According to Wikipedia, General Motors and their associates buying and destroying public rail transit systems is just a “conspiracy theory”. When charged and taken to trial, the individuals involved were acquitted.
But I have seen books showing things like the Pacific Electric Railway equipment stacked in giant piles and being burned.
So, I’ve read various rail related publications that seem to disagree with Wikipedia.
John
Why would you bother with all of the siderods and cylinders and stuff? That’s a ton of maintenance and wear and tear. Wouldn’t it make more sense to build a steam turbine, like the Jawn Henry? The coal dust problem seems like a solvable issue.
Ok, reading the Ultimate Steam 21st century link:
Sure 18% thermal efficiency would be an improvement over traditional American steam designs, but clearly not enough of a design improvement for the investors.
Interesting that steam operations continue in Zimbabwe.
John
If you can find a copy of Rails Remembered, vol.4 by Louis Newton (subtitled “Tale of a Turbine”) you will get some pretty good ideas of the issues involved. The problem with steam-electrics historically has been too many levels of expensive complexity, each with its intrinsic losses. By the time you have all that stuff expected to work correctly your ‘big savings’ over simple evolved recip drive is marginal at best, and you now have all the potential issues with traction-motor care and handling to consider. Note that the original Steins PRR turbine was mechanical, and the revised Bowes version was mechanical final drive; the C&O M-1 was a secret Baldwin effort to ‘scoop the PRR’ on entry to what seemed in 1945 to be the bright new era of steam-turbine locomotives… with the results you have seen.
The ‘better’ STE architecture was, as you might expect, from GE, which used proper high pressure and condensing on a steam plant intended to run asynchronously from road speed. Supposedly the bugs in this were largely worked out in the time the units worked ‘up north’ in wartime, but GE did not pursue the idea postwar – probably due to the Alco partnership.
The big issue with steam turbines in general is that they don’t scale well as systems for railroad use without either some design care or special operating circumstances. Even today a ‘practical’ modern STE can’t be much smaller than 8000hp… and we all know how railroads dislike holding up that much capacity when servicing or shopping.
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The actual conspiracy and trial were on something radically different from the NCL arrangements … and one suspiciously close to what Mr. Zane alleges. GM tried the same approach on all those ‘converted trolley lines’ that EMD did in the same time period on railroads that owned their diesels: influencing them to buy not only GM coaches, but only GM parts and services (at sweetheart GM prices and margins). I do not have the proper court reference at hand but I believe the ‘conspiracy’ was indeed recognized as restraint of trade, and GM was found guilty and required to change practices.
That they or other suppliers might buy up key auxiliary and specialty suppliers to the ‘steam locomotive industry’ and preferentially shut them down as a proactive strategy is what we’re looking to establish – as I said, I hadn’t considered it but it might be easy to track.
It is amazing how a simple flip comment with no meaning other than typing practice russles so many feathers. For the record…I have read years back about GM purchasing trolleys with help from Esso, and Firestone to replace them with GM busses to run on Firestone tires, Esso gas, and of course built by GM.
To help sell their new diesels to railways, I also had either read or heard about companies related to GM purchase firms who made important steam loco parts like Nathan and Elesco…than repurpose them, etc. Proof? I have not a clue to their validiity and I never claimed that I did.
Personally I’m a great fan of steam, and if I owned a steam powered railroad in the 40’s or 50’s, I would have chased diesel salesmen from my property with my 12 gauge. but in the end, it is always cost efficiency that wins. Some may have read in my ramblings, videos, or articles that I had two uncles who ran steam…uncle Ike on the Erie and uncle Ed on the PRR/RDG Seashore lines. Mostly I rode with uncle Ike in his K-1 from Allendale (NJ) to Jersey City from 1946 to 1950 and in 1950 his new RS2 which I first thought was really cool. 10 miles down the line, I was bored silly as was Ike. All he talked about was how his missed his K-1. He had several marriages, but kept the same mistress…the K-1 which he personally polished and help maintain it in his off-time. Uncle Ed was similar, but he ran his K-4 until 1954, then retired as did Ike, both missing steam.
I loved my times riding in the cab, and if steam never had died, I would have gone into engine service on a railroad rather than driving airplanes years later. Note: Ike’s K-1 was built in 1905 and I think Ed’s K-4 was built in 1918…can’t remember for sure. My times with both uncles were part of the driving forces which drove both my dad and myself into model railroading.
I had one of those generic, I believe American Heritage, railroad history books.
It contained the photos of the stacked Pacific Electric Railway interurbans being burned, and I recall the authors stating that General Motors was behind it and had replaced them with buses.
Also, I recall reading, I believe it was Fred Frailey, in one of his numerous editorials, stating that in recent years California public agencies had spent many hundreds of millions of dollars reconstructing the Pacific Electric Railway that General Motors had dismantled. They have reconstructed it as a commuter operation on virtually the exact same old rail alignments (the rights-of-way were obviously intact)…a waste of public money to reconstruct something that should have simply remained.
I’ve read other sources that say the same thing as happened to the Pacific Electric also happened in citys like Cleveland and elsewhere. The commuter rail/interurban/trolley systems, whatever you want to call them, were bought up or else heavily “influenced” to trash their infrastructure and replace it all with brand new GM buses.
John
It’s interesting that electric automobiles are being “sold” to the American public.
My fellow engineers are telling me that the batteries to power them actually create MORE hazardous waste (heavy metals that must be disposed of someday at a finite cost) than construction of a traditional gasoline powered automobile. Also, my fellow engineers are telling me that it actually takes MORE fossil fuel resources to construct an electric vehicle, and to “feed” it over it’s lifetime, than ALL the gasoline it would ever use if it were a traditional gasoline powered vehicle! Once again, political interests are making a big “sales pitch” claiming environmental benefits that just simply, factually, are not there.
In engineering school, we are supposed to be taught to see the bigger picture:
Ethanol is supposed to make gasoline burn cleaner, yet the engineering fact is that it takes more gallons of petroleum to actually run the farm equipment, harvest and produce the ethanol than what the yield of ethanol actually is. There is no real gain for all the effort, except corn gets produced and sold.
I, too, love steam power. I rode behind Grand Canyon Railway’s immaculately restored 4960, which I’ve learned was basically converted to burn waste oil, and not even coal. I completely resent that in the name of environmentalism, the Grand Canyon Railway was “forced” to shut down its steam operations, due to alleged air quality concerns…of operating 3 steam engines in the Arizona desert.
So years ago, many cities enacted smoke ordinances, that resulted in sometimes “premature” end of steam power, which was then replaced by hydrocarbon emitting trucks/buses etc. The ONLY difference is that then you don’t physically “see” the pollution, but it’s still there! A good argument could actually be made that with traditional steam locomotion, most of the
I think in the case of most of the smoke-opacity testing that was used to ‘fine’ railroads (cf. the Ringelmann chart) any effect of ‘steam’ in the exhaust plume was both well-recognized and ‘compensated for’. Weird things of dubious actual effect like compressed-air overfire ‘guns’ were used to remove the ‘obvious’ black smoke problem… it does have to be said, though, that many of the more insidious pollutants in internal-combustion exhaust are in steam-locomotive exhaust only by misfiring (or excessive ‘forcing’); this as you may recall was one reason for the brief flowering of interest in external-combustion engines after passage of the EPA in 1970. (See the amusing short ‘Steam Bus’ and look at some discussions of that project on the SACA ‘phorum’ for more).
There could be more than just carbon raining down on the laundry, to be honest: there’s a reason for the smell of soft coal smoke and it ain’t straight carbon. On the other hand, I suspect we can all agree that reciprocating switch-engine power is one of the blindest of blind alleys for external-combustion of any kind, even when a mechanical genius like Carleton Steins set his mind to it.
Interestingly, there is a similar sort of ‘feel-good’ issue in modern diesel-engine standards. The opacity concern in California is based on ‘visible’ soot, which is annoying but not particularly unhealthy as these things go … the result being the idiot inclusion of a ‘diesel particulate filter’ that catches this material (all too much of which is a proximate result of other antipollution technology) and then has to be expensively (and fuel-inefficien
Born in 1968, I’m many years too late.
I never heard of the Ringelmann chart, but I know that steam was most efficient when they were running a clean stack.
Yes, my concern is that many of the nanoparticles we can’t see are likely far worse than steam loco exhaust. Effectively we haven’t accomplished much in all those years since, in air quality.
We learned in school that you can clean up the air, or water, to a certain amount for a “reasonable” or “doable” cost, but then beyond that each incremental improvement costs a lot more for questionnable or diminished gain. The law of diminishing returns holds true in environmental engineering.
I will never forget the article in Trains just a few years back, when the diesels were going from Tier 2 to Tier 3, that plainly said the (un-funded government mandated) cost to rebuild a diesel engine (every 10 years) was going to be $100,000 ADDITIONAL money just to meet Tier 3 emissions. Again, this is an unfunded mandate or tax on the railroads just for the “privilege” of remaining in business, for owning their “roads” outright, and paying taxes on all that owned real estate. So, on a railroad like BNSF, ten thousand locomotives times $100,000 added emissions cost every 10 years is REAL MONEY. Then I am shocked, overwhelmed when certain politicians have the clueless audacity to go on TV and say America has not done anything at all to clean up our emissions or the world’s air quality. Clearly they were not paying attention in economics class.
Indeed, we are among the ONLY few who have made a difference in cleaning up the air. Other countries agree to whatever sounds good but don’t actually implement anything. We are the only ones who have.
Respectfully submitted–
John
The ringelmann chart is just a gray scale. It was actually used to certify on-highway heavy duty diesel engines for emission compliance in 1986.
I had to attend a one-day qualification school to use it properly. I probably still have the certificate for that.
You looked through the hole in the middle at the smoke, and compared it to the gray scale around the center.
[(-D]
It was literally a Fred Flintstone joke. I cannot believe we actually used this.
-Kevin
The big problem with almost all the ‘advanced thermodynamics’ approaches is that they have historically cost more than the ‘beef’ they deliver, in a practical railroad sense. The Franco-Crosti economization was a significant improvement to the practical Rankine cycle on a non-condensing locomotive – but if it is used with high-sulfur coal to a heat-transfer exhaust temperature below the dew point of any of the sulfuric-acid analogues, and you use cheap steel with cheap joining methods, your exchangers may come to resemble Swiss cheese – nearly as quickly as boilers built in the mid-Forties with the wrong kind of ‘advanced’ alloy steel did when actually exposed to road conditions.
I confess I was amused at the assertion that a modern diesel prime mover has fewer moving parts than a reciprocating two-cylinder locomotive of equivalent dbhp, but I suppose you can explain that somehow. The more important point I think you should have made is that in a modern engine all the parts require less regular attention than those in ‘legacy steam’ – but consider that the same materials and advances often apply to steam components, particularly in the details of ‘oilless’ engines or the piston side of an asynchronous compound.
Keep in mind that the criteria Porta mentioned do not revolve around pure thermodynamic efficiency, and in many cases shouldn’t. The one that should most matter is net dollars per ton-mile, and the considerations of service infrastructure become much more important now that things are ‘reversed’ and the entire structure of efficient steam maintenance is lost, while sometimes very expensive diesel-centric modifications to plant have been made. Much of this is relevant to prospective operation of the T1
When did they go to slurry fuel? While I was watching it, they were touting ‘mine run’ coal – a ridiculous thing on any advanced steam locomotive at any time, and a damn false economy – in those modularly-handled ‘coal packs’, fired more or less normally if autonomically via some form of stoker. Their boiler never got to the point it would be efficient on slurry firing, either; you’d need a full reverse pass or more like a modern package boiler to recover the latent heat of condensation in the combustion water. Or go blind watching ‘the heat go up the stack’ or whatever.
Interestingly this is right at the point Foster-Wheeler was patenting their fluidized-bed locomotive boiler – something Mr. Mock might find interesting, especially in light of what would have to be done to it to make it practical in a contemporary railroad context. The fuel choices there (and the options would currently involve an interesting array of clean-coal alternatives) did not require slurrying the fuel either for transport or introduction. Getting proper luminous flame out of the thing was something of a different story…
There were a huncha buncha other reasons the ACE3000 would have failed, so the point stands, uncorrectable by me. The ACE5000 as ‘shaping up’ at cancellation time might not have been quite as lame, but wasn’t anybody’s answer either.
Overmod–
Thank you for that information. I’m a civil engineer–because we don’t have to worry about things that move other than vehicle loadings on bridges–so our required knowledge of mathematics is much simpler and we don’t have to know rotational dynamics very well (which is used as a weedout course anyway). I must confess to barely passing thermodynamics, as it was required to graduate, and most civils didn’t do so well there. So I’m sorta following you, but not totally.
I was trying to keep things pretty general: steam power was extremely maintenance intensive, with easily more than 100 spots on a big articulated that needed lubrication before each and every run (even considering mechanical lubricators were in use). It was said that roads like Norfolk and Western and Nickel Plate Road had “dieselized” without yet having actually dieselized because they developed state of the art steam servicing facilities that in BOTH cases (and I think UP also) could have an engine coaled, watered, fully checked out and lubricated and ready to go in less than 2 hours. All of that is amazing when you consider the work involved to get them ready to go in any weather at any time of day.
I do think the advanced steam power might, might, have had a chance if not for all the coal/oil/water/ash/below engine inspection facilities having been completely demolished, and the tremendous cost that would be required to begin to put a system like what the railroads had back into place. Remember, it had been more than 100 years over which those facilities had accumulated to the level that existed in 1950. It would be most impractical, and extremely expensive, to begin to rebuild that infrastructure today or at any time since.
Track alignments that were altered as those facilities were removed would have to be re-aligned yet again…
Had the railroads thought ahead, instead of
Most of the solutions for ‘modern’ steam – and this goes further back than the stuff I did – don’t involve the large fixed infrastructure that was more ‘appropriate’ in the days when large numbers of dedicated people could use cheaply built but complicated large plant. Note that the functions of lubritoria are easily achieved with little more than a set of appropriate guns, hoses, and tanks hooked up to a source of 140psi – hint, hint – compressed air. This can be mounted on a sled, trailer, swap-body or truck. The advent of M-942 grease lubrication of roller bearings and appropriate long-term seals, which of course is mainstream for car maintenance now, made much of the ‘care and feeding’ of large specialized roller bearings much easier and more direct, and in my opinion will solve most of the fretting issues that might be associated with oil lubrication when a locomotive is stored for a period of time ‘loaded’ on its own wheels. An interesting range of hard and thermal-barrier coatings and methods to apply, maintain, and inspect them are available to reduce service issues for things like rings and glands. I am currently working on seeing how cerium steels adapt to high-rate repetitive flexing (as found in Timken thin-section rods).
The key insight Tom Blasingame had was similar to what’s made hydrogen ‘practical’ as a transi
Nobody ever said it had to run on coal, it can run on Torrified Biomass as well. It has the same energy, density, and material handling properties as coal, without the pollutants.
It is in fact somewhat better, as depending to an extent on the ‘feedstock’ the plant ash has some of the necessary fluxing content that “clean coal” techniques would have to add with separate additives like dolomite.
There was an interesting, if strange at times, proposal from SRI/CSR to use the last surviving big ATSF Hudson (3463) as a kind of science project to burn torrefied fuel … and set a speed record above 130mph. This led to some decidedly interesting preservation concerns and legal action, and (unfortunately to me as a steam technologist!) will likely not come to pass. But most of what would be necessary to fire an engine that size, at the necessary mass flow, was worked out. And yes, firing with that fuel would have been practical … now, guiding and stability of that engine at that speed, and some of the other details (like the steam tracting, which was almost preternaturally wretched on the 3460 class), are quite different concerns…
This leads me to wonder if I should start up where I stopped building a model of the ‘modifications’ … hmmmm. There’s the thing our OP ought to think about doing with his overprint. The arrangements to fire with torrefied fuel, and do functional streamlining with induced slipstream drafting and Franco-Crosti economization, and the cylinders, tracting, rods and other gear appropriate for higher rotational speed…
I can line him up with a source to study Glaze’s balancing book, if he wants an accurate thing to model to reach high rotational speed…