BaldACDC that’s very interesting for all the forum’s community. Never write a pm about it, we are all tense to get to know the latest news about it.
What make is that phone of Overmod? What is your’s? Where did you buy it, what did it cost and where is it where you use it? And why? You know, some people always have important things to tell, even if they have nothing to say. And: it’s all so directly connected with the PRR Duplex types, your phone surely is one duplex too. You should go around and set up everybody’s phone because there is no-one like you to know how it’s done.
Great stuff, keep on forever and confiscate this thread for the best of everybody.
Ah, we admire you, Oldy Baldy, thank you, oh thank you forever, …(deleted)
There really isn’t one. As was explained to me a number of years ago, Kalmbach made a great push into developing site features especially for phones (and then tablets and such) when the iPhone took off after 2007 and ‘handheld devices’ looked like the Next Big Thing for how target communities were going to be accessing Kalmbach.
Then this stopped being a priority, and then became actively unsupported. The money went into lots of ads on devices with more screen real estate to display them, and common features that would run effectively on every kind of device. It was in the context of the failure of phone access to profile information or PMs that I received the reply that ‘there wasn’t enough return on investment for Kalmbach to spend tech money fixing free resources’ (they didn’t say, but I understood the development budget was on more and better dancing ad serving and ‘marketing ingenuity’)
To my knowledge the ‘reset problem’ only occurs with mobile connection – my suspicion is that they don’t store the page in the local client on a phone, so when they do something that refreshes the Internet page, it blanks or ‘initializes’ the text window.
I expect stage 3 of the trains.com site revisions at Kalmbach to fix it, if for no other reason that it will return mobile devices to using some kind of ‘supported’ code even if the new site isn’t “designed for mobile”. I don’t think I will object to that even if navigating or reading content on small screens is inconvenient as a result.
I’m surprised that I am evidently one of the nobodies that has not commented. Where was I when this was posted? Now I have to get hold of a copy. look it over, and see what we have.
It certainly seems right for the 1944 version. I copied side and end elevations from material at the Hagley, and I suspect many additional drawings were made before the V1 was formally abandoned at PRR.
I have absolutely no idea how many versions of the V1 were designed. I thought it was the “finalized” version of V1, even though it doesn’t look like something that could have been called “Triplex”. I note Hagley uploaded some new old pics to their amazing digital archive recently, I can only hope that they will upload all files related to the PRR V1 there.
For an engine that gigantic, it wasn’t easy for any designer to create a standout streamlining for it. The 44 version looks like a huge whale get stranded on the beach.
My reconstruction of the ‘turbine research’ so far is roughly as follows:
‘Triplex’ was originally a Loewy idea from the mid-'30s, partly related to questions of cab-forward running with coal firing. He divided the “locomotive” into three parts, a bit like a Garratt’s arrangement, with the boiler and engine one unit, the fuel bunker another, the water a third. As I recall Loewy’s discussion (it can be found at the Hagley) these could be coupled in any order, subject to a couple of relatively obvious constraints like keeping a stoker worm between coal fuel and the firing table inside the firebox.
Steins adopted the term for any locomotive with this general arrangement, apparently extending it to having drive wheels under various points, which was not as I recall in Loewy’s scheme. In Steins’ original mechanical-turbine patent there are, in fact, large drivers visible as in the S2; this gets changed to the familiar “4-8-4-8” rather quickly in the following patent (look at the filing dates, not the issue dates).
MEANWHILE along comes the Steamotive development, which became ‘mature’ as a technology around the end of 1936. Steins does a ‘triplex’ arrangement for this roughly comparable to the evolving V1, but now optimized to the oil-fired electric-drive system. The Steamotive idea starts to show its issues around 1940, as Duffy claims; the likely thing being in part the need for oil fuel (with low vanadium, etc) which was by then recognized to be much more efficiently run in diesels on an Eastern road like PRR that is heavily coal-centric.
What gets greenlighted in 1944, notably for the same heavy and high-speed service as the Q2s, is the mechanical turbine with two four-driver-axle underframes separated by the firebox, and a modified Q2 boiler facing backward. The 8000 nominal hp reflects the Q2 test-plant results extrapolated to the more efficient (at road speed) turbine dr
Rendering of PRR “Triplex”, patented by Carleton K. Steins from PRR in 1944, streamlining was probably designed by Raymond Loewy. Note the position of the front cylinder and wheel arrangement in the rendering is different from the patent drawing, let alone other design details including the truck design of the coal tender.
In the patent, it is basically a cab forward PRR Q1 with a reversed boiler, attached to a coal tender and water tender. I don’t understand the advantage and selling point of such a design for PRR’s system, like how such a design could “attain increased pulling power with minimization of slippage of the drivers incident to starting; to facilitate travel of track curves at high speeds without attendant unbalance”.
The rendering is quite attractive though, it gives conventional reciprocating steam locomotive a modern look.
An observed issue is weight transfer at starting, where the drawbar is usually higher than the axle centers. This unloads the front drivers. Moving the coal load out of the trailing tonnage reduces that; now that it is in buff it can be used to increase ‘downforce’ on what is now the firebox end of the frame, and the drawbar at the ‘trailing’ end can now be made lower if desired
This could be a couple of things, perhaps the most significant of which is that the frame of the heavy ‘locomotive’ is no longer used for primary guiding; the 6 to 8 axles under the coal bunker now do this, with much improved lateral than a typical engine truck can provide and a longer time to effect steering.
The other key difficulty is steering the rigid wheelbase, which in a normal design puts stress on the leading coupled flanges. This design steers the flanges much better, and in fact now provides a separate ‘engine truck’ that can be optimized to further reduce leading-flange impact and wear.
At least such were some of the advantages claimed.
In an article about turbine locomotives M. C. Duffy sustains that the turbo electric V1 was one unit locomotive, without separate tender, “an exceptionally large tank-engine”, “an elongated version of M1 class locomotive component”. Did the project evolved from a one unit +tender configuration (visible in Stein patent) to a one unit without separate tender? In the photo above it seems to be no separate tender.
This sounds almost as if he’s conflating some version of the V1 with something like Bulleid’s Leader (which was billed as a replacement for an M tank).
It is possible that an early version of a turboelectric locomotive (I.e. pre-Steamotive or Triplex) could have involved an M1 boiler instead of ‘something larger’ and have been designed as a large single unit. I have not seen any evidence of this, but I don’t claim to know Mr. Duffy’s sources – I should add that I joined the Newcomen Society to get access to some of his articles (e.g. on the Velox locomotive) so I do not and will not disparage what you have read.
Note that any turbo electric locomotive of a size of interest to PRR would involve a significantly bigger, and probably more modern, boiler than an M1’s. At this same general time, the duplex ‘successor’ to the Ms (which you could think of as 5/4ths an M1a) was being developed – this of course being the Q1 with all its fascinating detail design. The point I want you to be thinking about going forward is not so much the horsepower but the associated water rate for a noncondensing locomotive.
By the time a ‘buildable’ version of the V1 is design-frozen (in 1944) it is mechanical (without the conversion losses of turboelectric drive) and uses a slightly-modified Q2 boiler (remember the HP achieved by the Q2 on the test plant) to achieve the nominal 8000hp – BUT look at the water rate associated - necessarily associated - with that horsepower out of any turbine drive. There is no way to package the necessary water anywhere on a single unit using a nose bunker of adequate size followed by that boiler - hence the sensible adoption of a water-only tender as part of the ‘triplex’ arrangement according to Steins.
Presumably for wartime work (e.g. had Operation Majestic been necessary at full scale) the V1s could be operated with multiple tenders, but I have not seen any design confir
This is interesting in that it represents just what Duffy describes, but with mechanical drive in Steins’ wheel arrangement.
Alben is a Westinghouse guy (this is why so many of his patents show up as assigned to CBS!) and they are turbine and final drive guys – look carefully as you read and note he’s not claiming the “4-8-4-8” arrangement as part of his claims, only as a preferred embodiment.
Note how the patent specifically refers to fuel and water carried on the single unit (presumably as pictured, complete with small turret cab). With the boiler dimensions pictured this would be a difficult job.
MEANWHILE it turns out that GE was apparently in active development of a 6700hp turboelectric using pulverized coal firing, which progressed to the point in 1947 that a test boiler was constructed; cost per mile was calculated at over twice that of ‘comparable’ diesels and the project was abruptly terminated after Deasy’s replacement by you-know-who.
I know nothing about the technical details of this proposal. Who does?
That is a very interesting information. There are any drawings about it? It was ordered by PRR?
A little out of topic, the only giant diesel locomotives from cab unit age were Baldwin Centipede at about 270 tonnes and 6000HP Baldwin prototype with 8 diesel engiens at 310 tonnes. I know also John Yellot 3750 hp gas turbine locomotive project at 288 tonnes, 28 m long, of course not diesel. There were any other GIANT diesel cab locomotives projects?
Highly likely there are. This is out of Chris Baer’s chronology of the PRR for 1947, and he is with the Hagley Museum in Delaware that has Cover’s and the other surviving files of the contemporary PRR motive-power department.
The Essl locomotive really, really ought to have been ‘proceeded with’ but (reading between the lines) the el-cheapo capitalists controlling the Westinghouse/Baldwin takeover were either not interested in or incompetent at financing the very expensive first cost of fully-‘populated’ Essl locomotives (in favor of cheaper truss-carbody trucked designs using big slow-turning tugboat-derived engines). In my opinion the sensible design change… which contemporary Bakdwin build quality probably would NOT have delivered… would be to have the modular gensets feed some common bus architecture to the TMs rather than have all the fun of governing a full 750hp swing per individual axle… but things did not get that far before the experiment turned comical by putting tugboat engines in a 120mph chassis, connecting everything with hoses and driving it with combinations of cheap V-belts, and running the wiring safely under the floor out of sight with no drains.
Let’s all go to live in Ground Fault City, shall we? People trying to run the production PRR Centipedes sure did… not as bad as their turbine-bound C&O counterparts, of course, but for similar reasons from the same nitwits…
Yellott’s BCR was a scam. He was hoping that evolved technology (Hilsch tubes, etc.) would eventually solve the ash problems going into the gas turbine. Of course the least investigation into the mass flow and gas path involved will tell you of course there isn’t a cost-effective way to do that… but Yellott thought he had ‘live ones’ in the various railroads that wanted
Thank you very much for this very complete answer!
In Kiefer 1947 report there is a stuning photo with a stunning 5000 hp electric "2-C-C-2 locomotive project intended for NYC line.
There is also a mention about a 3000 HP AT&Santa Fe gas turbine locomotive intended for passenger trains. Any more info (weight, lenght etc) or drawings about this project?
I also think it is a pitty Essl 6000hp locomotive project hasn’t materialized. It would have been maybe one of the greatest diesels. An awesome design if not riveted. For me a giant locomotive is only a single unit locomotive, not a multiple units At least for diesel it was only a convention that 3 units coupled togheter are a single locomotive. Anyway, visually such a lash up lacks the unity, we don t perceive it as a single locomotive.
It took quite a bit of work to get to the story behind that electric, and why I think it was a full-size plate, larger than any other picture in the report, but not a line about it was in the text.
I am winging it a bit here, but there was serious consideration to electrifying a substantial part of the Water Level Route… not where you or I would expect it, including the poky third-rail section from GCT to Harmon, but west of Albany. This both eliminating the issues with West Albany hill and providing much easier sustained high speed without engine changes to the west. Interestingly I don’t recall any proposal to wire the Hudson River part which I think was still 4 tracks with tight clearances and many limiting curves; I suspect ultimately that section would have come to be be wired on the overhead system BUT leaving the third-rail arrangement on the south end, perhaps all the way to Harmon, as it would be prohibitive to try to wire the Park Avenue tunnel and GCT approaches.
What killed it was the same thing that definitively killed the Harrisburg to Pittsburgh electrification: the advent of practical diesel-electrics.
I am hazy on whether the ATSF 3000hp turbine was actually built as such or whether it developed into the Baldwin-Westinghouse ‘Blue Goose’ prototype. I seem to remember two different carbodies using that same four-B-truck arrangement (standardizing on multiples of a B truck was a hot idea in the late '40s – have you seen the drawing of a PRR sharknose electric with EIGHT B trucks under it?) and the thing that comes to mind regarding it is Allis-Chalmers as the turbine developers. Perhaps very similar in internal arrangement to the ‘3000kW’ version of this:
I have been reading Hirsimaki’s book again to find out if this project is mentioned, but I found nothing. What I found is something not related but you guys might also interested, which is the idea of PRR Q3:
“The railroad continued developing duplexes, though. It collaborated with Alco in the fall of 1946 on a 4-4-6-6 “Q3” with a welded boiler. Alco had the only furnace large enough to heat treat (to relieve welding stresses) a boiler of that size. Most likely boilers would have been purchased from Alco with Altoona building the engines. Preliminary plans were drawn up in November 1946, but the project died as the emphasis shifted to Diesels.”
PRR wasn’t satisfied with the overall performance of the Q2, especially the lack of superiority of the Q2 when compared to the J1, they wanted something even better and bigger!
Q2 locomotive is a giant of 5 meters height (to the top of the structure, without salient smoke stacks), so a larger Q3 could have been even more impressive!
