I suspect I was pretty close when I pulled into the “North Pole” one night with one of our F units. Apparently I was cleaning out a lot of carbon, resulting in an interesting shower of sparks…
.
OK, couple of questions here.
- What type of engine failure causes something like this?
- Wouldn’t pushing the fuel cut off switch have stopped, or at least limited, the fire? Or is all that smoke and fire from fuel already in the prime mover?
The crew men seemed quite calm as they exited the cab. Better than I would have been.
And after watching this, what should FDL stand for? Fire ??? ???
Just your ‘ordinary’ diesel runaway. Diesel engines are compression ignition engines - virtually any petroleum can be ignited in a compression ignition engine - as long as you have ‘some form of fuel’. air and compression you will have ignition for the power stroke.
Runaway diesels happen mostly happen when through some defect in the engine, the engine begin to run on the lubrication oil. Even through the Emergency Fuel Shut Off has been activated there is somewhere near 250-300 GALLONS of lubricating old in each railraod diesel.
The normal way to shut down a runaway diesel is to block off the air supply - which I suspect would be difficult in this case.
Balt has it right about how a diesel runaway works. A common source of the oil is a blown seal in the turbocharger (most turbo bearings are lubricated and cooled with engine crankcase oil), which allows lube oil to enter the intake manifold.
EMD and Detroit 2-stroke diesels can run away in another way, the ‘full rack’ runaway. The rack (control arm for the unit injectors) can become stuck in a high or full fuel position, causing the engine to speed up without any control from the governor, and if left it will soon exceed the maximum safe RPM. Even one stuck injector can potentially cause this, as the rack tends to pull to the full fuel position when the engine is started.
Detroits have a mechanical fuel pump which is directly driven by the engine, wheras EMD locomotive engine have an electric pump, and also have a large handle (the layshaft) on the end of the rack, sometimes pulling back hard on this is enough to close the rack and kill it.
But blocking the air supply is the only sure fire way to kill a runaway diesel. The only question is how.
Well, since we’re talking about runaways maybe it’s time to take a break from the seriousness for a bit and relax.
Have fun!
Keep In mind that a large compression-ignition engine will run on carbureted oil under certain conditions – there needs to be the right combination of promotion and flame propagation. The 95-odd percent of natural gas in a dual-fuel-fired locomotive diesel ‘counts’ as a carbureted fuel in this sense. Such an engine does not require fuel injection to make combustion power.
This means that a Diesel engine that has EFI (and hence shuts off injection to stop the engine) will happily continue to run after full commanded shutoff, both of the injection FADEC and the fuel pumps, if there is unrestricted intake air and an adequate source of oil.
What happens in this sort of event is that one of the turbocharger oil seals fails catastrophically, letting lube oil spray into the turbocharger’s compressor (and be atomized finely as it passes through there). This oil happily burns in compression ignition, quite possibly overfueling the engine to ‘runaway’ high speed since the governor is not controlling “fuel feed” at all. Meanwhile in all probability lube oil is also running into the turbocharger turbine, vaporizing there into what is basically oil smoke. So you have an engine reaching a balancing speed of what may be more than 1050rpm, with burning-of-Rome smoke effects. Only interrupting the flow of combustion air through the filters and intake tract, or putting an enormous load on the engine or seizure of internal parts due to lube-oil starvation will stop an engine in this condition.
Now until there is an ignition source adjacent to the smoke plume, you get this towering eruption of mixed black and white smoke. The turbo interstate bearing in particular is not getting full piling, and spinning faster than designed is likely to heat up to the point the oil flow in the exhaust torches, at which point you get a stack fire like the one pictured.
If the intake air can’t be interrupted or have something s
AKA Californians
AKA Californians
deleted
I assume you’re talking about out-of-staters moving into the Durango area and trying to change the whole culture of the place?
A distinct possibility. The last time I was in Durango was 18 years ago, and in addition to the railroad the main attraction was wilderness sports, camping, hiking, whitewater rafting, and things like that. And in many cases the only way to get to the sites used was by the railroad, so the railroad and sports enthusiasts lived in perfect harmony with each other.
A lot can change in 18 years. If the main attraction now is Durango’s being changed to an upscale “artsy-fartsy” destination like Sedona AZ or Santa Fe NM I can see where the local opposition to the railroad might coming from, that is, the newcomers, who as in so many other places expect the local culture to change to accomodate them.
But I fully admit, I’m just guessing, I really have no idea what the place is like now. But back when I was there the railroad and wilderness sports were the only things Durango had going for it, the symbiosis was there and recognized.
Durango Today…Pot stores (and their customers) and bikers
Really? I would have thought the pot store clientele would be too stoned to notice the train!
Bikers? You must mean trail bikers. Traditional bikers, as in motorcyclists, LOVE machinery, the bigger the better! They’d dig the steam locomotives big time! Come to think of it I knew some motorcyclists back in New Jersey and they were ALL steam freaks!
“Maryjewawna, maryjewawna’s baayyd, m’kay!”
(for those of you who don’t watch it, that’s a South Park reference)
Seriously though, some of you would be very surprised at just how varied the customer base of those pot stores has turned out to be, and just how successful and normal so many of those folks are.
I’ve heard the Angels can actually make pretty good neighbors, you leave them alone and they leave you alone.
The last time I was in Durango was 5 years ago in winter. I regularly go to Colorado to ski. My impression is that as Telluride gets pricey, Durando is the next resort real estate hot spot. Its the closest spot in Colorado to Southern Cal/Arizona, and all of Colorado is getting over developed.
I can believe it!
My first visit to Colorado Springs was in 1976. I was on the way back from California and stopped to visit my brother who was attending the Air Force Academy. I wouldn’t say The Springs was a backwater by any means but it was a nice, smallish community. At least it was compared to the North Jersey megalopolis we grew up in.
Last trip back was in 2002, and I was absolutely shocked and stunned by the growth! It might as well have been the megalopolis!
Where’d they all come from? And why?
Another thing that is driving this population shift is telecommuting. Companies suddenly found out that they could function with people working remotely. There are applications for meetings, and many of the things people did involved telephone and computer anyhow.
We are seeing signs of this exodus in northern New York, as people strive to get out of the Big Apple.
Started with an exodus from California in the 1990s to Arizona, Utah and Colorado.