Yes, I believe you’re right. I have overlooked the effect a lighter alloy would have on tractive effort.

And thank you for the lighthearted response.

As for the push for it to moved to railfanning, I won’t protest those and their opinion in favor of it’s move. I will counter that a healthy dose of speculative thought keeps fresh ideas that could further our profession at the forefront of everyone’s mind.

MS

Sure have. Take a look at marine steam. It takes advantage of every update and tweak available to make it as efficient as possible, it's way more efficient than locomotives could ever hope to be, and it's still virtually extinct on the world's oceans. Diesel engines are virtually universal in ships, other than in high performance applications that use gas turbines, some submarines that use fuel cells, and some nuclear (which is steam by the way) in very high end military applications.

If you are going to burn diesel fuel, why not run a diesel and cut out the middle man? I believe that Doble steam cars were the pinnacle of steam car development in the 1930's, with condensing, superheat, and all the rest. They burned gasoline and still only got 8 or 9 MPG. Steam can only work economically if you burn dirt cheap fuel, and these days only if it produces no more, or less pollution than the reining state of the art. Lots of luck.

Kelly says it well. The chances of coal fueled steam being competitive with diesel or natural gas on the railroads is between slim and none.....and slim has left town.

IMHO-Ross Rowland

I’m guessing the future is in batteries. The modern locomotives are all electric hauling around diesel power plants.

Would be cool if you could swap out batteries in a yard during crew change. Certainly that technically is being looked at.

Probably for short haul-local switching. Long haul is electrification of main lines-no need to switch anything out

There are plenty of places for lightweight alloys in modern steam power. The key is to use them where they matter, or are essential, and not where they cause problems.

A great issue in potential preservation is the use of the 'wrong' alloy steel in boilers, notably some of the nickel steels used from the late '30s on. Several fairly well-known classes of locomotive required expedient mass reboilering when the wrong design decision was made. Even in the early 1920s desired higher pressures on ATSF resulted in 'unbuildably' heavy designs; later, 3765 would remain unstreamlined because the comparatively puny weight of the streamlining was 'too much'. While it remains to be seen if the Hancock Turbo-Inspirator was as lamentable in cared-for excursion service as it seems to have been the various places it was tried for 'production', there is no doubt it was used to save overall weight.

Meanwhile there are the essential places for weight-saving, notably in the rods and reciprocating parts. Augment reduction is just as valuable today as it was ever perceived to be in the golden age of reciprocating steam; some modern developments like cerium steel may make this more practical still.

Even in areas where 'historically' very heavy castings were used. it may be better to use modern fabrication techniques to trade sheer mass for careful design ... making engine beds directionally stronger for a given weight, for example, or using strategic ballasting or other approaches to keep adhesion correct. It is easy to design and implement practical antislip on steam locomotives, by a variety of methods, that makes much lower technical factor of adhesion essentially as practical on reciprocating steam as on modern electrics -- methods, I might add, easily retrofitted to existing locomotives, some externally invisible even to 'purists'.

While torrefied fuel obviously works better when co-fired with some carbon-rich fuel (which is something difficult to come by in 'renewables') there is little reason it would not constitute an effective carbon-neutral solid fuel to replace coal firing. With a little care in adding some of the 'clean coal' additives most of the trace-element issues encounterable with powerplant emission regulation can be addressed on mobile power not suitable for combustion-gas filtration or aftertreatment.

I continue to believe there will be a market for interesting replica or new-build steam, including the sort of locomotive the 5AT project considered or Andreas Schwander was promoting in the mid-2010s. Even if very few examples are actually built in the next few years, the actual carbon and other pollutant release is relatively small on a national, let alone global, scale; interest in steam whether 'heritage' or enthusiast is likely to promote either practical efforts or fundraising to mitigate at least an equivalent mass of materials, likely those with higher effect on AGW mechanisms. To my knowledge none of the current burner technologies have the nanoparticulate issue of high-pressure diesel/GDI that is the major human-health threat.

While there may be complaints about the applicability of new-build steam like Kloke to a 'preservation' list, I think that's overkill. Certainly the heritage interest of steam can be as great for replicas as for true 'historic fabric'.

A new build would have to be cheaper than a restoration in order for that to make sense.

This was the B&O W-1, about which there are a few discussions on the Web. A different flavor of this was the Roosen motor-locomotive design in Germany, an example of which was brought here as a war prize, and only scrapped after the great dying-off of interest in any modern steam after 1948.

A much better approach (which would bounce into one of the most interesting technological early diesel passenger locomotive designs) was application of the Bowes drive to the stillborn V1 freight steam-turbine-mechanical project. It would have been interesting to see N&W adopting this rather than the kludged-up all-wheel-electric drive this locomotive morphed into by 1950-52, to say nothing of the underpowered and dubiously engineered TE-1 later.

Everyone is probably familiar with the BCR coal-turbine scam, but there was an interesting Canadian project using coal-burning air reheat in a turboshaft engine for road power -- a surprising amount of work was done on it at 'locomotive scale' in the mid-Fifties.

None of this is likely to replace modern diesel-electric power, which is still the take-home message. But some of it would have served nicely up to introduction of the EPA in the early '70s...

That is not necessarily so.

In some cases, 'restoring' historic fabric to operation is unfavored by organizations, and quite possibly dangerous. A tangible example is 1361's current quandary, where the only 'practical' solutions are massive derating or new boiler construction; that this has been such a timeless topic here is easy to document, but notice that it took two major figures in practical restoration to resolve the issue even in principle.

We have had many a thread noting that 'new construction' is often preferable for museums or other organizations that primarily intend 'working steam' or rides to be the attraction.

Yeah I remember TVRM saying they should just build a brand new mikado, and IRM saying they should order a new decapod.

Oh wait... nobody said that. There’s so little that’s actually original about any steam locomotive I don’t know why it’s even a thought.

And do you believe the T1, when finished in may be 15 years, may be allowed to be fired up even with torrefied coal when the more radicals have the say?

A side remark; as advanced as the project was/is in technical aspects, I believe what choked the 5AT was its outer appearance. Probably the proposed modernized applications even in disguise of someting as the legendary class 36 might have been more successful as to fundraising.

Mike

This was the subject of extensive discussion both in the early engineering-committee discussions and the original feasibility plan. The original rough working idea was to overcome the known grate restriction by equipping the locomotive for easy conversion to liquid fuel, either as primary or co-fired. Subsequently the decision was made to restrict both dimensions and fuel to 'prototype', so a high-carbon solid fuel is likely.

Torrefied wood would presumably be sourced from 'renewable' stock. Co-firing with a solvent-refined coal-like product (which extracts the carbon finely-divided from most of the 'actionable' impurities including glassing ash, and would then 'briquette' or pelletize it appropriately) would get rid of most of the concern 'other than CO2'; there will almost certainly be some form of offsetting credit (financial or otherwise) that would legally permit operation. I certainly expect any 'demonization' of historic steam to ping-pong in and out of governmental displeasure over the next few years, but I doubt we'll see a permanent outright ban.



In my opinion, much the same could be said of the ACE3000. Especially peculiar about the 5AT was that the appearance question was somewhat extensively covered on their Web site.

The Turbomotive 2 proposal was much more 'properly' planned, and I don't think there is much if anything in Wardale's FDCs that precludes the result looking like a 'normal' well-proportioned locomotive.... the problem being it would be more a British proportioned 4-6-0 than a Canadian or United States one. This got much worse since the only good way to steer the rear of that chassis on American ROW would be to push the front tender truck up like the Japanese C62 and give it some enhanced lateral guiding ... now that is weird-looking...
Probably the proposed modernized applications even in disguise of someting as the legendary class 36 might have been more successful as to fundraising.
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"Your word in God's ear", as we Teutons might say..



Absolutely, but both were proposed for different potential customers.

Especially the great pre-BR engineers had fine tuned antennas for style and harmonic outlines. These outer looks would have today made donors open their wallets as they do with many projects. From the start, 5AT to me appeared so very "not from this planet" that it even made Ivatt's "Flying Pigs" look very British.

ACE3000's potential customers - in that short time frame - would have had an interest in ROI and not much else, so the designs were rather following the demands in both cases.



Austrians had a 399..

Wasn't the 5AT planned mainly for the british market anyway?
I think with the lower scale of enthusiasm (= funding) compared to the Brits, the T1 will be the one modern steam locomotive you will probably get. It is the most attractive "missing" North American locomotive in many respects.

Mike

Based on things actually carried out, the ancient form of 4-4-0 seems to be the most sought after replica in the US today. Probably, it's because it has appeal to the g eneral public rather than to us tiny subset of foamers and steam tech geeks.

there is a drastic difference in cost between building an old time 4-4-0 and a PRR T1. The 4-4-0 is pretty simple, parts are much lighter, much less complex, requires smaller tools etc and is WAY less expensive.

Keep in mind these 4-4-0s aren't exactly worked as hard as the NKP 765 or 611 are either.

All this talk of advanced steam still misses out on competing against modern DPU/MU setup which is used on nearly all C1 rrs. And the required watering/fueling infrastructure. To have one advanced steam engine " win " against one EMD SD70ace, is missing the point. A large unit train will have 5-6 SD70aces in DPU configuration.