Well, I know it has really happened that due to insurgents / revolutionaries etc. that there have been rail lines that had to have armed troops on the trains to protect them. Seems to me as recently as the 1970s Rhodesian Bush War the line from South Africa to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was often shot at, and I think at least sometimes had armed troops onboard for protection.
Why limit yourself to EMDs??? Alco sold a large amount of locomotives internationally.
Santa Fe and Utah Railway got excellent performance out of the RSD-15 alligator on heavy trains and steep grades, and some Santa Fe crews preferred them over EMD’s SD24’s specifically for their lugging ability on Cajon Pass and due to their better dynamic brake performance than EMD SD24’s on Cajon Pass (despite lack of typical EMD cab creature comforts). Utah Railway got good performance out of them on Soldier Summit, after Santa Fe let them go.
The Mexicans used six-axle Alco Centuries and MLW’s to pull passenger trains on those steep grades in Mexico, sometimes triple-headed, during the time period you are referencing.
Alco/MLW diesels provided outstanding tractive effort at the lower speeds in heavy haul service (as long as you didn’t run them through SP’s 30 major tunnels on one line).
Otherwise, due to the number of long tunnels, everything else overheated for SP, so then you should be considering SD45T-2’s and SD40T-2’s during the era you are talking about. That is what and why SP preferred. Everything else (other than perhaps SD-9’s) came up wanting in 4000 to 6000 foot tunnel lengths during that era.
SP’s mainline over Tehachapi can be considered the toughest, most brutal operating conditions for any diesel model within the continental 48 due to all the grades and tunnels. The GE U33C and U36C’s I guess did ok for SP, but did not hold up as well as the tunnel motors, and were present in lesser numbers.
Respectfully submitted–
John
I love this, the whole enchilada. I don’t have any improvements to suggest, not being that far along in my own protofantastic hybrid. But I give the project a thumbs up because it’s underpinned by a great story. When we model railroad we tell a story; some of us tell the actual story of a prototype as closely as possibly to the truth of it, and some of us tell a different story of our own making, but even if we just string a bunch of different-era Tyco cars together behind an unlettered locomotive we’re still telling the story that – at a minimum – “a train like this rolled out one day”. A good story justifies any scenario. Bravo! Get to work on it!
EDIT: And I know a guy in my neighborhood who loves to mash and bash military models and weather them up nice. He would totally Mad Max your caboose for optimal defense in montane environs.
-Matt
Not so much…a while back MR (or RMC or someone) had an article on someone building a layout set on the moon at a future date when the moon was being colonized and resources were being mined.
The late lamented “AWNUTS” magazine had some layouts that were pretty far out there too.
The Great Northern did it, due to ventiliation issues in the tunnels.
The Milwaukee Road did run hybrid consists on their Pacific extension, but I don’t know if the electrics or the diesels served as helpers.
The rationale is unknown, but in the 1980 Conrail Conemaugh Division electrification study specially called for diesel helpers in electric territory. Gibbs & Hill did not offer any explanation for this.
Initial reaction here was you shouldn’t eat mushrooms while watching Lord of the Rings or playing Warcraft, but the more I thought about the idea I realized it wasn’t far fetched. The place wouldn’t need to be purely fictional as something like that would be at home in many parts of the world outside the developed urbanized nations. It used to be most model railroads were pure fantasy and no one tried for realism. Styles change over time. I think it would be cool to model a railroad in early 1900s Mexico or South America. Africa is another exotic modeling topic.
Not on GN, not as helpers. On GN, a steam powered train would be pulled through the electrified tunnel area by an electric ‘motor’. The steam engine would not be working, it was just along for the ride. Once enough diesels were around to displace steam, the electrics weren’t needed anymore and the overhead wires were taken down. The diesel powered trains just ran through the tunnels on their own.
Thanks, everyone.
I agree the three phases of locomotives is a bit odd, that was just inspired by the Milwaukee Road. I could just put gas turbines on the point at a certian altitude.
No one has commented on the gas turbine idea. Does it make sense that Turbines would be ideal above, say, 10000 feet due to oxygen? I am just assuming that they would be based on a few assumptions:
Diesel engines are built and designed at lower elevations generally, and are air-breathing, so I’m guessing they could experience the mechanical equivilant of altitude sikness" at such high elevations a–slight decrease in efficiency. Whereas jet engines work better at higher altitudes, I’m assuming turbine locomotives would be more efficient up high.
I think one of the appeals is the idea of having these massive turbine-powered locomotives slowly haul trains up the pass while soldiers in compartments in the short hood and the end of the long hood scope the landscape with machine guns. The thing would look like a frigging B-17 on rails, it’d be awesome! [:-^] It’d require a lot of scratchbuilding, but still…
If the bandits are camped out at higher elevations, do you think they would have soldiers and armored cabooses leave the major cities as well, or would they tack them on somewhere in route, maybe once they enter a more sparcely populated area.
You could argue that all the manpower would get expensive,but rememeber, there are royal subsidies to cover the cost of the firepower. The railroad only has to pay for the crew and private equipment
Far more likely an armored rider car(s) for the defending troops would be stuck ahead of and/or behind the power, although additional armour plate protection might also be added to the engine (and particularly the cab) to protect it and its crew from damage. But if you want protecting troops and firepower you want more space than just cramming them in the engine walkways. Give them a dedicated “fighting” car. You can also provide “defensive” cars at the front and rear, and maybe even spread throughout the middle at regular intervals depending on the train length.
Honestly your biggest problem here is going to be destruction of the physical infrastracture (track, catenary, power supplies) since the entire railway is in “enemy territory”. The army might not be able to clear the whole mountain region, but you’ll probably want a series of fortified facilities protecting the physical line, and allowing defense and repair teams to be dispatched to deal with bandit activity.
I recall watching a British-made TV series on trains around the world back in the 1980s where they visited a line in South America that (IIRC) crossed the Andes mountains. They noted that the railroad dieselized by buying diesels with the same horsepower as the steam engines, but then found they had to buy bigger locomotives (FM TrainMasters I think?) with greater horsepower, because the diesels didn’t work as well in the thin mountain air.
Given the fact that turbines had a relatively short life on real railroads, I’d have to assume there were no situations where they proved to be more efficient than either diesel or electric locomotives however.
Many hotroders put “blowers” on their engines. Would this work on diesels at high altitudes?
More realistic… push an armored gun car in front of the locomotive, and armor the locomotive.
The Polish, Germans, and Soviets did this in World War 2.
The gun car can be armor clad, or just a flat car with lots of sandbags. Both are realistic.
Basically, no.
The vast majority of diesel engines manufacturerd since 1984 have been turbocharged. Some stationary engines remained naturally aspirated for a while, but now nearly 100% of all diesel engines are turbocharged.
Installing a roots type blower (supercharger) on a diesel that is already turbocharged is pointless. A roots type blower is a positive displacement mechanical air pump. When the air coming in is thinner and below 14.7 PSIA it becomes less efficient.
A turbocharger, which is a centrigufal air pump, becomes faster as air to the inlet decreases, so it stays efficient at “lower” high altitudes, but there are problems if the altitude becomes too high.
Detroit Diesel manufactured some 53 and 92 series engines after 1984 that were both turbocharged and equipped with blowers. Their design needed the positive displacement blower to start and idle. Once under load, and the turbocharger built up pressure, the blower provided no performance benefit. This design was dropped in the early 1990s.
There were some bizarre experiments with different types of air pumps for diesel engines at high altitudes. These were mainly to address issues when heavy trucks operated in the American and Canadian Rocky Mountains back in the 1960s. One of these involved a mechanical “barrel type” supercharger driven by a second driveshaft from the transmiss
The giant railway layout, Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany has a bridge between two buildings that connects Europe with the U.S, and South America. Anything is possible.
NDA, my rear end.
Very well-established precedent in reciprocating aircraft motors is to use multiple-speed supercharging to maintain constant intake-tract pressure at altitude. A similar approach could easily be used on a locomotive since the actual peak boost pressure can be almost ridiculously small by comparison with ‘high performance’ supercharging (as e.g. with the diesel-sourced 6-71 Roots blower design used in drag racing, or on the turbocharging side the sequential twins used in truck or tractor pulling).
All you’re assuring is that the engine performance at higher altitude matches specs at sea level.
In practice, it can be cheaper just to do as Kevin indicated and derate a ‘standard’ locomotive operating at a known range of altitude. But that’s very different from saying that it’s hard, let alone impossible, to do.
Steam locomotives, by contrast, lose comparatively little effective combustion heat release at up to 15K altitude but their cylinder efficiency can go up dramatically as you get into lower air pressure.