New Steam ?

Check this out.

Strange-but who knows what can happen if oil gets up to 80 bucks a barrel.


http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/news/Steam ... 3-2005.pdf

Sure, but what about the price of coal? And how are you going to offset the basic inefficiency of a movable stream engine versus an internal combustion engine? C'est la vie. Hank Rentschler

Coal may be cheaper, but the higher labor and maintenance costs will kill this. Don't quote me on this, I've been told I'm not too bright.

Before you will see producer gas being used on a large scale you would see either coal liquifaction such as done by SASOL in South Africa or you would see pulverized coal in a stabilized suspension being used instead of oil. Either technology is well established and simply needs oil to get high enough to be economical.

Jason40172003 wrote:Coal may be cheaper, but the higher labor and maintenance costs will kill this. Don't quote me on this, I've been told I'm not too bright.

Coal isn't cheap anymore. The world price has more than doubled over the last year.

I hope santa leaves me lots of coal for christmas... with energy prices going up and up, that would be great

I recently came across a web site of a company trying to develop a modern coal steam locomotive. It had sketches and everything. I can't remember what it was though. It kinda looked like a pair of modern passenger locomotives, like the sleeker end of the downester, joined, but sitting on the wheelset of old steam locomotives. It looked kind of cool, but if you were going to make a modern locomotive, wouldn't it make more sense to do it as a steam-electric? For the same reasons that diesel locomotives are diesel electric.

Even if coal is not cheap, we can use our own coal instead of buying coal from.. i don't know, saudi arabia

l008com wrote:I recently came across a web site of a company trying to develop a modern coal steam locomotive. It had sketches and everything. I can't remember what it was though. It kinda looked like a pair of modern passenger locomotives, like the sleeker end of the downester, joined, but sitting on the wheelset of old steam locomotives. It looked kind of cool, but if you were going to make a modern locomotive, wouldn't it make more sense to do it as a steam-electric? For the same reasons that diesel locomotives are diesel electric.

Your description describes the ACE-3000. More here:
http://www.trainweb.org/tusp/ult.html

FWIW, if you have access to a copy of David Wardale's "Red Devil" book, there's a not entirely charitable chapter on the ACE Coal Train tests of January 1985.

* JB *

Yup thats the one. The artists rendering on that site looks pretty cool. Even if coal/steam engines weren't cheaper, and were actually the same price. Politically it would be a good thing, cause less dependence on foreign product, more dependence on domestic product.

HOWEVER I still think it would be better to have a steam-electric, than a full steam with the big old school looking drive wheels. Rail companies might find it much easier to swallow too. But perhaps the whole point is moot anyway. 15 years from now they may very well be building hydrogen combustion powered locomotives, whose tanks are charged from solar power plants out someplace in the midwest where there is lots of space and lots of sun...

The lessons of supply and demand seem to be forgotten frequently in the US. Remember back in the early 1980s the major US auto makers all started to build diesel cars on the premise that the fuel was cheaper, and at that point the price of diesel went higher than the price of gasoline and stayed there. Then the big diesel builders all decided they were going to offer modified engines to burn cheaper "heavy fuel" and overnight the price of heavy fuel went sky high. I remember one tugboat that got a heavy fuel engine and by the time it was installed they could not afford to run it on heavy fuel, so it spent all its life burning #2 diesel. Well the same thing would happen to the price of coal if you announced you were introducing a large number of coal burning steam locomotives, or to whatever grade of oil you might choose to burn in a large fleet of oil burning steam locomotives.

By the way I have a great design for a solar panel and wind powered steam propulsion system for streamlined diesel articulated trains and with just a few million dollars of federal research money I could study it enough to determine whether I would need a few hundred million dollars more federal research money......

Several major electric utility companies recently announced long-term contracts to import foreign coal instead of using domestic citing (1) lower delivered price, and (2) the railroads having allowed trackage to deteriorate to the point of not being able to reliably deliver coal.

That old haunting theme
on classic steam!
Ever since steam had been hastily thrown overboard in the 1950s there has been thought of what would have been ...
(1)... had classic (reciprocal) steam continued
(2)... had classic / unconventional steam returned in the 1960s (for various - because of's -)
(3)... had modernized classic steam returned in the 1970s (in the wake of the first 'oil crisis' - which in hindsight was nothing against our present days situation)
(4) To that ads up the question: couldn't steam be revitalized to make a limited return.
This last question, our present day one, I believe can be answered 'YES' - a limited return for a special purpose could be made if there were enough people and capital determined to realize it for a specific purpose at hand.
Such a purpose could be -
- simply to run steam trains to present day express schedules thus conforming to daily commercial traffic;
- to correct historical error of scrapping essential historic designs such as the PRR S1-6100 or the NYC Niagaras; such a re-building of such then apex engines should be be to a revised design just in order to do justice to the historical value and rank of these engines
(5) - and ... you name it, please


Addition August 14th:

mxdata wrote:I saw a wonderful ad recently ... The ALCO ad talked about how safe their steam locomotives were, because none of them had blown up and killed anybody the previous year.

Well, mxdata

I think that sound unusual, not sure - was there really such an add? I have never seen the like, neither in Locomotive Encyclopedia 1941, nor 1947, nor in locomotive technical magazines from this era - on the other hand I would never claim that this would prove anything. Mind to post it here?

Maybe today's such an add would have to read: 'Buy shares of Chernobyl works - no core melting this year!'

On the other hand: in the short time I am visiting this site I have read appalling stories about mishandling of steam locomotives that would warant second consideration, for instance in thread Steam Engine You Won't Forget read steam man's story of a tour with Reading T-1 2102, where they continued with boiler foaming like mad until they had used up steam completely, never stopping before, never getting things right, obviously never even noticing something was badly wrong. Or C&O Allengenhy #1601 read GC&EShay12, here quoted:
"1601's last run was in 1955 Engineer Dutch Sullivan and Fireman E.E. Rogers outta C&O's Handley Yard. They ran her down to Quinnimont yard on the New River Sub on the way back E.E. kept the stoker going and filled the fire box with so much coal it got all the way up into the combustion chamber once it got back to handley they couldnt get the coal out so they shoved her on a siding above the roundhouse which she sat there with trees growing up through the tender till 1956 when C&O gave her to the Ford Mus. Friend of mine Carl Lake rode her dead from Handley to Huntington shops where they rebuilt her to running status and under her own power to MI."
With this kind of abuse it is perhaps less ridiculous to mention if no-one had achieved blowing up a boiler in spite of maybe jamming up untight safety valves so they would simply never blow off, or possibly trying how far you can go without feed pump working, not adding up water to the boiler, and the like.
The equivalent would be a diesel maker advertising: 'No cracked block this year in spite of customers never adding any anti-freeze to cooler water yet storing dead engines outsides in winter! No piston freeze-up in spite of customers regularly forgetting all about oil change!' - or maybe because: since if they had done an oil change there might have been one or the other who would have forgotten to fill in new oil, so the engine would have run dry and would have been a sure bet for freezing up all pistons before long.
Of course all this is not railroading as it should be and in modern times the like would not be tolerable - but neither would it be done since any enterprise allowing employees to handle equipment that sloppy would have to go bankrupt pretty soon - diesels or not. But, you see: while it may sound quite naive in the first place, actually such an add would rather hint appalling lack of quality control in railroads methods of running locomotives - and this did have it's backlash on locomotive development because design had to take into account a large amount of abuse and also had to keep engines simple and close to established types or else they were bound to fail in such a rough handling environment. It only was with the advent of dieselization that this type of 'smith shop' maintenance had to make place for modern procedures with industrial quality standards and control, simply because diesels couldn't be handled that way ...

Juniatha


( Plate inside cab of Duplex #6100, above driver's and fireman's windows:)
Do not open window at traveling speeds above 120 mph

l008com wrote:I hope santa leaves me lots of coal for christmas... with energy prices going up and up, that would be great

Put out lots of stockings and try being really bad this Christmas. That ought to net you a lot of coal!

Hi Photogenic,

Some really tough questions, and you obviously gave them some thought.

The answers are not so easy. First off, the steamers would have to be economical to operate, MAINTAIN, and, here's the hook, not pollute the environment. Once a steamer starts belching black smoke, watch the EPA come down on its owners with both feet. The lawyers will love it.

I mentioned in another thread that steamers should be stored in working order in areas where flooding is normal and expected. A steamer can operate in water up to its axles. No Diesel or electric can do that. It would be a safety measure and ensure continued operation of the RR affected.

Resuscitating old locomotives such as the PRR S-1 or even the S-2. Once again, economics. As I remember it, the S-2 turbine used as much fuel idling as it did hauling a heavy load. That one needed more work. S-1's were pretty, had possibilities, but came up against first generation diesels and lost out. Maintenance costs between the two types finished off those steamers. We could learn a few things from the UP steam program and Steve Lee's people. How to do more with less and make it LAST between repair times. More parameters to mull over. Lots of additional questions.

I saw a wonderful ad recently that was displayed as part of a presentation, it was issued by the American Locomotive Company in the 1930s, right about the time that GM announced they were going to build the plant in La Grange for EMD. The ALCO ad talked about how safe their steam locomotives were, because none of them had blown up and killed anybody the previous year.

I wonder if a manufacturer of ANY product in the United States would even consider running an ad like that in 2006. I wonder if any company in the United States would even consider building a product that required a public relations campaign like that nowadays?