I have beeen reading “Model Railroading with John Allen” and in one part he describes a watermeter that he was using on his railroad. For those who have not read the book, the meter was used to cause you to stop at the water tower to refill the water supply on a steam engine (keep the gas tank full) . If the tank went empty you then stopped and waited for an helper engine to bring water.
Has anybody built something similar to this for their layout ? I have DCC and have an idea on how to make one, using a decoder, an old engine motor (from repowering a engine) and a bicycle speedometer (one with an odometer) . Use the motor to turn the speedometer, the decoder to control the motor, assign the decoder a throttle and LASH it to whatever engine you want to use it on. I think lash is the right word, making 2 locos respond to the same throttle. You might have to adjust the RPMs of the motor using a resitor to slow it down if spinning to fast. All you would need to do is figure out how much water each engine should use, and keep track of it on a chart. I was thinking of this more for the yards than the mainline because many of us loop several times to get the distance to the next town. If any body else has ideas or comments I would like to hear them. Maybe an electronic means instead. Just brainstorming out loud.[8D]
That seems a bit complex to me. Most engineers knew exactly how hard and far they could push an engine and exploding boilers tended to be hazardous to ones health. The way I would do it is to have a tank on the layout for emergency fills and have a random number generator that every time say the number one came up the train had to stop for water and realize the penalty on the timetable. The tank could even be on a siding that required the engine to uncouple and back in for water incurring an even larger delay. The random number generator could be triggered electronically from a track detector or have a wheel that each engineer spins to get a number. That seems easier to me.
Modelrailroader had an article several years ago on a project ot build a boiler water/fuel level simulator. I believe there was a way to hook the thing up to track power (DC) so that if the boiler ran out track power would be cut. Perhaps the magazine index at the top of the page will help.
I suspect that the water refilling was a regular and planned operation. Water towers were spaced apart for optimum refilling. The train would stop for refilling a planned basis. Run-down shortlines might have operated on a haphazard basis, but otherwise the possibility of a train running out of water and tying up the mainline as well as delaying the delivery of freight/passengers would not be tolerable.
OTH Yard operations might be a little more casual as the water is to hand. Might be fun to rig a meter on the yard switcher and have to stop switching to go refill it.
Enjoy
Paul
I was told by someone with Project 819 that when they ran the engine, they can depend on a water stop several times in a workday. Some of these stops also inculded coal and lube for the running gear. I thought I heard 60 miles as the figure for water but again I wil have to look it up.
Regardless, you can probably depend on the railroads preserving the knowledge of what steam engines are capable of doing with the coal, water and lube needs on a trip. I would doubt that they would actually send a engine out and not know where to stop.
I have heard cases where engineers elected to take a faulty steamer out of town (Maybe the injector was not working well and repairs would be a unacceptable delay) with a result that sometimes they lost the engine and perhaps some lives.
I was thinking about the Gettysburg Railroad that lost it’s boiler after the water got too low and hurt the crew. That one was because the gauge used to measure the water in the boiler was not maintained properly and perhaps the crew did not have the resources to ensure that there was proper water in that locomotive while going uphill.
Another thing to consider is perhaps rigging a hose to a nearby stream or water body to get the water to the tender without having to go all the way to the water tower. I had to do this several times in hot summers on my old 71 ford so long ago.
The yard work was what I was thinking of. I thought it could help add to what the yard person had to do and keep track of. On a real busy layout it might be a problem, but on a smaller layout it might be fun. Mainline engines would be serviced when they hit town to drop off and pick-up cars or pass through. By using the decoder to operate the meter, you can lash it to your engine of choice.
Logging railroad locomotives frequently took on water from nearby bodies of water via a hose. Bachmann’s Spectrum HO 3-truck Shay comes with such a hose, although it’s a very fine hard-to-see detail if installed.
It’s usually simpler to denote water tank locations on your timetable, and have a notation somewhere in the special rules section in the back of the ETT on how often engines with certain sizes of tenders need to stop (every town, every other town, every third, etc), and for how long (5 minutes, 10, etc). Leave it up to the schedule and the engineer to actually stop, which increases the operating session’s “play value”.
That is, unless you’re into the electronics aspect of the hobby!
Water stops were generally 20 or fewer miles apart–steam engines used a lot more water than fuel! Stopping to take on water (or not) could play a critical factor in timetable operation: if your train is running late, do you stop to take on water (which will make you later) or pour on the steam and hope you can make up the time and reach the next water tank before you run out?
The easiest solution of all: use kitchen timers, and simply assign each locomotive in your roster a water capacity that’s measured in real (as opposed to scale) minutes. Whenever you halt you simply stop the timer (it’s a simplification to say that locomotives use no water when stopped, but they certainly use less), and restart it when you move again.
As far as the consequences of running out go, you could just add a page to your book of rules requiring a crew to determine randomly (with dice or cards) what happens after five minutes without water. The range of options is fairly small, but it probably includes:
Crew realizes problem and dumps fire, stranding train at current location until relief arrives.
Crew doesn’t realize problem and burns crown sheet, stranding train at current location until relief arrives; locomotive must be dumped at nearest siding for trip to shops.
Blowout plugs function (this is what happened at Gettysburg), putting out fire, scaring crew, and requiring locomotive to be moved to siding.
With new DCC systems, such as Lenz’s Set-LI with Loco CE, that can use WiFi equiped PDA’s as controllers, I see a feature like this being quite easy to implement. The water meter can be built into the PDA screen display.
The two advances of PDAs as controllers and the new 2-way communication protocol could allow for some exciting advances in model train control. The use of a PDA controller would allow for a very realistic train control system. The controller could essently look like the inside of a real locomotive cab with all the controls, displays, and guages. The ability for the decoder to talk back to the DCC system would allow the load the locomotive is pulling to be broadcast back to the controller, forcing the engineer to make the appropriate realistic adjustments, and keep track of the fuel and water consumption based upon real conditions. Imagine a controller that allows the user to adjust the cut-off for maximum power at start-up and maximum efficiency at speed. It would be just like Microsoft Train Simulator but your controlling your model train. [:D][yeah]
Thanks for all the ideas . I will have to see how it all works out. At the moment I am still working on benchwork , so it might be awhile beforeI get to put it to thte test.