Bad days for locomotives

When engines go BOOM!

This is not the best-quality video, in my opinion.

What a peculiar bunch of claims!

I don’t remember anyone actually involved with locomotives, especially with shop experience, calling the crankcase ā€˜the vault’. It gets weirder from there.

I’d be highly interested to hear Randy Stahl’s opinion of some of the assertions being made here.

Some of this may be related to adoption of cast thin-wall crankcases, but the idea that a spun bearing makes enough heat to destroy an engine catastrophically and kill the crew seems dubious at best. And the idea that crankcase overpressure causes runaway overspeed like failed turbo seals defies explanation. (I have seen some amusing results from piston seizure in engines with ā€˜power assemblies’, but that’s a story these people don’t seem to know how to tell…)

Now, it does have to be said that one of the major reasons big Caterpillar engines never got much use as locomotive powerplants was their propensity to crankcase explosions if the (somewhat ridiculously expensive) periodic maintenance was not carried out carefully – but the damage was unrepairable engines, not catastrophic and deadly consequences.

I know that no one at the tractor repair shop where I work at uses any such term!

Sometimes one turns the crankcase exhauster off when starting the loco, but, for heaven’s sake, turn it on right away afterwards. Never had one blow. Don’t want to.

We run all vintage ALCOs.

Beyond the bizarre language and unlikely disasters in this crap video, Balt seems to keep posting weird videos of this nature.

The AI photos, along with ones that had nothing to do with the subject matter, like steam locomotives with crownsheet failures, made the video very hard to watch. I don’t understand the fascination with ā€œEnglishā€ computer-generated voices.

Showing photos of a steam engine boiler explosions in a video of diesel engine explosions is rather odd.

The reality is that all internal combustion engines have a finite limit beyond which catastrophic explosions will happen - when the explosion happens, what actually happens will be its own story, good, bad or indifferent.

Trying to inject some life into this moribund collection of bits and bytes.

The more, the merrier… but be careful not to pick the whoppers.

To each his own, I suppose or let sleeping dogs lie.

However, it seems ironic that a 50+ year rail vet is reduced to posting AI garbage that belongs in a juvenile fantasyland.

As (legally speaking) a juvenile with some fantastic ideas, I don’t want AI twaddle, bunkum, and piffle either! I am, quite honestly, sick of a lot of the dreck and spilth that gets tossed around!

I was being kind to suggest fantasy. It’s just crap.

The only time I’ve heard of crankcase explosions being a concern for the crew was in Paul Schneider’s story (Never Say Die) in Trains Magazine in the February 1995 issue about the final months of Burlington Northern’s F unit era in regular freight service.

The fireman had to go back every hour to see if there was any lube oil coming out of the exhaust and there had been some close calls with airbox covers getting blown off and crankshaft failures during these inspections.

The crews had no such issues with hood units since there’s something between you and the engine if something goes haywire.

The video would not load for me. But from the sounds of the comments i probably would of stoped watching it shortly after it got started.

Crap, dren, whatever word you prefer. It’s rubbish either way. About the only thing that it does even vaguely decently is coding, and that it ain’t too great at (though changing between programming languages it does sort of acceptably).

It’s also interesting that it had a picture of a BNSF GEVO that was crushed by a runaway coal car, NOT a prime mover failure; the long hood was mostly intact and it was the cab and short hood that were obliterated

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Clickbait video where facts don’t matter.

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No, that was GENUINE piston damage there. Yes siree, bob. Only AI is smart enough to figure that out. :zany_face:

AI = artificial imbecility (as opposed to normal human imbecility, when people don’t want to be confused by the facts cause they just KNOW things…)

Thought satire was your raison d’etre.

I know right, totally!?!