I had the pleasure in watching the preparations for 611’s move last week and today the thrill of watching her pass by, on the Trains web cam, which was sited close to the Lynchburg - Salem turnpike. The interviews were quite interesting to me while we awaited the train and luckily, apart from the wind, it seems it was a lovely day.
Grateful thanks to Trains Magazine, Jim Wrinn. the young lady and helpers for a very unique spectacle. I look forward to the Classic Trains Special.
Now, before bedtime (it is presently 20.17 UTC here), to look at the Roanoke cam.
18 trailing cars, including the “canteen” water tender. Would Amtrak dispatch 3 P42’s for that?
It seemed the locomotive was working hard? Was the valve rod dropped down for “forward quadrant”? It seems a little hard to tell as the engine flashed by and also with Baker valve gear.
Was some of that smoke “for show”? It seems there was some stoking to darken the smoke just as they passed the crossing? The pictures of J’s I have seen show a rather clean stack.
Were all of those train watchers on public property or on private property with permission. What about those people crossing the tracks towards the end? This gets batted around and argued, but I would like us in the railfan community to make the extra effort to set a good example regarding safety crossing tracks and respecting the private property of the railroads, especially from the safety point of view.
There are only two real possibilities for the smoke: inattention or purposeful. Given the circumstances, my money would be heavily placed on the latter choice. For some strange reason I can’t quite understand, the practise is to lay on the black stuff thickly for photo opportunities. Somewhere along the way, a great many people accepted that properly fired steam locomotives should belch volumes of smoke, and that gets passed on to successive generations. I don’t like it one bit, but I am one of relatively few contrarians it seems.
The locomotive was still cycling near 3-4 rpm as it rounded the curve, so the cut-off ought to have been somewhere between 20-30% at that point in the grade and climbing by increments of about 20 every 10 seconds, or so. As its HP dropped off rapidly, the increased cut-off became more important in smaller units of time.
Paul, the elderly gentleman scampering across the tracks caught my attention as well, mostly because I know many older people think they are more physically adept than they really are, especially when excited (who hasn’t seen the wedding videos on youtube where some rather awkward and potentially dangerous events take place). I watched for more of the same, but when the locomotive rounded the bend, I watched it and failed to look for more opportunists or people who couldn’t make up their minds. I didn’t notice any, and felt better that the gentleman seemed to dash before the locomotive could be seen bearing down on him about 300 yds away. It’s the late dashers who make me hold my breath. A dropped shoe, hesitation to retrieve it, a dropped lens from a carrier not zipped shut (the one his dad gave him prior to his death), a dragged toddler whose mother’s hand can’t quite maintain his squirmy hand in hers, yada yada… I don’t want to think about it.
They used to do that coming southbound out of my hometown of Bucyrus, Ohio. They’d hit the straight stretch between Bucyrus and Marion and just pour on the smoke. Awesome sight to see! On south of town, though, where she was “cruising”, the smoke was rather light, as seen below on a northbound trip south of Bucyrus at Caldwell Road.
if you look at old pictures , steam used to be fired ‘smokey’ in the States generally and pretty heavily so . If this was improving steaming is at least questionable for the ‘darker’ cases since it increased the percentage of but partly burnt fuel and increased CO content which meant a loss of heat development by increase of feed rate . As with the infamous ‘grate limit’ there always was a limit to how much steam you could generate and this said , the crews in their daily struggle to handle loads that in doubt were rather up to the engine’s limit than leaving a significant margin of power reserve were definitely more concerned about getting their train over the line than with environmental aspects or saving fuel . So in doubt , tendency clearly was to ‘fill the box’ rather than take a risk of fierce blast of draughting tearing up a hole in the fire .
Then again , much of the coal used had a lot of fines and volatile contents and was ‘smokey’ to fire to start with . If that latter aspect has since been improved substantially I just don’t know . With steam tours , true , there is a deplorable tendency again to put on plenty for show - disregarding not only environmental aspects ( and raining lots of cinders onto cars and travellers , too ) but also doing no good for boiler flues & tubes and superheater elements , smokebox upkeep .
Was the engine working hard ? I beg your pardon , she was , wasn’t she ! There is a common tradition of calling it ‘effortlessly’ if a steam loco did live up to demands , even if just so .
Back off Mr. Jim, Juniatha’s a friend of mine and I always enjoy reading her posts and her technical insights. She’s got a better brain for this stuff than I’ll ever have.
I don’t want to lose her off this Forum due to petty sniping, and I daresay neither does anyone else.
To that I will say if anyone gets all huffy-puffy and leaves because of something anyone says on these forums, then they shouldn’t be here in the first place.
Now, it should have been very obvious that “stdgauge” had the smoke problem nailed to begin with. There once was a time when black smoke was a no-no and could result in disipline to the crew member. Sadly, the practice of a clear stack seems to have changed just to placate railfans. But, since all of this smoke is probably due more to inexperiance let’s cut the fireman some slack for now.
Further more, somehow speed got tangled up in this thread and I will beg to differ with Juniatha’s premise that the singled up rods of the 611 preculde it’s ability to run 100mph or more. And let’s keep in mind that even though she has never seen videos of J’s running 100mph doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Keep in mind the timeframe and that movie equipment was not a part of peoples everyday household equipment.
That was a “Bulleid Pacific” not a smooth riding N&W Class J!
The smoke ‘problem’ is easily enough resolved by observing the exhaust in the video from just before the engine reaches the crossing. It may be a bit difficult to tell with the strong backlighting, but significant smoke then would be even more markedly dark…
The “issue” with the rod redesign has been covered here before. It is not difficult to calculate the augment forces for the original and redesigned layouts. I doubt there would be any difficulty in achieving 100 mph safely with the redesigned rods, as the N&W staff indicated at the time of the redesign. But I also have no doubt the balancing (and overbalance conditions) were better with the original layout than the revision, as was indicated.