Steam Locomotive Piping detailing

Model Railroader Prototype information for the modeler
1

Can anyone point me to good information resources, preferably liberally illustrated, about how to detail steam locomotives by adding the visible pipework, valves and reservoirs found on them?

I acquired a half dozen Mantua Pacifics, and spare parts to upgrade, customize and become my railroad’s largest class of passenger locomotives. I concluded the Matuas are a good product to start with, and they were quite inexpensive. If I work carefully and thoughtfully, I hope to get a dependable result.

I was a Machinist’s Mate in the Navy, so I’m intimately familiar with steam, hydraulic and pneumatic systems, just not as they apply to steam locomotives. I hope to add enough detail to really spruce them up without killing myself over perfection and prototypical accuracy. Representative detailing will suffice, but I’d like to do as much as I can reasonably manage. I plan on putting a good deal of work into bettering my fleet, so I want to be certain I get this right the first time. If I approach this task as a mass production effort - adding detail bits to the whole fleet at once - that might keep this task manageable.

All general and specific information, including info about materials sources and types, will be sincerely appreciated. Thanks, people!

2

Look for Steam Locomotives Cyclopedia by Linn Wescott.

Found mine online, just do a search and there might be several sources besides e-bay.

Lots of good diagrams and photos.

Kevin

3

Thanks, Kevin. Excellent tip!

4

You didn’t specify what railroad. The thing I found invaluable was photos. Try to get photos of all sides and at the same time period. Steam locomotives went through many changes in their working lifespan. Some were built without stoker engines and later in life rebuilt with a stoker. Appliances also changed. Some dramatic some very subtle.

I took a crude Westside K5s pacific and transformed it into a locomotive that you could tell what year it was represented. A 1936 photo showed it having shrouds around the turbo generator and two non lifting injectors under the cab. A 1938 photo showed that the stoker engine replaced an injector on the fireman’s side. Then I ran across several photos taken in 1937. No stoker and no shrouds. I had photos of every angle in 37. That was it.

Brass wire is okay but work hardens and breaks. I found phosphor bronze wire better to use. Common sizes from .010 to .025 and rarely thirty thou wire for steam lines.

Hope this helps.

Pete.

PS. Thank you for your service.

5

This one’s probably too basic for your needs, but I’ll toss it out for your inspection anyways. I bought two of these Bachmann 10 Wheelers…

…but decided that they looked too old-fashioned for my layout, which is set in the late '30s.
I chose to modify the slide-valve cylinders into piston types, and some styrene and a little imagination did the trick…

The locos still looked archaic to me, so I used a couple of cast zinc boilers from MDC to make something more suitable…

…but they didn’t look all that suitable either, so I decided to make a few modifications…

Since I had some Bachmann boiler castings on-hand, I decided that the cabs from them might look not too bad…

…and also modified the tenders, both shortening them and making them narrower, as they were wider that the Bachmann cabs…

…then followed-up by adding some details to the boilers…

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Doctorwayne, thanks so much for your response, ESPECIALLY the pics. One thing they do is make me think I can do something like that with my fleet without screwing everything up. And you did an admirable job, too. I’m much inspired and VERY grateful!

7

Pete, thanks so much for your helpful response.

One thing right off: the railroad I’m building is my own Great Lakes & Hudson’s River RR, a line I made up so I’m not boound to prototype practice any more than I care to be. There are other reasons too. I want my line to be realistic, and its backstory is about merger and consolidation of actual historic lines.

The Mantua Pacific I started with has strong sentimental value as it was given to me by people at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum in Miami. It was salvaged from the rubble after Hurricane Andrew nearly destroyed the site in 1992. I was down there working for FEMA, charged with creating and running their first ever targeted disaster recovery program for historic sites, structures and objects. Given what the storm did to it, the folks at the museum thought their collection was worth nothing more than scrap until I showed up and invoked the National Historic Preservation Act to rebuild them. I was there when a recovery team we sent in found the Mantua, the first piece of their HO collection that was rescued from the ruins. It blew me away when they gifted it to me. For the longest time ('92 to now) I kept it in the condition it was given to me in, but have now decided I’d be proud to have it the lead locomotive in my passenger fleet. I don’t want to go crazy over it, but I do want to spiff it up appropriately.

I have a master of science in historic preservation and am one of a relative handful who specialized in historic technology, which is how/why I ended up doing that job for FEMA. It was a joy to reinforce for the good folks at Gold Coast how truly important their collection was and is. So, accuracy is important in many ways.

I busted my butt down there for nine months. My first Mantua Pacific, the one they gave me, is really important to me.

And I got to supervize the restoration of the Ferdinand Magellan too.<

8

Gene:

Welcome to the forum. Thank you for your service. My high school football coach was a submariner. He was a very large (round) man. He told us that when the skipper wanted to dive the boat, he went to the front of the boat. When they wanted to surface, he would go to the back of the boat. (I hope my terminology is correct).

I received my first Mantua pacific as a 12 year old. I had to take it apart a couple of years later because my sister dropped it and broke the pilot. At the time (1973) parts were still available. It still runs, and I acquired a 2nd from a friend. I have plans of rebuilding them with better motors, better detail, and converting the tenders from coal to oil.

Dr. Wayne provides inspiration with every post. His work is amazing.

9

Gene,

Another one (also a Navy vet) that appreciares your service. As for parts to detail your Pacifics, Bowser has tons of them on offer, both their own and the castings that were originally produced and sold by Cary. Also, see if you can download a copy of Precision Scale’s Catalogue 4, their steam loco super-detailing parts and kits offerings. As you’ve already been tipped off here - or will learn soon enough - there are a couple fistsful of other vendors who go back a long way in making detail parts of all sorts. Some of them are long out of business but have items still offered under eBay or through various swap groups. These all go back to the days where modelers who couldn’t afford spiffy brass locos built in South Korea and Japan had to upgrade less expensive steamers and kits.

Some of the items that you find as you’re running down parts are no longer produced or offered by guys opening up their old stashes. But if you’re familiar with the principles, sub-systems, and the plumbing (and are not trying to precisely model a specific loco from the past), you have modeler’s license to use what you can find. As Dr. Wayne has illustrated above, most anything you can picture can be done.

Enjoy. And welcome to the forum!!

John

10

Thanks for the kind remarks, folks.

Here’s one that I found…

and mentioned to a friend, who had been looking for something similar.

I offered to rework it into an HO version of this prototype…

Here’s a few views of the re-build…

The cab was a five-piece brass casting, so rather that trying to use a soldering iron (I do have a 200watt iron), I assembled it by hand, then wrapped it with soft iron wire to to hold it together while I used a propane torch to solder it together.

I left the roof off, modifying it to be removeable so that I could add “glass” in the windows after it was painted.

Here’s some under-construction views…

…and even managed to label some of the appliances…

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Dear Wayne - when I get discouraged I just look at your stuff as pictured here. You truly are an inspiration. Thank you.

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Knowing how to “plumb” an engine comes from understanding the systems, how and why they work. The how and why is very important because if you know that, then you can look at a drawing or a photo and understand why pipes go where they go. As mentioned before Linn Wescott’s Locomotive Cyclopedia, having diagrams of some of the systems, will probably be the easiest to find.

The best books are from the International Correspondence School, but, are very hard to find. Even the web site where you could access the books has gone into hiding.

13

Thanks to all for your kind words.

If you want to learn more about the piping on various locomotives, Linn Westcott’s Cyclopedia - Vol. 1 STEAM LOCOMOTIVES, is a good resource.

It shows drawings of various types of piping, including that for several types of feedwater heaters, and also includes the purpose of the various pipes.

There is also a generous amount of photos of locomotives. The book is fairly large - roughly just over 14" wide, and 11" high, with 272 pages, and even the “used” ones command a good price…which is well worth it.

I have six of these Athearn Genesis Mikados (four in-service and two getting make-overs). (If you click on the photos, they’ll enlarge, better showing the details)

Here’s one of the four, only slightly modified detail-wise…I did, however, add considerable weight to them, as when new, they could barely pull their own shadows…

This one, not yet used in-service, is getting a make-over with a Worthington S-type feedwater heater…

…the box in front of the stack is the heater (on the real ones, there’s more of it inside the smokebox).
There’s a pipe from it to a hot water pump, which is under the walkway, and is hidden by the coil of pipe that provides compressed air for braking purposes, both for the loco and it’s trailing train.
The piece of .040" phosphor-bronze wire represents the pipe from the hot water pump to the top-feed check valve, and there’s a similar pipe on the other side of the boiler, also terminating at the top-feed check valve.
I had to remove the original cast-on water pipe on this side of the boiler (the rest of it, yet to be removed, is below the walkway and

14

The time - the “when” part - can make a big difference. Many engines that were built in the early 20th century had fairly clean lines, but over time acquired various appliances and piping that greatly changed their appearance.