Informative and accurate reply/
Thank you for this very comprehensive answer!
https://mi3ch.livejournal.com/2637409.html?page=2 :
"After the materials on the Hitler super train were declassified, similar projects appeared in the USSR.
Deputy Director of the Institute of Complex Transport Problems of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Soviet scientist Vasily Zvonkov, in particular, wrote: “The existing generally accepted railroad gauge in our country - 1524 millimeters - was proposed by one of the builders of the St. Petersburg-Moscow road, engineer Melnikov. Already today it cannot satisfy us. A track gauge of 3 - 5 meters will allow us to build significantly more lifting wagons and use locomotives with a capacity of 40 - 50 thousand horsepower to ensure a speed of 250 - 350 kilometers per hour. The question of using nuclear reactors on such locomotives will be greatly facilitated. After all, as you know, only a significant weight of biological protection prevents nuclear locomotives from entering our roads today,
The throughput capacity of BAM has been exhausted for today. The main problem of the inhabitants of the Far East is isolation from the center of Russia.
Nuclear reactors on trains are too dangerous. Today the train from Moscow to Vladivostok takes 7 days. At a speed of 250 km / h, this time will be reduced to one and a half days</
“At the same time, there was an active discussion of the construction of the Pan American Intercontinental Highway to connect the Americas, and with it the idea of an intercontinental broad-gauge railway was considered. It was supposed to go from Alaska to Argentina and turn both continents into a single economic zone. Nuclear locomotives were the best fit for this project. Soon, negotiations began with the creators of the X-12 on the development of a similar locomotive for an ultra-wide gauge.”
Not content with deploying liquidized weapons-grade uranium across the general system of transportation, they want to send it through a variety of Central and South American nation-states, including one then largely influenced by Juan and Evita…[:O]
"Will it be so far in a few decades that railway giants, super trains of dimensions still unimaginable today, ‘ships on rails’, pulled by nuclear locomotives, speed through the Russian steppes? Many technicians in the Soviet Union think it is possible, yes they have already worked out the plans for it. Because the solution of the traffic problem, especially the transport of huge amounts of goods through the endless expanse of the Russian, but above all the Siberian area, has become one of the most urgent tasks in the Soviet Union. The railway network of the Soviet Union currently has a route length of about 160,000 kilometers (USA 380480). Since the railroad is still the most important means of transport in the Soviet Union, work is ongoing to expand it. However, while in most other countries in the world one only deals with increasing the speed of travel (by strengthening the substructure and using stronger locomotives), increasing the comfort of passengers and improving the loading and unloading systems, new types are to be found in the Soviet Union Railways are built that would be able to cope with all traffic requirements in the foreseeable future. These plans - as fantastic as they may sound to traffic experts - undoubtedly have a real basis in the Soviet Union, in fact they are becoming a necessity there, considering that this country has only a relatively weak network of well-developed roads and motorization despite all efforts, will not have reached the level of the western world by a long way.
The planned super railway - it definitely deserves this name - should have a track width of 4500 mm. That is about three times the width of today’s standard gauge, which is 1435 mm and is used on 74 percent of all railway lines in the world. (This dimension can probably only be traced back to the fact that at the time of the first railways the axis length of the stagecoach was p
See if this makes the link clickable:
https://www.mosafilm.de/CF/heftbesprechung/hobby/5706/superzug.html
Note the reference to 200km/h stability here, too.
Is it just me or does that Russian nuclear locomotive have styling cues based on the PRR T1? Quite apart from the “duplex” arrangement of driving wheels, look at the front casing and the shape of the casing over the wheels…
Peter
That video has some of the most splendid video quality I’ve ever seen in a YouTube video – even before we consider the subject matter. It’s well worth watching, and I think we should encourage his ‘channel’ with likes and subscribes.
You do know that was CGI?
CGI can illustrate things that no longer exist as well as things that only exist in the mind of the creator.
It would be interesting to see some of the more outlandish proposals that were never built but turned up in Wiener’s “Articulated Locomotives”.
I was referring to the video clips at the beginning. The MSTS was typical 2011 quality, no more, no less.
An actual render in modern CGI would be much closer to ‘photorealism’, both in ray-tracing lighting effects and resolution. See the 3D derived-pointcloud models that were produced for the T1 Trust about a half-decade ago, but in color…
I enjoyed the video! Authentic footage where available (and the rendition was excellent) and CGI where needed. A pretty good balance and a great end product.
I definately gave it a “Like!”
Question - On compound non-mallet engines. Are the low pressure cylinders quartered on the same phase as the high pressure cylinders?
It would have to be that way on Vauclain compounds and probably that way on cross compounds and D&H 1403.
Thing is that it would require 180-degree opposition on each side to get the engine to balance, and that is manifestly not true of a Vauclain compound (I presume you mean type 1, with the high-pressure and low-pressure cylinders outside, driving on a common crosshead). There are illustrations on the Web of the special piston valve and convoluted port and passage arrangement that is at the heart of this method of compounding, and although the porting and operation are complex to analyze, the system was certainly capable of developing near- if not actual world’s-fastest speeds in the early 1890s.
I think the inside connections on a Cole balanced compound are quartered at something like 135 degrees relative to the (quartered) outside. Early compounds did not use the analogy to loop scavenging to lower effective HP backpressure going into the receiver, and I’d think dynamic balance would be a more important concern that equalizing MEP… especially with the actual condensation of LP steam in the receiver and then during expansion in the LP cylinders, which was often far more abysmal than manufacturers and designers seem to have realized.
The ‘answer’ of course can be seen first in effective steam-streamlined passages and superheating in modern compounds, and then in the ‘booster valve’ applied to some of the N&W Y-class engines (which of course were only circumstantially and accidentally ‘in pnase’ HP to LP). I still have no hard information on whether the LP reheat ‘superheater’ on 160 A1 was actually useful or not. In my opinion the ‘best’ approach is still that proposed by Chapelon, which is like a modulated version of the booster valve: high-pressure saturated or superheated steam is preferentially injected into the receiver at acceptable determined HP back-pressure excursion, so that not only the MEP but the instantaneous pressure on the LP pistons over the effective range of their stroke ’