Cost effectiveness varies by application. After all coal fired automobiles would have much cheaper fuel costs than the ones we all drive but is anyone going to argue that the Stanley Steamer is going to make a comeback?..
&
What are you talking about here?, i just had them over yesterday to clean my carpets, they did not go out of business, you need to check your facts better carnej1.
He was referring to this I think.
What you can see from those numbers is why the Diesel-electric made such a good switch engine compared to Steam. But out on the road, where presumably a big engine spent most of its time, Steam showed its muscle if somebody really wanted the train to move…
I suppose if someone enjoys ironies, above 6 mph, the Steam engine outclassed the Diesel-electric in Tractive Effort, and above 19 mph, in all respects; the irony is that the bulk of Diesel-electric road engines, with DC traction motors, could not operate long below 11 mph without damage from overheating of the traction motors. So, by necessity the Diesel-electric road engine operated in the area of the curve where Steam had the superior performance characteristics. And that is suggestive that the decision to Dieselize was almost entirely an economic decision based on the price of fuel at the ultimate sacrifice of certain operating advantages of steam locomotion. Well, that’s an interesting theory …
From Brown:
[Click to enlarge]
Thanks for all of your effort to post these graphs and other statistics. I know from years of experience and by empirical observation of the locomotives I have operated about how any given steam locomotive of equal weight to a diesel, blows the diesel away after you get it above 5 MPH or so. I know that diesels have supposedly more tractive effort at starting than the steam engine with approx the same weight on the drivers, but what you find out when you run the diesels is that they often can’t take advantage of this tractive effort because of the power to weight ratio. EMD’s are especially bad in this area. The diesel easily slips at starting because there is not simply enough weight on the driving wheels to take advantage of it. Often times one has to have the engine pull against the independent brake, peg the Amperes way up into the danger zone and get the train started that way because otherwise the diesel simply can’t start the train without excessive slipping or if it gets started can not maintain the pull necessary to keep the train
Hiho. Model Railroader here, but this caught my eye. One of my a:87 fantasy ideas is a modern sghortline making a buisness in “classic” lease engines. One department being steam engines, running on a Hydrogen engine instead of a coal fed fire. Hydrogen engine creats some heat on it’s own but also feds an electic heater, which makes steam, which goes through pipes, which makes a steam engine work.
Hey, a guy can sdream can’t he?
Micheal that’s an explanation I can actually understand. Thanks. However, that comparison relates to DC if I read it correctly. What about AC traction?
[(-D] OK, that was funny.[tup]
That’s interesting. I mis-spoke on my original post, stating that Steam TE surpassed Diesel-electric TE at 11 mph. I was in a hurry on the way out the door this morning, and misread the chart – as you point out, the threshhold is much lower, and I corrected my original post to show the crossover at 6 mph.
Your observations make sense. Since “they never let me blow the whistle, they never let me ring the bell …” it is interesting to see how the observations match well with the performance curves. Too, thinking in terms of economic efficiency – the Diesel-electric tops out at about 11 mph. Everything after that is brute force – fuel consumed. The Steam engine just
It looks like Canadian and Australian producers of hard coking coal are going to see a 300% increase in the price they receive for this year. Perhaps steam coal may begin rising quickly in price.
I seem to remember reading the comparison that, “A diesel can start any train it can pull and a steam engine can pull any train it can start.”
I’m interested if any shortlines that operate steam tourist locomotives (who was it that bought those Chinese made locomotives a few years back?) will find them more economical than their diesels…
Also, wasn’t the Sierra Railroad experimenting with an almost all biodiesel fueled fleet? Any updates on their experiences, in light of recent petroleum fuel costs?
[quote user="Kevin C. Smith
I’m interested if any shortlines that operate steam tourist locomotives (who was it that bought those Chinese made locomotives a few years back?) will find them more economical than their diesels…
How about R.J Corman? They have several coal hauling operations and they just took delivery of a QJ…It’s an interesting thought…
I don’t mean to single your comment out. Don’t take it personally. You are only illustrating the totally block headed view that is guiding the entire transportation industry. So basically as long as the transporters can gouge shippers and then the shippers can get tax breaks because they are being gouged, then that’s the way the World should rotate and no other ideas or progress can be made until the industry is forced to. Much like when the Railroads were forced to adopt air brakes and automatic couplers. The industry then couldn’t see that these innovations would save them millions in lost productivity, loss due to wrecks derailments and loss of life. Today the mindset is still the same. “We’re not gonna do anything until we have to,” As I stated earlier in this thread, innovative thinking is punished in the rail management world. I found out about that the hard way. Young men with ideas get hammered for, “rocking the boat.” Regional railroads, Terminal Railroads and many short lines can’t benefit from fuel surcharges and it is from there that the change will come I believe. And I don’t find the evidence that shippers are compliant with the whole fuel surcharge idea as the Congressional Record shows. A year ago the Congress found that the Class Ones were overcharging for fuel and a limit has been placed on
There are a few caveats here.
Number One: Almost all steam plants make use of condensers to reduce the back pressure to about 1 psi absolute (about 14 psi of vacuum at sea level). This helps enourmously with thermal efficiency. Even then, typical thermal efficiencies for modern coal plants are around 33% as compared to 60% for the latest generation of combined cycle plants.
Number Two: The furnaces on a coal fired plant are quite large, not practical to shrink down to locomotive size (though a gasifier may help). The primary heat transfer mechanism in the furnace is radiation - where a locomotive makes greater use of convection (though radiation dominates in the firebox and combustion chamber.
Number Three: A power plant has a lot more room for pollution controls than a locomotive - to be fair this is also true for diesels, there’s not much room to put a catalytic converter on a diesel locomotive.
For locomotives pre-dating the EMD super series traction control, the steamers could deliver higher sustained tractive effort for a given weight on the drivers. After that, the diesel’s did better. A modern 6 axle AC locomotive can generate a higher continuous tractive effort (at low speeds) than a Big Boy, and weigh about as third as much. A 6,000 HP version will produce almost as much drawbar horsepower as the Big Boy and cost about the
Ah, but the catalytic converters are required on Diesel-electrics after 2017. There is a reason the requirement is out there so far, but presently, the converter is the only way to bring the diesel engine into compliance with emission standards. This will reduce the economic efficiency of the Diesel-electric locomotive.
On the other hand, the fluidized bed method of coal combustion has proven successful at bringing the combustion efficiency of coal up to 13%, and reducing emissions that TVA built its most recent plant without the catalytic converters – the first one – and it is burning cleaner than the remainder of its plants – all with the catalytic converters.
…Michael, I believe the catalytic converters increased the efficiency of the automotive engines {gasoline}, back about 1975. Their use allowed other polution removing means to be lessened on engines promoting the ability to retune said engines for better performance and economy. Said polition was then “cleaned up” by the converters before passing out into the atmosphere.
Wouldn’t the effect on diesel engines be similar…?
Catalytic converters are much smaller, lighter, less expensive to purchase and maintain than are scrubbers. Catalytic converters do not produce waste solids that require disposal as do scrubbers and fluid bed combustion systems. And at the end of thier life catalytic converters are valuable as scrap, scrubbers are not.
Fluid bed combustion requires two feed systems. So you must not only carry your fuel, you have to carry the lime (usually) that will react with the sulfur. Fluid beds are much larger than normal locomotive combustion chambers. The fluidization requires that a lot of energy be expended before you even get combustion so the overall energy efficiency is lower because of the parasitic loads. And you have to have a huge dust collection system, which is expensive to buy and maintain and requires more energy to operate. And at the end of the day not only must you replenish the coal and lime, you must remove and dispose of the calcium sulfate which contains significant amounts of me
My understanding, which is very limited in this area, is that catalytic converters are in the exhaust cycle – after the engine energy is delivered to the powertrain, and so cannot contribute to energy conversion efficiency except in a negative fashion. Since the effectiveness of the converter depends on a variety of fuel conditions, the converter also “controls” – through some more electronics – certain engine functions to minimize combustion byproducts – and this is almost always at the sacrifice of engine efficiency.
The trick has been to develop catalytic converters that reduce emissions while minimizing the effect on engine efficiency, and these are often characterized as “increasing engine efficiency” which they do, sort of, compared to older pollution control equipment, including previous catalytic converter models, but not compared to an engine which is designed solely to maximize fuel efficiency.
Figures I recall seeing – and its been quite a while and this could be completely haywire – reported fuel efficiency losses as high as 10%, in addition to the cost of the catalytic converter which, for production automobiles, can run as high as 5-8% of the retail cost of the automobile. These are expensive additions to equipment, and add their own maintenance costs as well as reducing fuel efficiency.
On automobiles, my limited understanding is