I had always been told that diesal overtook steam because of the quick turn around, cheaper cost etc…That from my recent reading is not the complete picture. Another factor is that many or all of the steam parts manufacture went out of buisness or switched to diesal manufacturing leaving the hold outs for steam with out many of the small parts needed to build a steam engine.
SO the question is how much longer do you think the steam engines would have run if the small parts manufactures would have stayed in buisness ? Five more years ? Ten years ? Something else ?
That’s like asking if the horse and buggy would have lasted longer if harness makers would have stayed in business longer. The makers of steam accessories needed steam locomotive production to continue in order to stay in business.
I’m fairly certain that N&W would have continued steam production in Roanoke if parts had remained available at reasonable cost. Unfortunately, a customer base of one bodes ill for the continued success of your business, especially if that customer is one of the smaller class 1’s. N&W tested 4 unit F7’s against its latest Y’s and came to the conclusion that for its purposes, the Y was superior. Unfortunately, by that time the other lines were scrapping steam as fast as they could get diesels. One is left to wonder what would have happened if other roads had gone to the same lengths as N&W to get the maximum out of steam.
The true story is railroads found they could save billions by killing off steam with diesels.
Here’s what they saw:thousands of steam related jobs could be eliminated,hundreds of roundhouses and dozenss of back shops could be closed and they eye the elimination of thousands of fireman jobs as a bonus.
Railroads embraced the diesel and only WWII stopped the railroads from dieselizing sooner.
The reason is simple steam was a high maintenance locomotive that self destruct every time those drivers rolled down the track plus a steam engine pounded the rails.
BTW.One thing that got ALCO in trouble is they was still thinking steam when railroads was clearly embracing diesels.
In America, the main steam locomotive builders (Alco, Lima and Baldwin) often built designs that the railroads themselves designed. They were simply contracted out to build them. A railroad’s backshops could construct or maintain any parts the steam locomotives needed. N&W, for example, built a majority of their locomotives in-house. The only thing they could not make is some of the appliances such as feedwater heaters that were only needed on new steam locomotives, which were no longer constructed after the early '50s. Parts supply did not impact the demise of steam, except for the poor economics of the shops required to manufacture the parts.
I don’t recall any mom and pop suppliers to steam programs. There were specialty industrial suppliers that usually became divisions of major corporations and shut down as orders dried up. The major contributer to the roles of diesel production was the War Production Board that allocated materials and even products companies could produce. PRR had to change the steel it wanted for the J1 boilers and Alco was locked into an inferior crankshaft steel which affected postwar sales and opinions. The reach of the Board should not be overlooked in the demise of steam Or the ppostwar sales of diesels
I believe there was some financial incentive to purchase diesels by EMD and ALCO. Apart from the foreseen, but not realized, savings in crew costs, diesels were able to be added as managed units remotely controlled for the weight of the consists, and the diesels were sold cheaply initially to get the market rolling. They were also less costly in fuel and infrastructure costs and maintenance.
the changeover was progressive, they had to build backshops for the diesels and service stations etc. Then they could drop the fires. Some lines went diesel early like Pennsy and NYC, parts like flues became less in demand and that would raise their prices. Less demand, the steel makers would find less profit in it and quit making them making the roads dig further to find supplies. Flues need a specific steel grade and mix of metals or it doesnt work. Pere Marquette 1225 during the train fest in Owosso they used had restored the engine with the wrong quality steel for the flues, and they had a flue failure up there the day after I visited. The Milwaukee group friends of 263 got them the right flues and the engine is back today running…
Brakie beat me to it but he’s right. The SP&S did a test with Alco S-2 #26 on two OE trains, the savings were upwards of $58,000 dollars not including infrastructure and labor costs. As nice as the SP&S grades and track were to steam, it was clear that the diesel was there to stay. By 1956 all active steam was withdrawn and stored serviceable.
Another interesting tidbit… there was an agreement between the Southern and the N&W to exchange maintenance cost records for two 2-unit Southern E6’s vs two N&W J-class 4-8-4’s and two 4-unit Southern FT’s vs two N&W class A 2-6-6-4’s. The N&W Historical Society obtained the original files on the test that was conducted from Nov. 1945 through March 1947. They did an article on it in the September/October 2004 issue of The Arrow (NWHS Magazine).
It’s interesting to note that China kept steam going for many years after the U.S. But they had the “adavantage” of very cheap labor and their own coal. Eventually, they gave it up as well.
Five years maybe, but not any longer by my thinking. It was over for steam and even today, almost all parts can be made in the back shops. It does cost a lot of money to have special parts made and that added to the cost of steam maintenance.
Steam was one of the greatest machines made by men in my opinion, but if you ever went to a roundhouse or the back shops, you would realize the time it took to keep them on the road. I spent a lot of time around roundhouses in Southern Illinois watching steam being repaired at the end of each run. The backshops were 24 hours a day in many places the number of men working was simply amazing. Good jobs but each diesel that came on line ended all of the work and maintenance.
Parts began to get hard to get in the mid fifties since only a few roads were still maintaining steam, but the real reason they were replaced had to do with the total maintenance cost and reliability to be on the road earning money for the railroads. I was sad to see the Illinois Central finally give up and start to purchase diesels in large numbers and it took two or three geeps to equal on of the 2500 or 2600 series 4-8-2 mountain locos.
Right after WWII steam got hit with the perfect storm:
A lot of communities started legislating against coal smoke and cinders, even in the heart of the coal fields.
Financing rates for new diesels were very low. Those rates were not available for either maintaining or expanding steam rosters.
Diesels were built to a standard design with minimum options. Steam had, traditionally, been built as custom orders, each batch a little (or a lot) different.
Some railroads (notably NYC) seriously underestimated the amount of diesel horsepower needed to do the same job as a steamer. Quite possibly they were overimpressed by high tractive effort and forgot that, once rolling, it’s horsepower that attains and maintains speed.
Boiler feed quality water was always a problem, and only got worse with massive use of agricultural chemicals.
That parts problem. David P. Morgan described the N&W situation: Send off a routine order for a standard part. Get back a thick envelope full of drawings, detailed manufacturing instructions and a cover letter giving Roanoke permission to manufacture their own, since the supplier was now involved with other products…
Plus the fact that the locomotives were wearing out. They were expensive to maintain and getting more expensive. Plus, there were all those diesel-qualified machinist’s mates looking for jobs, none of whom had any great loyalty to the entrenched unions…
In a video tape about the Union Pacific shops in Cheyenne, Wyoming, then steam engineer Steve Lee shows some pictures of the area. He states that in the days of steam, close to 5,000 people worked at Cheyenne per shift just to maintain the steam fleet.
After full dieselization fewer than 200-250 employees can maintain the equivalent horsepower.
Much as I admire steam, and I do have good memories of it in my childhood, they were just too expensive to keep running. Their availability was low enough that sometimes a single diesel could replace several steamers. Imagine driving a car that needed the radiator filled every 60-100 miles and every hundred fifty miles or so needed an oil change, lube job, tire rotation, tune up and alignment. Newer steamers were much better of course, but they were often restricted as to where they could run. Luckily, it’s not too drastic in scale models, though even then steam is more hassle than diesel.
Technology rolls on, and economics is often it’s hand maiden, as others have noted with respect to reduced labor forces, smaller capital costs with longer operating lifetimes for diesels, etc.
But what goes around, sometimes returns in suprisingly familiar form- as steam locomotives were dying, steam was the motive force for the then- new technology of nuclear ship propulsion. The vinyl record became an antique as laser-read data discs replaced it (for a few years) as a means to listen to music, etc. The water cannon that was used in surface mining reappeared as a high tech (much more refined) method for cutting materials without tool contact.
Time marches on and nothing can stand in its way, neither nature nor man.
Actually, there’s some factual evidence that coal strikes near the end of steam hastened steam’s demise at least on die hard roads like the NKP. The diesels were already here but steam might have lasted at least to a limited extent another year or two if that might not have happened. There are some very late examples of steamers pulled out of storage for a bumper crop or other upswing in traffic. But the coal strikes pretty much killed that.
Steam would not have lasted much longer. The NYC’s Niagaras, which were famously efficient, were pitted in a series of trials against diesels and narrowly lost. Combine that with the realization that diesel technology would improve, and correspondingly improve their efficiency numbers, and it was all over for steam.
Nope. There were no small part manufacturers. Every thing was custom built. If you needed a part, you had to back to a machine shop and make one.
Diesels introduced sameness and standard parts, because they were eaiser to make that way. Some steam locomotives were in serial production, but never enough to support a small parts industry.
LION had an old printing press, and when a part was damaged, him had to find a machine shop to make a new part.
The newer steam Super Power engines could have lasted a bit longer, but the major problem was the worn out local engines like 2-8-0’s and 2-8-2’s. They had to be replaced and they were not to be replaced in steam the GP7’s and RS-3’s were their replacements due to local switching. And the railroads did not want both steam and diesels on the same divisions with duplicate servicing costs.
But the main reason steam was replaced is tax. Locomotives were depreciated by law for 40 years. None of the first diesels were robust enough to last for 40 years like steam locomotives were. Truman had the IRS change the life on locomotives to 15 years per railroad requests, which is why you see them being replaced on a 15 year schedule, especially the ones that were not very well liked.