for a 3460, which is a larger locomotive) and the F-7 is actually about 3,000lb heavier.
The grate area of the F-7 is 96.5’ while the E-4 is “only” 90.7. (Compare the T1, with much more nominal horsepower, and only a pathetic 92’!)
I don’t know, I think that Espee Pacific looks lousy with the side skirting removed. The unremoved skyline casing makes it look hunchbacked.
I’d be surprised if Espee personnel didn’t name it “Quasimodo.”
The Southern Pacific loved their skyline casings. Here are some of their 4-8-2 Mountains:
Note 4353 with Daylight paint on the cab and the tender.
I am not sure how these two engines could have had radically different main lengths. Please enlighten me.
When I get home (in the next couple of days) I’ll check the drawings again. I may have been thinking of the combination of a slightly shorter rod and the larger diameter piston… But it did strike me that the two locomotives (shrouding apart) didn’t look as similar as the dates and builder would suggest.
Peter
These are the only pictures I could find of an SP 4-6-2 with the Daylight treatment with the full skirting and paint still intact. My understanding from reading from my various SP Daylight trains and San Joaquin Division books is that the consists grew quickly and so Mountains quickly replaced the Pacifics, and eventually GS 4-8-4s replaced the Mountains.
The first one is a head-on shot with an 11 car consist:
https://www.railpictures.net/photo/284875/
Then this one in Berkeley:
https://pacificcoastrailroads.tumblr.com/image/122149735421
Firelock76, you are correct that this skyline casing actually sloped downward a bit from the middle of the boiler. On the Mountains and Northerns, the skyline casing sloped up from the cap towards the middle of the boiler and then somewhat flattened out to the very front of the locomotive.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/dc/00/e5/dc00e5f0f000cff2c0bb0681f6bad3d7.jpg
I had been proceeding on the assumption that these two designs were essentially similar, which I think was a serious mistake, and furthermore that they were both from 1938, which may be considerably more serious.
The E-4s are from before the era of the ACL R-1 debacle, which may indicate that their balancing reflected design assumptions including the AAR principles of 1934. This was precisely the reason I started looking at the relative dates.
Apparently the things needed to ‘fix’ the ACL R-1s were relatively slight: lower-mass crossheads and presumably pistons; tapered main rods; different centers in the main drivers (perhaps with angle-balancing pockets?). Despite having 12" valves and a relatively tiny superheater (1425’ type A, which compares fairly dramatically with 1645’ on the F-7 and a whopping 1884’ on the E-4, both six-coupled locomotives) there are reliable accounts of the R-1s exceeding 100mph once their drivers no longer bounced destructively…
Now, we know that the C&NW was very attentive to improve the H class, rebuilding extensively both in the early 1940s and then again in 1947, producing certainly one of the best-ever 4-8-4s in the process. This clearly indicates to me that the ‘tools and the talent’ to fix any substantial speed issues with E-4s were there, along with the organizational willingness to spend the money where the use justified it.
It is my opinion, which may or not be backed up by documentation, that the E-4s were considered orphaned power not long after their construction, and were used more to ‘run off some of the investment’ while waiting for diesel replacement rather than rebuilt as appropriate to achieve the performance inherent in their design. While that is a shame from a pure steam-e
As to the E-4, that’s simply an amplified version of what I stated earlier. It was not a wise investment. The Hs were used primarily in fast freight on the Overland Route.
I have to ask, did those skyline casings have anything to do with smoke lifting? They seem like otherwise useless applications of sheet metal otherwise.
Flintlock76, in Robert J. Church’s book “Those Daylight 4-8-4’s: The Story of Southern Pacific GS Class Locomotives”, it references that the skyline casing helped with smoke lifting. There is a “scoop” structure at the stack that lifts air as the locomotive moves, and then apparently the air flow created by the skyline casing keeps the smoke above the cab.
Class GS-1 was not built with skyline casing. That class was pretty much an extended SP Mountain with a larger firebox. The GS-1 locomotives were largely assigned to Texas during their service lives.
Skyline casing started with the first Daylight Northerns class GS-2. Lima had a hand in the development of these locomotives. They had the same driver diameter of the GS-1 but improved performance to handle the expedited schedule.
GS-3 upped the driver diameter to 80 inches and increased the boiler pressure.
GS-4 added the vestibule cab and dual headlight setup that we all know so well on 4449.
The smokelifting setup must have been effective because they retrofitted it to Mountains and the handful of Daylight Pacifics, and evening had it on the AC-9 2-8-8-4 locomotives.
There was an extensive discussion of ‘smoke lifting’ a few months ago, kicked off by discussion of the 1931 Canadian (NRC) research into using aerodynamic flow to ‘lift smoke’ (this would eventually produce the smoke-deflector designs used in Germany and on a variety of North American roads founded on very different principles). That thread included a link both to the original NRC studies and to some of the subsequent research and discussion involving them (for example, Garth Wilson’s 2008 essay for the Oxford Design History Society). Someone with better access than I may be able to find that thread; my Googling with the usual terms is not pulling it up.
It’s a fundamentally-attractive idea that some of the frontal air resistance of the locomotive could be used to ‘lift’ smoke not being ejected by the induced draft … this coming as the combination of better valve-gear design and front ends with low back pressure produced less and less violent ejection of combustion gas.
The problem is that the usual problem with ‘smoke’ is that it rolls back and along the boiler and then either into the cab (as on the PRR T1s) or down one side or the other obscuring the view from the cab. And this is not anything that a skyline casing will have more than momentary influence over. The same is true for the various arrangements to induce air lifting with scoops or air jets (
Thank you gentleman, good information!
I had to ask because, to me at least, the esthetic look of the locomotive is ruined by the removal of the side-skirting, the skirting does a good job of balancing the look of the skyline casing, if good looks is all they were after. Skyline casing alone makes the look of the locomotive weird, if not downright ugly, to me at least. Others may differ and that’s OK.
Anyway, I was curious why they’d remove one and not the other as well.
Relatively less involved with access to things under the skyline casing than with skirts.
Both in Britain and North America there was some flirtation with ‘streamstyling’ the stack (see the as-built B&M Pacifics Lima built in 1934 as a good example) but you don’t see it catch on either for ‘function’ or aesthetics.
Some pictures and captions in Thoroughbreds about how the casing in the Dreyfuss designs could start losing panels. There are design patents for the styles applied to UP 2906 and 7002; these look much better in the drawings and overhead views than they did from the ground. I suspect that some careful perusal of ‘later’ online images or the Quadrant Press book on streamlined steam will show how different railroads addressed the concerns with skyline casings.
Let me repeat a point that I think I made in the “NRC” thread: one of the things involved in Green’s research was the specific problem of smoke when approaching station stops, something that might have been of particular relevance to some operations in Canada (e.g. that recently described for Edmonton-Calgary where there were relatively many stops separated by up-to-90mph running.) Here you get the whammy of presumably high firing level going in a short time to very little steam mass flow through the front end, almost a prescription for black smoke right at the time you don’t want it, drifting worse and worse as the engine slows to enter stations. A mechanical device using slipstream to address some of this issue at ‘zero operating cost’ compared to the costs of adequate ‘drifting steam’ would logically be attractive…
