Why does Pikes Peak #4 look like a bomb ready to go off in this video, at 2:09?

https://youtu.be/n_ZHfqmeApE

That's normal for hard working oil burners.

I don't know what you mean, and I don't get the time track (or sound) when I watch this video. It looks to me like they're having trouble keeping up, and they've got the atomizer turned up so she won't smoke like a tire fire (all the time). I suspect that the dampers aren't letting in enough air, but it's hard to say for sure by just watching youtube. I CAN tell you that it's a bloody miracle that she runs at all, considering the financial restructuring the cogwheel route has endured lately. I know Mike is a good man, and they will continue to tweak and adjust #4 whenever they get the chance.

I'm guessing that the steam locomotive will not be able to operate on the new tracks without modification.

In the video, you can see that the rack has dual offset teeth (1:24 in the video), but the new track has a single tooth as seen in the pictures in this article: http://cs.trains.com/trn/b/staff/archiv ... s-cog.aspx

The operator at 1:15 in the video mentions that there are two sets of staggered cog wheels on the locomotive. Hopefully the cog wheels on the locomotive can be adjusted to work with the new rack.

I also think that it's interesting that the new track uses steel ties, but I guess that this system is well proven in Europe.

The steam engine would need modifications to the rack gear to operate on the Pikes Peak after the rebuild. They had a firm study the locomotive and was quoted a price that was at least a million. So they said it was passing on the steam locomotive modification. Right now that steam engine is in Williams, Arizona of all places on display. Really a shame we won't see steam on the Pikes Peak for likely a long time. I know one of the major problems in the past was there was no water towers up the line. Don't know if they incorporated the water towers (or simply a water hose) into the new line but I am sure they did. One of the major costs was driving a daily water truck to the top of Pikes Peak for the visitor center. They likely have a water pipe going all the way to the center now.

They asked the wrong firm..... unless their purpose was to eliminate steam.

I was invited up there to see #4 run, but I did everybody a favor and stayed home. Why, you may ask... Well, the big boss man, a Mr A____ was going to be there. He is extremely filthy rich, and I'm just railroad riff raff. All it takes for careers to end and heads to roll is for one person to say one word that Mr extremely filthy rich doesn't want to hear. I was pretty sure I would cause trouble for the employees if I forgot and opened my mouth, so now I get to see it on youtube.

It WAS an awful lot of smoke. #4 was built as a coalburner, so there are going to be teething pains, and the guys had very little chance to fine tune the conversion. By comparison, I rode the cab of a Schafbergbahn locomotive in Y2K (the article used to be on this site, but vanished). The engine was a new build by Winterthur in Switzerland, and burned off road diesel like #4 (last I heard). The train was a single coach, and the engineer had to make no more than one or two quick adjustments the whole trip. No fireman, and no visible smoke...

And no flames coming back in the cab. Those flames look pretty impressive if you're not used to it, but it's really just the last little bit of unburned hydrocarbons, looking for the nearest available free oxygen so it can flash briefly and die. It's routine to be standing knee deep in these flames when shaking sand out of the sand horn into the firedoor, while your engine is storming upgrade. THAT'S railroading.

No worries all, I asked on Facebook, and according to their Facebook page, steam is "retired" at Pikes' Peak. :(

I'm just an arm-chair railroader, who doesn't know a lot about steam locomotives, but I am a motorhead who is into cars. I know that cars need their fuel/air ratio adjusted at higher elevations due to less oxygen. Considering that Pikes Peak is over 14,000ft in elevation, could that have something to do with the oil fired steam locomotive making the flames that we saw?

Not really. In Austria, I rode another similar Abt system railroad, up Mt St Wolfgang, and saw no smoke at all. They were using the same fuel, but the difference is that their locomotive was designed as an oil burner, and the mechanical guys had plenty of opportunity to debug it.

Black smoke is unburned fuel. My guess is that there wasn't enough air being admitted under the fire to burn all the fuel, but there can be many causes besides that for excess smoke.

On a rack railroad, the steam demand is pretty much all or nothing, and once the fire is set, I'd say it's more like tending a stationary boiler that runs a steam winch, not too dramatic.

The bit about standing knee deep in fire applies to regular adhesion type railroads. These require the fireman to respond to a much larger variety of conditions, in general. Every now and then, when these engines are working hard, the fireman will crank up the blower and shake some sand into the firebox through the round hole in the firedoor, and the draft will suck it through the tubes and blast the soot out of them, which increases heat transfer.

What you saw on #4 was use of a lot of atomizer, which is routine when steam demand is high. It reduces smoke when the fireman needs to use a lot of fuel. Engines are occasionally fired like that on most railroads which use oil burners, but I doubt it's normal on many rack lines. (Corrections welcomed).

Steam locomotives aren't much affected by changes in altitude. The air going into internal combustion engines (or people) is limited by the volume of the cylinder (or lungs). Lower the atmospheric pressure by 50% means that the volume of oxygen in the cylinder (lungs) has been reduced by 50% as well, so the engine (person) is starved for air.

The way I see it is the air supply to the fire is open ended in a boiler, without the fixed volume of a cylinder. The thinner the air, the more easily it is pulled through the boiler by the exhaust blast just as a greater volume of water will flow through a given sized hole in a tank, than say molasses. The greater volume of thinner air being pulled through the firebox means that the actual volume of oxygen fed to the fire remains the same.

I believe that the same open ended phenomenon is in play in jet engines, thereby allowing them to operate at much higher altitudes than piston engine aircraft can fly.

I understand that when the Ecuadorian railroad over the Andes dieselized, they found that at high altitudes, they needed 3,000 naturally aspirated diesel horsepower to equal the performance of the approximately 1,000 hp steam engines.

At least that's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

I've never seen it mentioned how the water is carried when the engine is back on nearly level track and the boiler is tilted forward. Seems like all the water would carry forward and threaten to expose the crown sheet.
I've never been around a rack engine to ask a fireman how they carry the water.

The firebox has a low crown, and the water level is measured in the mid point of the boiler, rather than at the back head. This gives a pretty good average, regardless of whether the engine sits on level track or not. This was how it was done in Upper Austria at the Schafbergbahn and at Achenseebahn.

The museum in Munich has on exhibit a retired rack locomotive which employees a different solution to that problem. The boiler is short and fat, and mounted crosswise to the track, which also makes the water level more consistent.

No doubt there are other ways to handle that problem.

Kelly makes an interesting point about steam being better at altitude than diesels.

WWII aircraft needed two-stage superchargers to get to 30,000 feet and above with their gasoline piston engines. The Bell P-39 had a single-stage supercharger which led to diminished performance much above 10,000 feet. At Guadalcanal they were used as ground attack and bombing aircraft if possible while the USMC/USN F4F with a two-stage supercharger was preferred for aerial combat.

Basic EMC/EMD engines have Roots blowers, a type of low-boost superchargers that are necessary in a two-stroke engine, but which do not have enough boost to perform well at high altitude. Perhaps this is why UP used steam over Sherman Hill as long as they used steam anywhere.

UP and EMD tested turbosuperchargers for 567's in the 1950's, leading to UP's "Omaha GP9's" and EMD's GP20 and SD24 units.

I recall going over Sherman Hill on the City of Everywhere behind an A-B-B-B-A set of E8/9 units, each with two 12-567's with Roots blowers. The units were making plenty of black smoke account air starvation.

Phil Mulligan

I was fortunate enough to get some (very little) firing time on No. 4 several years ago. No. 4 was converted from coal to oil in the 1980-90's and ran very seldom after conversion. The firebox is short and wide, making it a little difficult to get the burner appropriately positioned and adjusted. Since the locomotive wasn't used that much, a lot of the "bugs" regarding the conversion (air, dampers, etc.) were not resolved. These locomotives, while in regular service, never had any water glasses, using various gauge cocks as described, on both the fireman's and enginer's side. When I fired it, I do not believe the single water glass was properly installed as it was difficult to make any determination regarding water level. Needless to say, the engineer and I were constantly checking the gauge cocks and I always had more water than necessary most of the time...creating other problems. In addition, Baldwin equipped these locomotives with screw throttles and reversers. During the early restoration, the screw throttle was replaced with a traditional "lever" throttle, making it very difficult to make fine throttle adjustments, creating additional problems for the fireman trying to make adjustments with the fire.

These locomotives were also not equipped with any air brakes, but only 2 steam "jam" brakes, one for the fireman and one for the engineer. A water brake, along with the reverser,, was the primary braking when coming down the mountain, making for an exciting trip from what I understand. The hand brake was also effective. :)