LOL… Man what are you smokin!
Not in the classic sense. Perhaps coal liquification or gasification. In distant future perhaps coal fired generators for electric trains.
Ever heard of Ethanol? That’s what I put in my Corvette-engine-powered Camaro. (It’s a Chevy LS1that runs on premium unleaded usually, but I have found that Ethanol runs as good as premium if not better). I think Ethanol will catch on eventually. [:)]
-Brandon
It would still be more efficient to convert the coal to fuel and run diesels.
I voted No, and my reason seems to be the same as others, the pollution factor. Air quality is already at it’s worst ever and continues to get worse. Perhaps if science found a way to burn coal cleanly then it might come back, but not with current technology.
Trevor
I would be looking at producer gas (gas made from plant waste, garbage, etc) it’s far from a new technology and any gasoline engine can run on it (at reduced power)
and diesels can be made to run on it with modification.
underworld
aka The Violet
[:D][:D][:D][:D][:D]
The one thing that made diesels win out was, and is, electric traction. All rotating parts, perfectly balanced, no dynamic augment, all equating to more tractive effort at the railhead - especially at start and at very low speeds. Note that the significant advances in railroad motive power relate to the parts between the alternator and the wheels. AC in a locomotive doesn’t mean house current. It means a very sophisticated, computer controlled motor input, adjusted to load and speed literally every microsecond.
Exactly what powers the alternator isn’t all that important. It could be a diesel engine, steam turbine, gas turbine, reciprocating steam engine (Google ‘Heilmann’ for sample) or even a (very) big drum full of hamsters. As long as it can spin an alternator and develop sufficient power to drive the traction motors, it’ll work.
It’s a safe bet that any new North American locomotive will have electric traction, so let’s look at steam driven alternators. The best term available for the relationship between steam-electric power and American railroads is ‘unhappy.’ Both the C&O and the N&W discovered that the slam-bang of railroad operations was incompatable with the marine type power plants they had adapted. (Ships may pitch and roll, but the motion isn’t abrupt.) Also, coal dust got into EVERYTHING! Could you imagine the havoc that getting abrasive, conductive, acidic dust into the computerized controllers of a modern AC locomotive would cause?
As for any rebirth or resurgence of reciprocating steam locos - fuhgeddaboudit!
Chuck
Between the tree huggers and the EPA, I regret to say that steam as we knew it is gone for good.
You’d need the frame of a Big Boy or a Challenger to carry all the pollution controls and only get the power of a Mike out of it.
Maybe someone could come up with a way to pick up water while running at speed. [;)]
Jon
Bio fuel? You can run your auto on cooking oil if you don’t mind it smelling like a fast food joint when someone got the fryer wrong… and (here at least) you don’t mind the Excise men being on your tail for evading the (massive) duty on road diesel.
But the Brazilians run there cars on ethanol so…?
Then again, if we want renewable fuels… why not replace the dynamic brakes with wind turbines… if they come down hill faster they will charge up the batteries fast to get up the next rising grade…
[
Maybe someone could come up with a way to pick up water while running at speed. [;)]
Jon
[/quote]
Someone did… they were called water troughs… a mile or more of troughs dead flat between the rails and a scoop on the tender. The train had to be running fast enough to collect the water but not so fast the scoop couldn’t be lifted clear. The former meant that only fast passenger services and things like mails and express reefers used them… everything else stopped. The latter meant that the end could be smashed out of the trough / the scoop damaged. this could require a loco change and would require everything following to stop for water. troughs would also ice up.
I heard a talk by a Great Western Driver who had fired during WW2. Hauling a troop train of GIs up from Plymouth without a blanking plate on the leading passenger car’s corridor diaphragm he misjudged the fill of the tank… It over-topped at speed and flooded the first two cars…FAST. When they arrived at their destination he and the driver did an extremely fast disappearing act.
Steam is dead…long live steam!!
Even if the price of gasoline were to surpass the costs of mining coal to such an extent that coal became much cheaper, and even if no other fuels could be derived/mined in economies of scale, designing and building steam locomotives that would meet with existing regulations would put the cost right up there with diesels. Then, even with automation, there is the infrastructure to go with it. Even if we could get them 100% more efficient, we’d still need the water and fueling facilities.
But, who knows, maybe a super-efficient steam turbine could be made that would do what we need…
Then again… if they went back to running (live)stock trains they could plumb in the produced gas… Some sources reckon that the cattle that make ronald’s burgers produce more greenhouse emmisions than all our cars and trucks put together.
This got me thinking…
Most dinosaurs were herbivors… and a bit bigger than the average steer…
So I asked a paleontologist friend who works at the Natural history Museum in London. He reckoned that most departments have worked it out (but would never admit it) and that, yes, the dinosaurs could have produced their own downfall. Which could explain why no one’s ever found the crater from the meteor that is supposed to have caused all the trouble.
That is, of course, if Dinosaurs really existed… but I’d better not go there.
[;)]
Apparently, you’ve never heard of L.D. Porta, David Wardale and the gas producer firebox.
Check out The Ultimate Steam Page. http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/
Andre
But the weight of the steam has nothing to do with the pressure steam exerts on the walls of a pressure vessel, although Chuck’s post seemed to infer that it did. That’s why I asked. You can take a very small amount of water and get over a thousand pounds of pressure in a boiler pretty easily (if your boiler can handle that pressure)…
NO!
I would like to see the Ethenol or Flex fuel or corn oil, whatever work good and catch on so we can all live normally again, and I doubt steam will come back entirely, but a steam based something, maybe!
Back in the late 1980s or early '90s, Ross Rowland conducted an experiment with a highly modified Chessie System steam engine that was documented in a Machines of Iron video entitled, “The ACE of Diamonds.” ACE stood for American Coal Enterprise. The goal was to design a more efficient steam engine. Nothing ever came of this.
Railroads today would be very reluctant to switch back to steam power because of the need to rebuild coaling and water facilities and the number of employees required to maintain a steam fleet and crew.
At Cheyenne, Wyoming, for example, the swtichover from steam to diesel power eliminated nearly 2,000 railroad jobs. When you multiply that times the number of steam facilities there used to be throughout the United States, you’re talking about close to a million more employees that would be required – plus the additional people who would have to be hired to build steam engines. So economically, there’s no way this will ever happen in our lifetime.
It so turns out that they are now experimenting with cars that take the exhaust heat to turn water to steam. This HP steam is then sent to a piston. The additional power was modest (on the order of 12%) But still, it is recovered energy of waste heat.
So who knows, one day a diesel, electric, steam hybrid will rear it’s head!
it’s the way we calculate a boiler’s water usage rate…i work in a power plant that produces steam as a by-product that we sell to different customers…it produces on average of 1,300,000 lbs. of steam an hour between 4 boilers so, 1,300,000 / 60 = 21,666 pounds of steam produced per minute …21,666 pounds of steam per minute / 8.34 (8.34 is how much a gallon of water weighs) = 2,598 gallons of water and that is how much water we are putting in the boilers per minute…and if i look at all 4 of my feed water pump output flows, they are putting out at a rate of between 580 g.p.m and 750 g.p.m. respectively, add them up and it equals 2,600 gallons a minute of feedwater going to the boilers…so it takes 1gallon of water to produce 8.34 lbs. of steam …and yes that is the way it is calculated and has everything to do with the pressure exerted against the walls of a vessel…it takes fire and water to produce the steam that produces the pressure…chuck