Got a question for anyone in the know. As you can see on my Avatar, it is a NYC Hudson hauling a long line of freight. This brings up the question: just how many cars could a Hudson pull? I know that it does depend on the weight of each piece, but what would be a typical long train with a Hudson at the head? Also, where would someone get such information? Is there a formula of Tractive effort vs train length, etc? I imagine that much of the information is anectodal in that it would be what the individual line has experienced with their own engines, grades, gross weight, etc.
The NYC Hudson’s were designed to carry passenger trains at high speed along the water level route (aka little or no grades). These engines didn’t start running freight till much later in their life (aka near the end of steam). There are specs on the horsepower and starting tractive effort, the J3’s had 45,000 lbs of starting tractive effort (sans booster), 41,500 lbs of drawbar pull, and the ability to haul 1253 tons at 59 mph. This information is from Alvin Staufer’s Thoroughbreds.
Dennis, I can’t answer all your questions but I do know that the J1 models would develop somewhere around 53,000 pounds of tractive effort and something over 4000 horsepower and could hit 90 miles an hour on the level. A lot of the capacity and speed depended on the size of the driving wheels which might run between 63 and 79 inches depending on the model.
I asked a similar question on one of the other trains.com forums a while ago. I was particularly interested in the size of passanger trains, but the discussion covered freight as well. You may want to check there.
Dennis here is an interesting link. They say 16-18 passenger cars, but don’t mention freight cars. You probably could figure 3 steam era freight cars for each passenger car.
The Dreyfus Hudson’s 20h Century limited consist was typically 13 streamlined cars. There were two diner cars back to back in the middle of the train and these did ride on 3 axle trucks. The rest of the cars were two axle.