Check this out. Very interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdD3LOnv1TY
I would quibble with his choice for #1, but it’s a very entertaining and nicely produced video, done completely from still photos. About 30 minutes long.
[:'(] !
I concur with your observation as to “Number One.” If those were preserved it would have been more as curiosities than technical landmarks.
Numbers fifteen through two? No problems there, although I’d say all were equal of presrvation, I look at the numerical ordering as strictly a matter of convenience. Good video!
The author of the narration made a rather serious error in stating that the Y6A developed 166K horsepower. He meant tractive effort, of course, but it leaves the video wanting in some oomph. I didn’t watch past that point because it’s all his opinion.
Well certainly it’s the originators opinion, that’s a given. That’s OK with me, his video, his opinion.
If any of us put a video together on the same subject it would be our opinions, which others may or may not agree with. So what?
I have learned that an opinion isn’t worth much unless the criteria for it are announced, defended, and then weighted to give a reasoned appraisal of the items in question. He tends to favour larger and articulated engines, and most recent ones. Why not a lowly 2-8-2 of some kind, and pick one that stands out due to some defined benefit that it presented to its operators? There were 20 Mikes for every 2-10-4 on the road, or something like that number, so why not a Mikado…somewhere? I’d settle for it displacing the S1 which he places at #15 with all its slipperiness and difficulty taking tighter curves.
I can understand why he left 2-8-2’s out. The survival rate for Mikados is very good, since they were pretty economical to operate ( So were 2-8-0’s) many Mikes lasted right up to the end of steam. Maybe, certainly, not all variants but the video makers criterion was extinct locomotives.
Sure, I wish some Jersey Central Mikes survived, I wish some D&H monster 2-8-0’s survived, but honestly I’m grateful for what has survived.
Again, his vid, his choices. If I disagreed violently I’d figure out the mysteries of doing a YouTube video and post my own, but my brain would probably melt down first!
Amusingly, I believe his little ‘cut’ between candidates is the most awe-inspiring of all 2-8-2s, the O class, a bit like the merger of the front of a good Berkshire with the back of a NYC Mountain, with the high drivers of a full road engine. And I believe with no survivors.
He and I and Jones and Vince (and probably some others) have a spot for the S1 not just because of its over-the-top position as the most awe-inspiring passenger locomotive but for its sad and needless end (when it should have been a crown jewel in Northumberland. Most 2-8-2s were commodity locomotives, even when jam-packed with the latest tech like Frisco 1351 and 1352… both of which survive to show how the trick was done in the '40s.
I wish the author of that video had taken 30 seconds and said that his two main, or three main, criteria for selection were A, B, and C, and why they were chosen over the next six possibilities for selection criteria. From there, a discussion of this kind could ensue, just as WE are discussing the matter now. As his piece stands, it’s either a nod or a shrug, and ends with that binary notation.
I appreciate both your takes on the matter.
Like so many YouTube videos, it’s “his video, his likes”. I certainly agree that these things are better when you state your criteria for ‘top’, whether or not “we” would agree with him.
He certainly has some of the less-well-known things in there, although I’m suspicious that his knowledge of Potomacs might precisely mirror mine – essentially from Riding the Locomotive Cabs and then some Internet searching. They might have been really, really good – or, just as in other cases, further northeast, quickly become unwanted expense on a dieselizing railroad.
Let me put it this way, that “Top 15” steam locomotive video was a hell of a lot better than the “Abandoned Airplanes” YouTube video I watched last night!
Man, was that poorly done! I don’t think whoever put the video together even looked at the photographs of the airplanes he was describing.
From my vantage point - he was infatuated with the ‘locomotive freaks of nature’ - experimental locomotives that failed to perform the functions in the manner that those that commissioned them intended.
The PRR S1, the ERIE and VGN triples, the UP, C&O and N&W steam turbines ate up three positions for failed experiments that could have been better used for productive locomotives that weren’t saved from scrapping.
I can’t fault any of the REAL production locomotives he selected.
What would be your criteria and choices?
Reading between the lines, some of his choices involved locomotives that should have been preserved, but got away: the S1, EM-1, and 774 are all vividly memorable examples, and there are others he mentions in the also-rans (the roller-bearing GS4s, for instance) that are not on the list because ‘other’ examples were preserved – one might put preservation of NYC 3001 instead of a Hudson in this general category)
He does not mention that the preserved “Y6a” actually has had the firebox modification performed that makes it visually similar to a Y6b; whether or not this would have affected his criteria is not fully clear. In any case much of the value of preserving a Y6b is not so much in the locomotive itself as in the various technologies implemented to make the locomotive fully cost-effective in an age so many decks were stacked against big steam – many parts of which, of course, were only peripherally ‘on the locomotives’ that were lost.
I would rather promptly add the RF&P 4-8-4 that survived (in stationary-boiler service) as late as 1966 … and the late Reading Pacific that was freely offered to a town that rejected it as ‘insufficiently modern’ – what an excursion locomotive that would have been!
The turbines are there because not one example was kept – not even a sectioned exhibit of the turbine construction. In no small part this was related to considerations of opportunity scrap value or tax/equipment trust concerns, or a general lack of contemporary interest in ‘modern’ steam that looked more like diesels. If C&O thought to retain 490 – the great unrestored opportunity closest to what T1 5550 will be once built – it wouldn’t have killed them to have kept one of the dramatic M-1s just as UP kept all those Big Boys … except perhaps for the perceived failure (we don’t have one of those 500,000-pound Leaders preserved, either, and very nearly no 71000-series Paci
One that the B&O had in mind - but never got near construction.
A most interesting concept. Unfortunately for steam aficionados, it looks like a more complex method of getting the constant torque of a diesel-electric locomotive.
Nearer than you think. Most of the ‘hard parts’ of the design were done, the motors and the boiler shell being really the two major parts that were critical.
Note that this is a late-Thirties design, and there were significant restrictions on ‘constant torque’ out of cost-effective diesel-electric horsepower anywhere near the capacity of the W-1 (about 5000 sustained nominal horsepower) As with the Paget locomotive, there were a colossal number of power strokes even from single-acting cylinders – remember, the axles were individual, and the power impulses not necessarily in phase – with relatively quick slip control.
Not mentioned, but implicit, was the inherent ability to match mass flow to instantaneous load, much as promised in the Baldwin 6000hp Essl locomotive of this same era. This would allow the equivalent of 5000hp constant-torque geared acceleration with four motors, then cruise on perhaps as few as one, with appropriate saving of fuel and, more importantly, water.
The problem, of course, was the detail design of the motors: slung low down flanking the driver axles, with solid gearing. This was like the opposite of the Roosen motor locomotive (which alternated two-cylinder motors on opposite sides with spring-and-cup quill drive to lightweight driver pairs) and the relatively low diameter of the drive gears made installing a flexible gear of appropriate capability to prevent vibration and torsional damage a difficult exercise. I suspect there would have been a series of teething troubles culminating in some very expensive redesigns … using money B&O chronically never had. Daniel Willard saw the future for B&O in the EAs by 1940, and while I’m personally regretful he didn’t try the experiment further, there’s little doubt of the outcome where B&O operation and shareholder value were co
Vastly less complex, about four times less expensive at the time, and most of the shop crews far more familiar with it and its systems than high-speed diesel-electric equipment.
5000hp is about the equivalent of three EAs, each 1800hp out of a pair of complicated V12s with a great deal of complicated and tight-tolerance equipment. (A fingerprint on some of the early 567 injector parts would prevent you from installing them!) Each of the 72 cylinders has four overhead valves, and even considering the scavenge intake and bridged actuation this was more machinery than the uniflow arrangements on the Besler motors. Far less complicated and critical bearing oiling … and I haven’t even gotten to the delicate wound-rotor generators, and the flashover-prone traction motors with required forced cooling, and all the complicated Woodward-governor and load-excitation systems needed for the electric drive.
And the Besler motors could operate as long as desired at high power under 10mph, something that would be suicide on any early EMD, and happily spin past geared speed without birdsnesting. Here again is the bitter and the sweet of the design:
And here again is a crappy-resolution picture of the B&O diagram for the 5800s:
Note the torque links for motor suspension.
It might have been interesting had Emerson not retired in 1942 to see if this engine were revived as a B&O ‘contestant’ in Cincinnati traffic had there been the expected volume and competition in the late Forties (this instead of the later Olive Dennis P-7 of such great beauty). The thought of these, ‘debugged’ C&O turbines, and light
Ah, yes, that would have been quite an engine–32 cylinders, but from what I saw on https://www.american-rails.com/besler.html, it needed a lot of water to keep going.
You need to put that in the perspective of 5000hp, though. I believe the estimated water rate at 350psi admission would be superior to the PRR T1, which was a North American record. MUCH better at cruise on 1 or 2 motors.
There was a compound version of these motors that would run at about 1200psi admission. Highly interesting in principle with a number of steam-generator technologies of that period.
To me, IMHO, the one that slipped away was the NYC J1e or J3a Hudsons. If I was to hit the powerball and donate a huge sum of funds to recreate one of these engines lost to time. Such as was done with the A1 Peppercorn Tornado in the UK, I would want to see the Hudson that took Lionel to fame, NYC J1e 5344.