Looking at the Trains Photo of the Day of the Burlington stainless steel deisel caused me to wonder. With stainless steel passenger car fleets being so common, why were there so few diesel engines done-up in stainless?
Stainless steel is expensive to begin with and paint doesn’t adhere to it very well without special treatment. Also, stainless steel passenger fleets were not that common, consider that Amtrak took stainless steel cars for most of its fleet when it acquired its initial fleet from the former passenger carriers and a lot of non-stainless steel cars were then scrapped or demoted to MofW service.
Only big users of Stainless Steel passenger cars, CB&Q, AT&SF, and Western Pacific in the US, and Canadian Pacific in Canada. Several other companies had some cars, D&RGW, PRR, and NYC had some for example.
The New York Central had hundreds of stainless steel cars. Going through several books dedicated to their lightweight passenger equipment, they bought approximately 300 cars from Budd.
That should put the Central at #2 on the list behind the Santa Fe.
My knowledge of stainless steel passenger cars on various roads comes from Durbin’s Some Classic Trains. In addition to the RRs already mentioned, he shows stainless cars for prominent trains on NH, B&O/C&O, SR, ACL, RI, NP (slumbercoaches), SAL, SP, and NKP.
I do have first hand knowledge of the NYC’c large fleet as was mentioned in another post. In the mid 60s when they were cutting back long distance trains, they were recycling them to commuter service. i saw and rode on whole commuter trains made up of them. NH also had a large fleet of stainless steel EMUs, and B&M had a large fleet of RDCs.
IIRC, Amtrak’s more modern, 1970s and newer Amfleet passenger cars are stainless steel too.
As for modern class 1s, BNSF’s business cars have stainless steel sidings too, which is a legacy of it’s ATSF heritage. And I think even former “smooth” BN business cars of GN and NP heritage were modified with stainless steel sidings too.
Locomotives require repair work of various kinds far more frequently than non-powered passenger equipment . Stainless steel requires very special handling, is difficult repair, and cannot be welded in a typical railroad backshop/
But hats off to the Q for the most beautiful diesels built, the E5’s.
The only diesels of which I’m aware that included stainless steel construction were B&M/MEC 6000 (The Flying Yankee), CB&Q Zephyr power cars in the 9900 series, CB&Q E’s and Metra F40C’s.
I knew about the others except for the Metra F40C’s. Do you have any more info or pictures of them? Thanks.
I recall reading that operating museums (the kind that repair their own cars with volunteer labor) are not fond of stainless steel cars because some at least have a gap between the outer stainless steel facade and the inner steel carbody where moisture can pool and cause hidden rust damage. And working on those cares is tough as one can imagine, it would be very difficult to make it look right if you had to take off the stainless steel shell, fix the rust, and then put it back together.
What you are describing is a characteristic of Pullman-Standard manufactured cars - they had stainless steel sheathing below the window line - being sheathing, it accumulated moisture between it and the regular steel side of the car - many of these cars had serious rust problems during their lifetime and many had the stainless sheathing removed.
A few pictures of Metra F40C’s
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=351535&nseq=18
CSSHEGEWISCH, thanks for the F40C pix. I read in a railroad.net post that the stainless steel side panels were the idea of a couple of board members of the commuter agency who were also members of the Illinois Railroad Museum, home of the ex-CB&Q E5.
I also remembered that the AT&SF had stainless steel E units:
Curious that it seems like they are using Coleman RV style air conditioning units mounted on top of the cab?
Why the F40c instead of F40PH on the the MILW Line?
Thanks,
Rich
The F40C preceded F40PH.
The standard passenger power was F-units in the mountains, E-units on the plains. The E-unit was developed as a passenger locomotive whereas the F-unit was and adaptation of a freight unit that had more of its weight on powered axles. As these units aged, they were replaced by 2nd-generation Diesels, but the number of 2nd-gen passenger units were few and far between because railroad company passenger service was dying in that time period.
The replacement philosophy was based on “unit replacement” from freight operations, where a 3000-3600 HP unit on C trucks could replace a pair of 1500 HP F-units on B trucks. Hence you saw the SDP35 for Seaboard, SDP45s on SP and Great Northern, the FP-45’s on Milwaukee Road, and U28CH and U30CH supplementing FP-45’s on Sante Fe. Commuter orders such as the U34CH on New Jersey Transit and the F40C on the Milwaukee Road Chicago commuter service were a little bit later.
Then Amtrak made this mass purchase of the SDP40F locomotives to replace the aging F and E-units it inherited when it took over the passenger network. For some reason not fully explained, these things started jumping the tracks on mainline curves. It may have had nothing to do with the C trucks and everything to do with body-mounted water tanks for the then steam generators for train heat and the water sloshing in the tanks, setting up a rhythm that synchronized with truck hunting or body sway at the speeds some curves were taken.
The SDP40F’s got traded in en-masse on the F40PH’s, the “Locomotive that saved Amtrak” according to a recent Trains article, commuter agencies picked up on ordering B-trucked F40PH’s, and now you know The Rest of the Story.
Why no Stainless Steel Locomotives it is Very Simple it is a PAIN IN THE BUTT to repair. Ever had to remove a panel of it to repair it or WELD it forget it. I would rather Sandpaper the rearend of a Rabid Wolverine in a Phonebooth than ever try Welding that stuff again. One boss I worked for had a few SS Reefer Trailers oh they were SHINY but man if they got damaged the Launguage that came out of the Shops well it turned the air BLUE. Stainless will not Rust but it is harder than heck to repair. The Chomruim used in it makes it a very hard metal.
I used to work with stainless steel and aluminum quite a bit when I was a reefer mechanic and I also used to overhaul passenger cars for private railroads. Stainless steel has just as many advantages as it does disadvantages. The great thing about stainless steel is that it will rarely if ever corrode because it is made mostly out of nickel instead of iron. You don’t have to paint it and it will never flake off. It is also some very tough metal. I consider stainless a very low maintenance type of metal.
The disadvantages of stainless steel with railroad cars are many. Kids throw rocks at passenger cars and they get dinged up over time leaving many small dents in the stainless. Normally with steel you could put bondo over it, sand it, and paint it. Or you could try to pound the dent out from the other side if that is possible. As a last resort for large dents you would have to cut out a section, and then weld a new piece in the section and grind the welds flush.
Trying to pound out dents in stainless(especially small dents) is nearly impossible because stainless does not compress and stretch easily. You can’t put bondo over the dent because that would show pink. Your really only left with two choices and that is to either fill the dent up with weld and try to sand it flush, or to section the dent out with a new piece and grind down the welds.
As stated earlier stainless is a pain to paint because it is totally smooth and not porous like metal is and the paint tends to run easily. It’s very tough to drill often dulling a drill bit in a few seconds. It is actually very easy to weld though. Cutting stainless and grinding stainless is actually a major health hazard because it can sit in your lungs forever with out breaking down due to it’s resistance to corrosion and acids.
Even though stainless steel is very expensive I don’t think the railroads didn’t produce many locomotives for that reason. I think the main reasons they didn’t use stainless is because they couldn’t paint them in
Stainless steel is very durable, so why not built the entire frame and body out of it?
Andrew Falconer
The commodity price of stainless steel is about 5 times that of regular steel. And as other posts have pointed out, it’s very hard to work with.