How often did tenders need to be replenished? Did railroads have math formulas that were used based on tonnage, speed, and geography?
I can’t speak to specific formuas for coinsumables consumption(?) of the mentioned, but having lived in Parsoins Ks. area: [it was a major division point on the MKT RR.] There were still reminders around the area of the need to replinish the locomotive consumables. Lakes,ponds,creeks were water sources, Coal, as it was burned, generally, from local resources, was often low-grade, dirtier varieties:Culm, etc.
Coal was generally mined from ‘pockets’, not too deep underground, or in some cases was ‘strip-mined’ by surface equipment. Mostly, it was sourced from known vein areas; Weir-Pittsburg coal field,in SE Kansas, being one. There were other scattered areas of coal pockets found in some cases with other mineral deposits,as well. The original lines of the ATSF used on-line resourced coal. [nee: KO&G RR from KC.Ks. via Humboldt,Ks. to NE Okla. being one. (Thayer,ks, area, sources, in pockets). The found coal was often low grade, and was ‘convienint’ to be used fior steam. (ie:) ArKansas River Navigation, by flat bottomed, steam boats, rer-fueling, was often done by puilling the boat up to an exposed coal seam on the river bank,where the black gang on board, would shovel coal onto the deck and then to the boilers,
Both the Katy and Santa Fe used local coal sourced by branch lines, into the Columbus, Ks., area for locomotive coal. In lthe early 19 th \Century, coal mining was an enterprise for emlgrant miners from Europe { German, Austrian, Italian, or so, ?} Pittsburg,Ks. still celebrates "Little Balkan Days’ each year.
makes sense that the amount of fuel and water depend on tonnage. of course multiple engines can carry more fuel and water. tonnage and # of engines would be selected to reach all water stops. wiki Water Stop says trains could run 100–150 miles (160–240 km) without a refill.
Most of the stories that I have HEARD - In most cases a locomotive would be filled with coal and water at its origin terminal, it was expected to make its destination terminal on that load of coal, it was expected to take on water one or more times between terminals. YMMV
The B&O Cincinnatian, when implemented ran from Mt. Royal Station in Baltimore to Cincinnati Union Terminal. Power would be fully serviced for its departure from Baltimore, it would take water at Martinsburg, WV and proceed over the Patterson Creek Cut Off to Grafton, WV where the power would be changed with fully serviced power, the train would then take water at Athens, OH and then complete the train’s 12 hour 30 minute run. Eastbound had the same watering point and engine changes as Westbound.
B&O Employee Timetables showed on the Division Map page what kinds of facilities were available at the appropriate division locations, coal, water, turning facilities etc. Crews working on the line of road would decide when it was necessary to take water and/or fuel.
Supposedly, NY Central built the Wayneport coaling station intending that it would be the single coal stop for some NY-Chicago passenger trains (presumably trains that didn’t go to Cleveland Union Terminal). They could hope to do that because their tenders had room for more coal, since water capacity was low, due to track pans.
So: assuming no track pans, how far did trains go unrefuelled? We don’t have that good of an idea. Probably oil burners had a better chance? Could be SP’s original 12-car Daylight was intended to run the 470 miles LA to SF on one tank of oil.
Steam passenger trains were known to run 200 miles nonstop, without track pans, but don’t think any could do much better than that.
even if a train needed to refuel, wouldn’t the loco simply be swapped with one that is fully loaded with fuel and water?
The longest steam nonstop run of which I’m aware was 205 miles between Nashville and Birmingham on L&N by the “South Wind”.
Coaling facilities, and water, were designed for rapid movement of the commodity in question - hence water towers and coal towers. I’m pretty sure that a refueling stop or a water stop could be measured in minutes, and not very many, at that.
In the days when a locomotive stayed with a particular engineer, what you suggest would be true. But in the later years, locomotives stayed pretty much with their trains. Of course, they never left “home” rails, either, unlike the run-through power we see today.
I was just reading about the NYC Hudsons - those on the 20th Century ran from Harmon to Chicago, changing crews enroute. Especially in the days of the streamlined locos, they wanted them on the name trains. There were only a few so decorated.
The Central’s track pans have been mentioned (I believe the Pennsy had them, too). Locomotives running those routes had tenders that held a lot of coal - and not a lot of water. Since they could pick up water at the pans pretty much at speed, they didn’t need even the few minutes that would be required to fill at a water stop.
If you look at old stations, you’ll often find that there were water columns at the point where the locomotive would stop. Thus the tender could be replenished during a station stop, minimizing any delay that might be introduced.
Running too low on water - was explosive.
Running low on water… meant you dumped the fire, except perhaps a small amount on one-quarter of the grate (as was described in Staufer’s Thoroughbreds).
If you were dumb enough to trade water for steam, or (as with C&O 1642) you trusted the lies of the Nicholson Company, then you might progress to rocketry and ‘unanticipated rapid disassembly’ – I remember seeing an ominous picture of an explosion with the water tower in the background – they took water and as quick as they could fired up the injector, which ran cold water onto hot sheets…
A number of railroads started building coaling facilities immediately adjacent to mains, or on bridges over them, to make fueling and watering easy and relatively direct. As I recall there was one on the famous Sandusky branch for the J-1 and 5001/5011 2-10-4s, with some onets on operations using it. C&O famously built one to service the M-1 turbines, streamlined to match the locomotive.
I don’t have a copy of Scribbins, but I have read that Milwaukee had high-speed coal chutes at one point (New Lisbon?) for the F-7s (and other coal-fired power, obviously not the As). I was never able to figure out whether ‘coal shoots’ was a technical description of something like high-speed flood loading (of the desired 2" washed passenger gas coal) or just another historian who couldn’t quite spell. (I did run with the concept for my own use…)
For those of you who are tired of ‘we can’t know’ and want a definitive account of fuel needed on the New York Central after the PT tenders allowed the single stop at Wayneport:
In April 1945 the ‘postwar passenger steam power’ was still the C1a, not any sort of “Niagara”. This had the running-gear dimensions of a PRR T1 but with Baker gear, piston valves of appropriate proportion, and – most importantly – a Niagara-proportioned boiler made to have as many common details and dimensions as possible (it was slightly longer in the waist for the center cylinder saddle).
One point of this design was that the Duplex had better water rate than an ‘equivalent’ 2-cylinder DA locomotive, and the lower water rate translated into lower fuel burn rate. Calculations indicated that a 64T pedestal tender (the design with the five centipede axles plus a trailing Delta truck) would allow the trip between Harmon and Chicago on one fueling (of course with many water stops enroute; the cistern was something like 17,000 gallons). Presumably this would have been on the
In 1924, SP said its 4-4-2s could run 223 miles Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo without taking water. (Lower right corner of the page)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015010882184&seq=286
Obvious question: why bother? Surely they changed crews at Santa Barbara, going from the Los Angeles Division to the Coast Division. If they have to stop anyway, what do they gain by refusing to take water?
When the Daylight Limited started in 1923, it was limited, all right. Just passengers from LA to SF – no in-betweeners. But presumably that didn’t last long, and presumably if they’re picking up passengers in Santa Barbara they’d feel pretty silly making a point of not taking water.
But maybe they did run thru a few times, and I don’t know of any train anywhere that ran more than 223 miles unwatered.
I believe the reason you could find a water tower at every town was for the freight locomotives. They spent a lot of time idling in sidings getting out of the way of the through passenger trains. Sitting still, they still consumed fuel and water, though not very much, it still adds up over time. Freights often did considerable work along the way, so they would use a lot more fuel and water from point A to Point B than a Limited.
I’ve been reading thorugh accident reports in the 1910s and there are several accounts where a crew will cut off the train they were pulling on the mainline and run to get water before it was too late. With no radios or other form of instant, universal communication, this sometimes led to problems with other trains that didn’t know what was going on.
Provided link to Hathitrust is worthless: it goes to a random page when clicked from an iPhone, and nothing from babel.hathitrust.org will load on my browser because their site permissions have expired but they still mandate HSTS.
Can you please provide the appropriate page number from the physical issue (not the one in the PDF copy) and post it here?
Doesn’t work on your equipment, you mean. Anyone else having trouble? As expected, it works in Chrome.
Page 252 in Rwy Age for 19 Jan 1924.
Yes, I should have said ‘worthless to me’. And it is their fault, really, that it won’t run on my overly-paranoid browser.
Thanks.
I suspected what I was going to find, and it was EXACTLY what I was expecting.
These were comparatively high-wheeled (81" IIRC!), small-cylindered express engines, but (as with much steam power) they could ‘pull a larger train than they could start’. They would also benefit from the comparative water-rate and heat-balance efficiencies of a good Worthington feedwater heater. Accordingly it should not come as a surprise that the locomotive with its then-innovative booster starts trains as effectively as a comparable 4-6-0, and has a remarkable effective water rate…
I am not certain that we should translate that “223 miles observed on test” as the person writing the story did – I suspect that this would have left very little, if any actual reserve in the tender cistern, which no one sane would do on a passenger train like the contemporary Daylight service. But, by the same token, a comparatively small increase in ‘original’ cistern capacity, or the adoption of even a small A-tank arrangement, might easily provide the required working range with little compromise to train makeup.
But then, there is an interesting piece of corroborative evidence which I in fact was thinking of when I read about a “SP 4-4-2” with high performance. One of these engines was mentioned in that ‘Trains of the 1940s’ book – where it’s mentioned that it successfully started and ran a train of well over 20 loaded passenger cars successfully, to the then astonishment of the author.
I am trying to find my copy of Fryer’s book on experimental steam, where he describes a contemporary experiment using a booster (in an articulated truck) applied to a British 4-4-2. It performed with similar effectiveness (but wasn’t deemed worthwhile enough to implement on a g
What’s “successfully” mean?
In 1932 Rwy Age told about a Frisco 4-6-2 that pulled 54 passenger cars back to town after a couple of other engines broke down and their trains got merged. Don’t recall if it said exactly where it happened; that issue isn’t online.
Would Frisco have had wooden cars then?
There is still a coaling tower on the Sandusky branch, it’s a few miles north of the diamonds in Marion and is visible from US23.
High volume coaling facilities were built to last when they were built - a lot of concrete & rebar went into their construction. Many 21st century carriers feature that removing them is more costly than just letting them rust in peace