Sitting here, looking through the plants on my window and trying to imagine the reason my house is 60 degrees is because I can afford to cool it, rather than can’t afford to heat it…
I was thinking about the 3 main ways of a/c’ing a car-ice, steam and mechanical. Mechanical refrigeration works well enough in all climates but I’m curious about the other two. Could ice cooling of cars work in extreme heat (AT&SF in Arizona, for example)? How about humidity (IC in Louisiana)? What about steam cooling? As a layman, I just can’t imagine it up to any more than a mild climate (B&M or MEC). Air conditioning didn’t really get widespread until the 1930’s, so there was some room for experiment but did anyone run (or order/build) any major fleets of steam or ice cooled equipment much into the postwar years?
The Santa Fe used steam activated air conditioning on the majority of their lightweight streamlined cars and never had a problem. The secret was to maintain constant steam pressure through the system.
On the other hand the SP had tried steam injector system and had nothing but problems so they switched to mechanical.
Ice was probably the least used in the lightweight cars , it was a carryover from the heavyweight era and saw very limited use in the lightweight era.
But since the railroads operated so many heavyweights they maintained iceing facilites almost to Amtrak.
The big problem Amtrak had in the beginning was operating cars from one railroad on the rails of another. As carmen were not familiar with all of the different types of A/C. That is why ex Santa Fe cars on ex Santa fe rails caused no problems but they certainly did when operating on SP or similar roads unfamiliar with the steam injector system.
…Interesting subject. Someone please explain how steam or steam injector system operated…
I understand refrigeration can be accomplished in quite a few ways…A member in our family had a natural gas refrigerator {with no moving parts in mechanism}, back in the very early 40’s. I suppose steam could perform the process as the heat from N G could.
Or did the steam rotate a compressor to operate the Freon process…?
No Freon in the '30s and 40’s. These were mostly ammonia based systems which can either run using an ammonia compressor (mechanical) or steam heated ammonia expansion - similar to natural gas operated systems. I don’t know which the RRs used.
A quick Google of “Steam Ejector Air Conditioning” turned up some info on the subject.
A steam ejector is essentially a pump – a vacuum pump – where the force of steam expanding through a supersonic nozzle instead of a piston or vane compressor supplies the pumping force. Air conditioner cycles rely on some kind of pump acting on a working fluid to make an air conditioning cycle, and the steam ejector is that pump.
Since the ejector draws a vacuum, the evaporation of water in that vacuum draws off heat to supply the “cold” for the air conditioner. The rejection of heat takes place downstream of the ejector where the water condenses at atmospheric pressure, rejecting heat at the elevated temperature of the atmospheric boiling/condensing of water. The condensing of water allows for a closed cycle. The working fluid is water, where you evaporate it at reduced pressure to get the cold and condense it at normal pressure to reject the heat. A Freon airconditioner evaporates at normal pressure to get the cold and condenses at elevated pressure (the AC compressor pressure) to get the heat rejection. The difference has to do with different boiling points for water and Freon.
The steam ejector essentially has no moving parts – I guess it does, but the pumping action is the steam nozzle instead of an electric motor driving a piston or vane pump so the main part is non-moving. The steam ejector is probably less thermally efficient than having a Diesel generator provide electricity to run a Freon compressor, but its simplicity may make up for that. The steam ejector was used by the Santa Fe, which had to keep passengers comfortable in desert climate.
The story I heard in Trains in the article within the past couple years where they talked about the California trains is that Amtrak had steam ejector cars operated by SP crews who weren’t taught this sort of thing. You have to keep a head of steam in the steam generator in the heat of summer, and I guess steam gener
Do you really want to know about using ice to air condition (cool) Passenger cars The C.P.R. in Canada used this system right up until they purchased a fleet of Budd cars for the “Canadian” and still mixed trains used some of the old “varnish” with ice for a long time after. I should know when the last train used ice to cool the coaches, it’s much later than you think.(EX-ice gang rat)
If I recall correctly the Pennsylvania used ice to cool its P 70 coaches which were used between New York and Washington until after WW-II. As long as the outdoor temperature or the outdoor humidity weren’t too high the ice did a good job of cooling the car.
The way the ice cooling worked was the air from the car was passed through the ice chamber where it was cooled and dehumidified. Once the was cooled by the ice its temperature might be too low so it may have been passed over steam coils to reheat it so it wouldn’t be too cold.
Paul…Heating a house now with the high oil and natural gas costs probably is higher than heating with electric…We have a total electric home and oil and gas customers around us have been crying the blues with the increase in price of those fuels. It use to be the other way around but believe not so now…{We have ceiling cable heat}.
Freon, or R-12, came out about 1932. If I remember correctly, DuPont was the first one with it. It was the best thing to use back then. I think the major downfall with the ammonia system is what would happen if there was an accident, you could kill passengers with the stuff. R-12 leaking in small amounts would not be as bad for you. R-12 systems was what Pullman started to use on their mechanical systems about 1932-33. Thats about when they started to rebuild the heavyweights, and A/C was a big thing back then in the passenger comfort end of things. They refined it over the years. Some cars used the Spicer drive to drive the compressor, some used 32 volt and 64 volt DC. Some used 4 cylinder Waukesha Ice Engines to drive the compressor, and have cold water in cars. These systems used alot of Freon, I have an IC book that says that a typical heavyweight coach used about 60 pounds of the stuff to make it all work. Quite a big expense now if you wanted to fill up this type of system. And of course, it eats the ozone layer up. Mike
…In checking on the Freon data: Find that in 1930 General Motors and Dupont formed a Co. to produce Freon. Co. named Kinetic Chemical Co. By 1935 GM had produced 8 million Frigidaire refrigerators filled with the product Freon…!
Wish electric heat were the bargain, but here in Wisconsin I paid $1.15 per therm of gas (rougly the same as a gallon of propane, 2/3 gallon of oil), paid $0.12 per kwHr electric. Gas had been about $0.60/therm and electric about $0.075/kwHr, so it seems that while gas has doubled, electric has gone up a lot too. That gas price is actually pretty cheap because we had a really mild winter so far (although winter is stretching out kind of late), while this $0.12 electric seems like a permanent rate increase.
The explanation is that gas is used to generate electric, but I saw a state publication that in Wisconsin it is only a small percentage. Maybe the price of coal, rail shipping of coal, and everything else has gone up in price. If electric hadn’t gone up so much I would be thinking ground-source heat pump.
In terms of crazy systems for rail AC, the Santa Fe HiLevels had these little Diesel engines in them – just like a reefer truck trailer or a reefer freight car. Inside, you couldn’t here it, but out on the train platform, the thing made quite the racket. You would think that sticking a Diesel engine in every passenger car would be expensive, but they do it with freight reefers, so how bad could that be? Are any HiLevels’ still on Amtrak? If so, did they pull the Diesels out to go with HEP?
Years ago I watched workers exchange a diesel / gen set out of a high level passenger car at Sanford…{auto train}, so the high levels at that point were being powered by such at that time…
Electric rates here…{central Indiana}, have not increased for some time…Our budget is about $110 / mo. year around…roughly 1500 sq ft…Total energy used in the house…heat, a/c, and all the rest. We are cheaper here than oil and gas…Much of Indiana’s electric is generated by coal. And as for the winter being better than normal…It has been: We’re about 4-500 heating degree days behind what is “normal”.