If i took off the water tube boiler what would have replaced or fixed to make this locomotive better. I am a railfan and not an engineer i would like hear from the engineering on would you fix this locomotive. Gary
Speaking of water-tube boilers, I have never seen a good diagram of the layout of a water-tube boiler on a locomotive. Most diagrams that I’ve seen show a stationary boiler (such as a power plant) layout.
Most stationary boilers are some variant of ‘once-through’ boilers (see Benson boilers for an example) which have a history of being tried on locomotives, with fairly uniformly dismal results. Among other issues, their construction does not permit the effective range of ‘turndown’ typically encountered in normal locomotive practice, with the result often being, somewhat counterintuitively, overheating failure of components in the gas path.
The ‘traditional’ great problem with watertubes in railroad service is that they are expensive to fabricate and maintain. A considerable amount of interest in this, much of it now lost, involved the implementation of good turbining systems that could negotiate complex tube bends. In the steam-automobile community there is a fair amount of claiming that tapered-monotube boilers could deal effectively with feedwater scaling – but when you actually look for numbers on this, there appears to be less and less actual evidence to back that up for the mileages a railroad application might be expected to run, and the water quality cost-effectively provided for locomotive use.
As an interesting aside, “locomotive boilers” in oilfield service were quite often operated at pressures up to 500psi with staybolted boilers, without much surviving evidence of either frequent or catastrophic failure. It is not difficult to figure out the differences between this service and typical locomotive practice that explain why even 300psi in large locomotive construction could be ‘pushing it’.
I studied the boiler on Baldwin 60000 fairly closely in my early teens, as I had occasion to be in Philadelphia fairly frequently and had an interest in watertube fireb
What would be the right size cylinders on this locomotive. Gary
Read through the references at the following page:
http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Reference/baldwin/baldwin.html
Note the long stroke for the comparatively small drivers; balancing is facilitated by the three-cylinder arrangement.
http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Reference/baldwin/fig13.gif
http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Reference/baldwin/fig13a.gif
Here is the graph of expansion ratios (for a conservative speed):
http://www.cwrr.com/Lounge/Reference/baldwin/fig42.gif
“The cylinders were designed to do equal work up to a speed of about 22mph, above which, as the tests verify, the inside engine is relieved with increasing speed”
Note the implications of Fry’s observation, at the end, that control of the locomotive is often optimized by throttling.