I’m thinking of making an HO scale 4-6-4 modern (Present Day) steam locomotive by 3D printing a custom designed shell onto a 4-6-4\4-8-2\4-8-4 body. Do you have any ideas or pictures I can use as design inspiration?
Thank you.
First question: streamlined or not? If streamlined, how extensively, and what access panels or removable trim do you account for? Here a copy of the old Quadrant Press paperback on streamlined steam in general might be a good resource to examine.
Second, look at a good late reference to see the different physical systems and their organization on a locomotive. The systems grew dramatically in complexity during just the era of the Hudson type (for NYC J1s in the late '20s, and almost radically different by the mid-Thirties J3as. Most of this can be 3D printed but I would not make it part of the overprint for the actual shell; add it as separate detail with the attach points designed for strength or including metal armatures for strength and convenience.
I am not sure what you are asking.
As far as I know, pretty much all the 4-6-4 locomotives were considered modern.
-Kevin
Do you mean modern as in a steam locomotive built today? The ACE 3000 might be a starting point, that was a planned modern steam alternative to diesel that was never materialized. New steam locomotives have also been built to old specs, such as the Tornado in the UK and the in-progress PRR T1.
Modern steam could win an oxymoron contest or tie with “civil war”.
For these questions, my go-to source is the MR Steam Locomotives Cyclopedia. It has photos, drawings and dimensions.
Simon
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lighten up!
I mean, search up “streamlined steam locomotive” or “steampunk steam train” for some inspiration.
Personally, I love the look of NYC’s streamlined engines, like the Mercury, Dreyfuss, and Commodore Van (cant wait for BLI’s release!), but also N&W’s J class and Santa Fe’s Blue Goose look good too.
Fun fact, IHC’s 4-6-4 engine is based off Santa Fe’s 3460 class 4-6-4, of which only 6 were built.
Charles
The ACE 3000 project had the idea of building a steam engine that looked more like a two-unit diesel, and burned a slurry of coal and water.
Part of the reason railroads switched from steam to diesel is that in the 1940’s-50’s petroleum products were considerably cheaper than coal relative to the amount of power produced. By the late 1970’s, with Middle East oil embargos and such, the reverse was true and coal was relatively cheaper.
However, in the early 1980’s, Iran and Iraq were fighting a long, drawn out war, and both sides began selling oil at below OPEC recommended costs to raise money for weapons. This made the cost of petroleum products drop considerably. Although this helped America and other countries recover from the deep recession of 1982-84, it meant that there no longer was a great saving in burning coal rather than oil.
If the Ace 3000 project was ever viable, it certainly wasn’t after that point.
This one was deifinitely in the bottom 10% of your responses.
Basically you said “jumbo shrimp” was not an oxymoron because there was this one really big shrimp once…
We have come to expect better from you.
-Kevin
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Lightened up.
Overmod–
Ok, on first reading it seems that perhaps you want to talk real hardcore design engineering, ignoring Howard’s humorous and imo rather harmless post.
So, I learned in real engineering school at Penn State, in Thermodynamics class, that steam power is inherently VERY inefficient, ie most of the power is actually going up the stack, and actual thermodynamic efficiency of the very best steam engines was on the order of 8% to maybe 10%, on a very good day.
Even allowing for some advancements of design over the last 50 years, I’ve not read or seen anything anywhere that says it gets beyond about 11% or 12% efficient. If there is, point me in a direction to actual engineering facts and not wishful theories, and I’ll gladly accept the correction.
Then you add in the enormous cost of facilities to service steam, and labor to service steam, and the greatly increased moving parts relative to diesel power, and what Howard said above is technically true in a strict engineering sense.
Modern Steam is truly an oxymoron. From a strict engineering sense, Howard is absolutely correct.
And as a reader here I just do not appreciate or understand what Howard said that warranted that kind of response from a moderator.
John Mock
Thank you John…nice to hear from some one with a sense of levity. Sure, in the later years of steam development, there were several advances made by several roads…most notably the PRR, NYC, and N&W, but still it was basically a 19th century technology that made all the way to the mid-20th. It may have gone still beyond had it not been for GM (also Firestone and Esso) by purchasing many of the suppliers and manufacturers of critical parts. Then there was the efficiency of the diesel and diesel/electrics which drove in the final nail to the coffin.
To me modern means current, but arguably could be a matter of semantics as obviously to some it means the last of steam development.
The problem here is that you are assuming no fundamental change to the faults of the Stephenson boiler and direct rod drive after the 19th Century. Porta among others was prone to beat that particular drum, for somewhat polemical reasons, but not all of steam was ‘evolutionary’ in that respect. Improvements in boilers could be and were dramatic, even in potentially larger sizes; the adoption of proper balanced (Ljungstrom) turbine with the evolved planetary drive patented ‘too late to matter’ or with the Bowes drive whose use was short-circuited on railroads were two clearly mid-20th Century things in ‘modern’ steam; use of magnetorheologics became a hot subject in the late '40s and would have been another option for the mechanical V1 turbine before N&W and then Baldwin ‘improved’ the design…
Some of the other stillborn ideas, like the Roosen motor locomotives, deserved more attention than they got, in part thanks to Korean War politics and expediency.
Use of a light cyclone in a Lamont waterwall firebox, with appropriate economization and feedwater heating, easily gets you into the range of '80s diesel competitiveness. (yes, the bar has moved more substantially toward diesels since then, but you seem to want to cite first-generation diesels as ‘modern’ where late steam of the same era is not, technologically rather than for basically sociological reasons, and both Brown and I have concerns about the full practical and applicable validity of that).
This is an extraordinary claim, and it calls for specific proof – which I have never seen but you very well may have. All the accounts of 'specialty shut
I can’t help but think that one of the things that made diesels so attractive in the post-war era was the ready-made supply of recently discharged diesel engine mechanics and electricians, all trained courtesy of Uncle Sam and looking for jobs.
Buying the locomotives was one thing, but they had to be maintained, and diesel mechanics don’t grow on trees, but was one time they did!
Going back to the OP’s question [:(], IHC (and Mehano, that produced many if not all of them for IHC) produced many variants of the Hudson, some streamlined, some not. Doing a few searches on the Web will yield quite a few pictures of different styles of boilers produced under the IHC label.
I’m still scratching my head about how one would do a 3D print for an existing frame. Please let us know how you will proceed and show the results.
Simon
Hmm, this seemingly innocuous posting seems to have become a bit short tempered. And admittedly the OP was not clear if by “modern” he meant present -day or just the last word in steam technology, circa 1945-52.
I think Trains magazine had an article many years ago about the advances in steam locomotive technology that the French, among others, had refined and implemented even into the 1950s but which came just too late to be of interest in the USA. There might be some ideas in that article, assuming I didn’t just dream about such an article, that might be worth pursuing. Some of those ideas resulted in exterior appearances that were non-traditional.
Dave Nelson
There was, and when I get back to my Complete Collection i will look for it. One of Riley Deem’s locomotives circa 1980 was a version of Chapelon’s three-cylinder 2-10-4, visibly designed to smaller European loading gage specs…
There was also the Trains article on the Giesl ejector, circa 1968, that basically claimed the device was the finest flower of steam technology drafting. It influenced me for many years… There were also a number of good ‘modern steam’ articles beginning with the original Withuhn conjugated duplex article in 1972 with some reasonably good theoretical discussions circa 1974. Some good drawings and pictures in those…
Since OP is going to use an IHC 4-6-4 for his project, I would like to recommend him to take a look at the C&O L2a #310-314 Hudson. Ordered by C&O in 1947, these were the last express passenger steam locomotives ordered by a United States railroad and were the largest Hudson ever made.
They had all the goodies at the time including Franklin poppet valve gear, roller bearings rods, and axles. If dieselization didn’t happen, they would have served the railroad until the late 1970s. The locomotive wasn’t streamlined, but OP could redesign a streamlining shrouding for it if he likes. That would give the steam engine a “modern” look, just like Luigi Colani’s streamlined train designs. Have fun!
Regarding modern steam development, this page might help:
The Ultimate Steam Page