I did some sailplane flying out of Sugarbush, VT back in the mid 70s when I was 14-15 years old. I used the “iron compass” to navigate as the surrounding mountains and towns all seemed to blend together as one at about 2500 ft. With so many rail abandonments over the intervening decades I wonder if the old “iron compass” is even an option these days… probably not…
Wasn’t there something in one of the Steam Glory series or some other place where the Union Pacific had to substitute steam for first-gen diesels when they would have breakdowns? And the crews had to back-transition to steam – like riding a bicycle, you never forget, but do you get rusty without current experience?
Thank you Overmod for the recommendation to look for Eugene Huddleston’s book. I found a copy on ebay and have been thoughly enjoying it.
I took a look at some of the stats between the different Challenger series and noticed the series 5 Challengers had some differences from the series 3 and 4 Challengers.
One of which was reducing the surface area of the circulators from around 80 sq. ft to about 44 sq. ft. Kratville mentions this as an attempt to improve firing. I guess UP figured out the combustion quenching effect was costing more than the enhanced circualtion was gaining?
UP also went from a lot of 4" flues ( 177) and few 2-1/4"tubes (45) in series 3 and 4 to a lot of tubes (177) and fewer flues( around 60?) in series 5.
They also went back to the Type A superheater, so I’m not sure if that was just to accomodate the type A or if more tubes were better at making steam than a lot of flues?
I think the tubes vs. flues is likely more a reassignment of gas-flow resistance across the face of the rear tubesheet than an attempt to maximize convective heat transfer. My knowledge of the type E is probably defective in how the effective resistance of elements-in-flues was figured at different gas speeds vs. a type A arrangement – some of that was planned as a kind of finger exercise once the multiphysics models for the T1 Trust boiler had been developed and tested.
I personally suspect some of the ‘adjustment’ might have involved excessive superheat, or excessive warpage or ‘cutting’ of elements, with the engines being run at higher loads and speeds. The effective FGA between a given area of tubes and a “loaded” flue with elements changes with speed, which can result in the development of what Ross Rowland sometimes called ‘crazy high’ superheat when large locomotives like 614 were worked at high speed and a ‘power’ level of cutoff for suitable mass flow for a heavy consist. It would make sense to adjust the proportions once to suit any worst-case problems “forensically” observed.
I do not know for sure whether WPA restrictions made ‘scarce wartime alloys’ hard enough to get that the type E was too expensive or difficult to maintain, in addition to being ‘too efficient for its own good’ under some conditions. There are certainly people who would know this on RyPN.
There are many sources that talk about the maintenance issues with the type E on both the Challengers and Big Boys. Lots of plugging with water contaminants and burn out of the return bends. I seem to remember an article stating elements in the type A were a larger diameter therefore less susceptible to plugging and also were much simpler to maintain? An article written by Steve Lee mentions ( I can’t remember the name of the article) the elements in the series 1 4000s Type Es were eventually shortened by 23" to reduce the issues with the return bends.
But note that both of these are circumstantial issues: the water contaminants are a consequence of severe priming or carryover (getting wet particles deeply into the elements, by way of a long dry pipe, throttle, and header!) and the return-bend issue is that they are too far back toward the radiant zone.
Yes, you are quite right.
Thanks for elaborating on those points!
I’m curious about BB 4014, now running and burning oil. I’d heard for years that a BB couldn’t run properly on oil - but clearly does. I’ve no expertise here at all, just wondering how UP and the steam shop designed the oil burning equipment to produce enough steam for the 4014.
On a semi related note, I find it a tiny bit ironic that 4012 (as I recall) sits in Steamtown in Scranton PA - in the heart of anthracite country. Yes, I know anthracite burns very differently then soft coal, so boilers are designed differently.
There is an article somewhere on the UP steam site with detail pictures of the components of the Dickens-Barker burner. Austin described this as a ‘modified Thomas burner’ in West Chicago, but it is considerably more than that.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Up1UaMVnv4M
An interesting characteristic is that the locomotive can hold nominal working pressure (necessary to work some of the auxiliaries properly) using only natural draft (no blower). That meant that the only time I saw the blower engaged was when the whistle had been enthusiastically blown (as enthusiastically as the West Chicago folks allowed, anyway, which was supposedly much less than Ed likes to do!) and even then it only needed cracking a small, virtually inaudible amount…
The arrangement and orientation of the tuyeres alone will tell you why this works so nicely.
(If I recall correctly (and this is largely second- or third-hand via Kratville) the late-'40s ‘emergency’ equipment involved two burners and a makeshift firepan, and was not reportedly successful although I don’t remember learning any of the gruesome details.)
Anyway to compare with coal use on the Delaware & Hudson Challengers, burning anthracite?
D&H Challengers, like their 4-8-4s, were bituminous-burning locomotives.
The type A always had a few large flues; the type E always had many smaller flues. Two type E superheater tubes in each flue, four type A superheater tubes in each flue.
You’re thinking of NP. UP coal wasn’t great, but it was better than poor. When the UP 4-6+6-4s were new, one article mentioned they were designed to burn 11000 BTU-per-pound coal, or maybe it said 11500 BTU/lb – don’t recall. Powder River coal is 9000 BTU/lb or less, isn’t it?
IIRC, PRB coal is less than 9,000 BTU/lb and has to be kept wet to prevent spontanaous combustion. There are several places in the Powder River basin where coals seams caught fire in geologic time and turned the soil above into some sort of brick. OTOH, sulfur is not an issue.
The last number I remember seeing for PRB coal-by-rail was 7550, and it was called ‘subbituminous’ in context.
Sounds reasonable. PRB coal is a higher quality coal than lignite, but a lower quality than the Rock Springs coal. The NP went to PRB coal from Colstrip in the mid 1920’s as the Red Lodge coal seams were getting expensive to work. The strip mines at Colstrip were much cheaper to work with the advent of large electric shovels and draglines.
Coal from the Roundup mines is of higher quality, but those mines were adjacent to the Milwaukee and would have involved a direct interchange at Miles City or indirect interchange via the GN’s Mossmain to Great Falls line.
The 1942 Railway Age article on UP’s new 4-6+6-4s said they were designed for coal having 11800 BTUs per pound.
Main line freight crews were never assigned that way, were they? “I’m up next, but I don’t want that steamer – I’ll use my seniority to wait for a diesel.”
Clearly? Has UP tried to run 4014 “properly”? I assumed they were satisfied as long as it moved and produced a bit of smoke for the fans.