A turbo generator fitted to ehe cylinder exhaust (this would greatly improvr the thermodynamic efficiency) could be used to power traction/dynamic brake motors fitted to the tender /auxillary tender & or equiptment carwhen the engine is cylinder ltmited & during dynamic breaking to pre heat the water & liquid fuel if used . Also banks of storage batteries could be fitted to the equipt. car & re charged during bresking motors could also be fitted to the trailing truck .Also modern coatings such as thermal barrier , thermally conductive & anti frictioncoatings would be of benefit. Steam power is entirely possible,propable & maybe fesable . We won’t know untill somebodybuilds & tests a one off prototype, fuel possibilities are practically endless ranging from fossil fuels , mineral ,organic,synthetics ,waste products to CNG/LPG & etc A hybrid steam electric is far from dead
Rube Goldberg would have loved you! OTOH, even in the transition era the master mechanics and road foremen of engines would have raced each other for the privelege of dumping the first bucket of cold water…
- There isn’t all that much energy left in exhaust steam, and turbogenerator sets big enough to power traction motors haven’t held up well in real-world service.
- Coal dust and electrical equipment don’t coexist well - a major reason for the failure of the STEL experiments on C&O and N&W.
- Coal ash is abrasive, so flue coatings wouldn’t last long. Other low-friction coatings would only marginally improve the performance of a locomotive fitted with roller bearings. Six women in high heels once pushed the Timken demonstrator up to a couple of miles per hour on level track - and roller bearings have improved in the 7 decades since that demo.
- The battery big enough to store the energy generated by a train descending Cajon Pass would probably be enough to propel it on to LA - but it would take up half the train.
- Collectively, the aforementioned people would undoubtedly shout, “Too much maintenance for too little gain.” They’d be right. In railroad maintenance, the KISS principle rules. Complicated and unusual things get simplified, or scrapped - everything from Cole and Vauclain compounds to the Porta modifications on those Argentine 2-10-2s. The latter succumbed to ‘quick fixes’ by semi-skilled shop maintainers.
If steam power comes back to American rights-of-way, it will probably be indirect. The steam will be generated in big, efficient fixed power plants, and the power will be delivered by catenary to very un-complicated electric locomotives. Not as romantic as a recipro/turbo compound hybrid with 100 tons of batteries, but a lot less complex and infinitely less expensive to develop and operate.
Chuck
In the mid 80’s an outfit called American Coal Enterprises was trying to sell the idea of a new generation steam locomotive, due to the jump in crude oil prices. The group did experiments with C&O 614T to gather data, having the steam locomotive pull coal trains in West Virginia in January. They designed a locomotive called the ACE 3000, but a drop in oil prices stunted the growth of the project. It was never revived.
They already have that. It’s called nuclear.
Guys, the fellow barely has 3 posts under his belt and he is already being written up for violating the Laws of Thermodynamics.
As a steam-power enthusiast, the most interesting talk I attended was a university seminar by these engineers from Argonne National Labs, talking about “Supercritical non-ideal-gas CO2 cycles” for propulsion on nuclear subs.
I love to speculate on the might-have-beens and could-still-happens, and here are these guys who are being paid to engage in such speculation – by the United States Navy. Even with the Cold War over, nuclear submarines are still an important part of the Navy, and the Navy pays engineers and scientists to have all of the might-have-beens and could-still-happens covered, in case some potential adversary (China?) invents a new kind of sub that is better than what we’ve got.
As it turns out, what a steam locomotive and a nuclear sub have in common in that the max temperature “at the crown sheet” is limited to about 650 deg-F. Yeah, yeah, Champelon and later Porta were running higher superheat temps, but with both the steam locomotive and the nuclear power plant, 650 deg-F is a reasonable limitation given the expense of materials and so on. The nuclear sub runs a much higher boiler pressure and no superheat, a saturated-steam cycle, whereas the locomotive is more limited in boiler pressure, but adds superheat, I suppose because of water quality. The sub recycles its water so it can use really high purity water, and it also gets higher thermal efficiency because it uses a condensor because the sub is swimming in water to cool the condensor. The steam locomotive blows the spent steam up the stack, which also means it is on a once-through steam cycle, and they have to use whatever water quality they get. There were some attempts at “condensing tenders”, but they were huge, cumbersome affairs because the condensor needs to be cooled by air.
The Argonne guys had a Navy grant to build a prototype compressed
The world didn’t (and still doesn’t) need a 300 ton, 150 ft long, plumbers nightmare, GP40.
Coal Scoup: I am a great fan of steam locomotives because I love seeing all the complicated machinery working but except for maybe a few road applications everyday use age is not a financial good idea .
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Many “experts” expected for there to be a slow electrification in the US but the diesels were able to overtake that process due to the perception that RRs were “dying”.
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Maintenance of even the best of steam engines has always been much more labor inensive and the out of service rate much higher.
3… With the present setup of diesel servicing and the common useage of all RRs and the ability to use each other’s parts and repair facilities each RR is tied to every other RR. Steam locos have always been route specific and the borrowing of steam locos from 1 RR to another took very careful care to assign the borrowed locos due to track geometry, turntables ( big advantage of diesel and electric), repair facilities, parts, type of coal (very important as most locos had some design based on its intended coal supply, water type, etc).
- The one fly in the ointment is if for some strange reason oil became very scarce then some of your arguments might have merit and for that reason I propose that institutional knowledge of the building, repair and operation of steam locos be retained for that unlikely happening.
EXCEPT::
5. Electrification of all major routes will cost less than a return to build steam locos and all the support facilities for steam. What would then be done with all the diesels not worn out? There are many ways to use many components of a diesel in electric motors ( wheel sets, traction motors, inverters, rectifiers, cooling fans etc.).
6. But also present some diesels can possibly be converted to a diesel and electric motor joined set configuration to use the present diesels as maybe as dual mode equipment.
7. Elect
I don’t think that the pulses of exhaust steam ported out of the upright stack would be a good way to generate motive power, directly or indirectly, via electrical generation. You wouldn’t have a consistent rate of rotor rotation.
-Crandell
So you are telling me that the ACE 3000 was condensing? On one has ever gotten an air-heat exchange condensing cycle steam engine to “work”, well, I guess there was that South African locomotive. They should have listened to Porta and taken a smaller technological step.
Yup. Big,ugly, nasty tender.
What the ACE 3000 was going to do differently was the condensing tender (and maybe the automated boiler controls) – everything else, fire tube boiler, 300 PSI boiler pressure, piston-and-rod drive, Walschaert valve gear, was “conventional.” Porta’s idea was to do nothing differently, conventional steam engine all around (at least for a Generation 0 model), with of course, all of the tweaks and enhancements – high superheat, low-restriction steam passages, advanced ejector nozzle, roller bearings, cast frame, compounding, high levels of boiler insulation, and so on.
Jawn Henry set out to do a whole bunch of things differently – turbine-electric drive, for starters, but that otherwise was a once-through non-condensing cycle.
In the interest in only doing one-different-thing-at-a-time, Jawn Henry had some kind of higher-than-300-PSI watertube boiler (Babcock and Wilcox?). Other than the fire-tube boiler (reaching 300 PSI by the twilight of steam, although there are reasons to run lower boiler pressure from the standpoint of boiler lifetime) never really caught on apart from that Baldwin one-of and those D&H monstrosities.
I heard all manner of knocks on Jawn Henry – apart from it being expensive and huge and everything – about the turbine getting knocked about in coupling impacts to coal dust and water getting in the traction motors.
But, I never heard much about the 600 PSI boiler. Did that, like, work as expected, or did Jawn Henry have so many other problems that the problems with the boiler never came up to the top of the list. If the 600 PSI watertube boiler “worked” in some fashion in railroad service, even though everything else came a cropper, that suggests there are things to try, provided one doesn’t change everything all at once.
If you restrict the exit of the exhaust steam, you necessarily lower the efficiency of the reciprocating engine.
And do not think the exhaust does no work! Pre-heaters, for example, and do not forget that it is exhaust blast that creates flue draft. You need it. If you use up the energy in some other way, you have to install mechanical blowers, and those did not fare well in service where they were used.
Now, now. the ACE 3000 was only supposed to be 112 ft long (but 325 tons). [:)]
Fun to imagine though. I wonder if anyone ever built a scale model of this beast.
somebody said only the baldwin experiment ( i suppose they meant franklin’s 4-10-2) and the D&H monstrosities exceeded 310# pressure. i suppose the canadian rlys. don’t count in the ultra-parochial US rail scene but CPR did build and operate a very-high-pressure, 3-cylinder compound 2-10-4, #8000. -big duke ( refugee from the US medical system; born in chicago; it wasn’t until i moved to canada 20 yrs ago i realized the rest of the world looks on the US the way the US looks on texas. don’t try telling me about texas; i graduated from sunset high, dallas, class of 1950; i know both dallas and texas have three syllables in’em. i may be one of the last ‘slobbering texas electric freaks’ alive.)
When Ross Roland et. al. were pitching the idea, they were toting around a non-operating model to show the modular design and general arrangement.
They weren’t pitching that the ACE would be reliable, just that you could swap out all the failed components easily and keep the beast on the road. [:S]
IIRC, there was a recent article in “Classic Trains” about Bill Withun (who was involved in the ACE project) which had a picture of him with one of the models…
Before Porta died he was apparently toying with the idea of installing traction motors on the tender trucks of a locomotive to act strictly as dynamic brake generators and using the resultant energy in a feed water heater system. Would have been interesting to see what further thermal efficiencies could have been wrung out of the steam equation.
Pat
No, but BN & Chessie appearently did. BN left because of arguments over who pays for what research, and CHessie had no interest in a Garratt, which one of them proposed.
And as steamers go, that wasn’t a plumber’s nightmare, a lot of it was going to be modular.
GP40 isn’t a good rating either. Look at what 614 was doing. On it’s own, it was replacing two engines, eventually with boiler problems even. If the ACE did only what 614 could hit, it would still be a (GP40)x2, and the ACE was looking to do a lot more than that.
There’s another page on tainweb, see if I was smart enought o bookmark it. There were another half-dozen proposals for steam locos behind ACE. One of them did something like what the OP proposed: it made steam, and ran through a generator which powered trasction motors. Sound familiar? GE thought so too, and was willing to look into the project some more, since that already required 70% of the stuff they had.
I’m taking bets that this subject will appear on Trains.com in the 22nd century too. LOL.
All I can say is that I praise the UK for building a Steam Engine I believe was called the A1 and recently during a very bad storm that shut down the modern rail locomotives, they pressed the A1 into service to haul stranded people and commuters to London and some of the people did not realize until after the trip that a steam engine ran em in proper.
Someday, if we are going to hit hard times as a Nation, Steam will be our salvation if in certain situations Nuclear, Electric or Diesel is not available to us.
There are a number of steam engines available to the United States but most are too expensive to return to service for a variety of reasons, not the least excessive regulation.
Imagine today if someone sat down and used modern materials to draft a plan and construct a proper Steam Engine design that will provide the necessary work ability that might equal what modern railroads would want today.