I found this article on the web. There’s a drawing of it, but I haven’t been able to locate a photo of the prototype.
http://archive.commercialmotor.com/article/30th-january-1913/18/an-85-ton-diesel-locomotive
It’s kind of amazing how quickly things became standardized. I routinely run a 63YO locomotive that (with a little orientation - that “6” brake will getcha) is little different, control-wise from what’s rolling on the rails today.
It would be interesting to see that prototype in person (if only it still existed).
Would be interesting to see it run. I’ve read that it was built and ran for a time pulling passenger trains over short distances in Europe. No photos of it anywhere that I can find. Unfortunately R Diesel also died in 1913 (some say suicide), and he never knew how important his contribution to railroads would eventually become.
Lots of contemporary coverage of this (it was indeed sold to the Prussian system, which apparently ran it in Berlin-Magdeburg service). See:
Engineering Magazine v.45 (September 5, 1913) p.317-321 and editorial on p.326
Scientific American September 20, 1913
Engineering News October 2, 1913
I believe there are pictures in these.
And, lest we forget (I almost did!) in the Scientific American supplement for September 20, 1913 (p.180) is the Tasmanian eight-cylinder express Garratt…
Thanks…going to see if I can get the Scientific American at the local newsstand.
Note the locomotive has no transmission, except for the side rods. The diesel can’t run when the locomotive is stationary-- as I recall it used compressed air to get itself moving.
Well isn’t this interesting! This would mean the Germans had a commercially successful diesel locomotive 12 years before Jersey Central’s #1000, generally considered to be the first commercially successful diesel, in the US anyway.
AND in mainline service as well. CNJ 1000 was used for switching only.
I’d be interested in seeing a photo of the German unit as well. Maybe Juniatha can pull another rabbit out of her hat for us.
You probably won’t find the right one there, but you can find one here. Per the site, price for a scanned copy of all pages is $1.95.
(Why I can’t find the 1913 issue on Google Books as a .pdf download, I don’t know. I have 1916, so it’s not as if Google is ignoring Scientific American in general…)
The compressed air setup does more than that. Starting AND some of the low-speed working is done by the compressed-air system (note the substantial bank of air pressure tanks), with the compressed air doubling as a source of enhanced combustion oxygen. In a sense, this might be thought of as a ‘booster’ version of that 1-E-1 locomotive (was it Lomonosov’s?*) which used compressed-air drive AS the transmission … the little two-cylinder air-compressor diesel in the Klose-Sulzer design provides the starting power.
More interesting, to me, is that the little engine acts as a separately-fired supercharger. AND the setup uses water injection to increase piston thrust while lowering peak temperatures (a bit like my Snow methanol-injection rig, but that’s another story… ;-})
BTW, for anyone interested, the Walsh & Clark ‘locomotive’ is described in the Aug 29 1912 issue (in the Commercial Motor archives). You will go blind trying to find the reference by the ‘issue 390’ given in the text… ;-}
*spelled “Lomonossoff” in Romanization of the classic formula, or by people who spell the composer “Rachmaninoff”, etc.
We’ll want a big favor from her, but not for the first picture:
What we need her to do is paraphrase or translate the information for the “Diesel-Klose-Sulzer-Thermolokomotive” found on this German Wikipedia page. For both the page and for the discussion. I’m not going to butcher the thing with Google Translate; we should have an expert. (For even more of a headache, some references have the company that had Borsig build this locomotive as ‘Diesel-Sulzer-Klose GmbH’ … or maybe ‘Sulzer-Diesel-Klose’ … but that’s not how the locomotive’s title reads… all I can say is ‘see the discussion’…)
There is a brief English-language history, with additional pictures, on this Sulzer Web site.
Interesting, never heard of this before! So what is the technical term, diesel-direct?
Diesel-mechanical
Okay, that makes sense…the locomotive reminds me a lot of early Swiss rod electrics, minus the pantograph. The fact that it couldn’t idle is very interesting!
A diesel-mechanical locomotive with no clutch?? I would doubt that this locomotive, unlike CNJ 1000, was anything other than strictly experimental.
Who hit on the idea of combining the diesel engine with the generator and electric motors, i.e. the diesel electric? This engine was designed along the lines of steam. Someone somewhere had to be thinking out of the box to come up with the diesel electric. Would be nice to know his/her name.
By the time the first Diesel locomotive was built there already had been at least one Steam- electric design built and operated:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilmann_locomotive
So it must have been logical to pair the IC engine with an electric transmission to overcome the problems with the direct mechanical drive.
I know the first Diesel-electric railroad vehicle was a self -propelled railcar operated in Germany and built with Swiss technology. That was introduced in 1914. Supposedly Fiat built the first diesel electric locomotive in the early 1920’s.
Cool! I hadn’t heard of the Heilmann until now. And this is from 1890! Impressive. Will have to learn more about it. Just made my day.
Sounds as good as any. “Diesel-mechanical” is used for locomotives with the mechanical transmission that this one lacks.
There were diesel mechanical but more often diesel hydraulics. Krausse Maffe (SP?) manufactured some pretty big units used in Europe. Here SP and DRGW got some. They worked somewhat ok but were never reordered.
Deutsche Bundesbahn was big on torque-converter drives similar to those built by KM for European railroads and for export to the United States (SP & D&RGW). Voith torque converters were also used in the Alco C643H, built for SP.