The problem with powering the tender axles is that as the coal and water are consumed, the tractive effort falls. When the tender is close to empty, the extra tractive effort is probably close to nil, yet the train weight hasn't decreased one iota.

The huge disparity, as I recall, between what Wardale wrote about his experiences with the "614T" and the ACE "test runs" in his book versus the public pronouncements by Rowland and the railfan media accounts at the time are one of the most illuminating "he said, she said, they said" contrasts I have ever come across in railroad history accounting. And as with EVERY such situation, most likely no one is actually telling the full, truthful story, but only what they want to say for whatever reasons.

The quickie condensed version of this, from memory (having purchased and lost/had stolen TWO copies of Wardale's tome), is that all the "test equipment" supposedly hooked up for the runs were little more than "window dressing" and "putting on airs" for the media and industry reps--that, either because of the ridiculously extreme weather and operating conditions rendering the equipment prone to failure OR no real intention of getting usable data in the first place, Wardale found the entire month-long exercise, especially adding "614T" to an Amtrak train for "high-speed test data," nothing more than a "publicity gimmick," and felt deceived being brought over for the month.

Subsequent readings of accounts by Porta and Rowland, contrasted with the analytical and at-times-terse writings of Wardale, convince me that we will probably never get an accurate accounting or history of this, or other, projects these individuals have worked with. It reminds me far too much of the clashes I have seen over projects such as Positive Train Control between the accountants, the engineers, and the politicians/managers. Sadly, only one of the "sides" in this scenario is making himself available here to reiterate his "spin" on the situation. Mr. Porta has passed away; industry folks usually have good reasons to not speak up; and Mr. Wardale has presented his side in his book.

I've read the book cover-to-cover at least 5 times since the time I purchased it (perhaps unintentionally proving Porta's adage that only after the third or forth reading does the "true" story come out, sometimes even despite the author's intentions). This is my take on what Wardale said:

Wardale never says that the tests were not intended to be a serious engineering effort; Wardale only claims that he felt the main intention of the tests was publicity, no doubt to garner support for the project. The weather that January was brutally cold, which created very adverse conditions for both operation and testing. Snow and ice accumulations played havoc with the instrumentation lines. I'm sure ACE would have rather picked a different time, but I can imagine Ross couldn't just call up CSX and say "this isn't going to work for us; can we delay the testing for a couple of months?", so the testing went ahead. The Foster Wheeler engineers were able to provide instrumentation to measure a lot of things that had been impractical to measure during the steam era (for instance, the stress in the rods while the engine was at speed). A lot of very useful data was collected, it's just as the month went on and the instrumentation broke down due to weather issues, less data was collected.

Wardale never suggested that he thought he had been deceived. He only said that he felt the locomotive was not in proper condition for the tests due to rushed firebox repairs conducted shortly before the tests began, and that the weather conditions were not suitable for serious testing. He also mentions he was not able to get a work visa to allow him to stay in the US and he had to return to the UK after a month or so.

Wardale claims that weekly (if not daily) firebox repairs were required (re-caulking stay bolt heads for instance) to keep 614's firebox reasonably water and steam tight. The booster failed part-way through the tests and couldn't be repaired in the time available, which required the train tonnage to be reduced. 614's oddball Hancock feed water heater had been removed by the C&O in the 1950's which significantly reduced the locomotive's thermal efficiency. The 614 (designed and built as a passenger locomotive) was significantly below its optimum operating speed in drag coal service, and loss of the booster would have adversely impacted its performance in this regard. Wardale felt that all this created the false impression among the modern CSX railroaders that 614's performance during the tests was typical of state-of-the-art 1940's steam, which was going to make them even more skeptical of the practicality of steam for modern operating conditions. Obviously a freshly shopped 1940's steamer intended for this sort of service (say an Allegheny) with all of its original appliances intact operating in ~70 degree F weather would have turned in a much better performance all around. As they say though, you have to work with what you have, not what you wish you had.

One thing that's clear from reading what's been written by and about Wardale is that he's never been very happy with the management he's worked under, including the South African Railways, ACE, China Rail, and I'd guess before that British Rail. No doubt some of his criticisms were justified in all cases, but you have to wonder if he just isn't a "problem employee" to some degree. Despite that, Wardale was quite complimentary of Ross' drive and determination to see the ACE project through and never criticizes Ross personally in the book.

I don't really think there's any intentional skewing of the story here among the participants, it's just that you can take any four people involved in the same events, wait 10 or 15 (or 30!) years, and in every case I'm sure you'd come up with similarly divergent accounts of the events.

Hello,

Lets admit, anyone, be they enthusiasts, preservationists, owner operators of a steam railway equipment are considered by the public at least unusual or unique up to full extremist borderline fanatical. In my long exposure to anything related to heritage steam, this has been true...also pervasive in the community of steam stationary and traction engines also. It's perceived that egos and strong wills prevail. They would be right. Maybe in a few cases these fanatics may be considered hostile but may I suggest what drives most of them is the need to not only to preserve history but champion what industry and society has long since considered a lost cause.

If anyone muscled though Wardale's book, read and digested every page, I'll buy them a pint. Who in their right mind would write such a book ( in the 1990's) which had extreme detail in technical content about taking a 1950's era steam locomotive and super tuning / upgrading it in the 1980's??? He himself seemed to have a rooted passion in saving this technology but by the end of the book, after all is exposure to the SAR, ACE and Chinese he seemed to have a deep fatalistic view of the opportunity. However, the epilogue comments by Porta in his book streamed from a mind of eternal optimism and after all he had seen, felt there was hope for steam. Kudos for LD! It appeared Wardale had the utmost respect for Porta, a " disciple" of him, much like Porta was a disciple of Chapelon. " L D Porta" was the name plate on the Red Devil's smoke lifters, not D Wardale. Wardale was as fanatical as the rest of us....about steam.

In my case, I look at reciprocating power from a wholistic standpoint. Being exposed to and marketing heavy duty recip diesel and natural gas engines for the last 10 years, I include recip steam into the same court as these technologies......from my perspective, gas and steam turbines are the greater threat.....turbines now being accepted as the industry standard. However recipes can have higher single cycle electrical / mechanical efficiency than a turbine in many power nodes.....10 MW or less.

Do recips have chance moving forward?...I think so. What engines are used in the largest most modern container ships today?.....ultra long stroke low speed diesels (....with cross heads by the way)

IMHO recip steam's best chance in industry today may be in a more subtle role.....waste heat recovery (WHR). Keep the diesel as the prime mover in a locomotive, input the engine exhaust, jacket water, oil cooler and 1st stage aftercooler heat into a binary (series) rankine cycle, recip steam as the topping cycle and ORC ( or similar tech) as the bottoming cycle......together adding another 20-30% power to the locomotive generator armature......Compact Combined Cycle. This may be sheer fantasy or be even feasible from a thermodynamic perspective. We have looked at a number of WHR technologies over the years and ORC's price point is too high....but steam WHR looked more attractive!....tried and true! If a manufacturer can lower the cost, modularize it, fully operated by a PLC, drop it in the locomotive cowling connect the energy inputs, you may you can have a rolling competitor to these multi - hundred MW combined cycle plants who lay claim to 60% + efficiency. Perhaps we small blokes can play too some day!

As for all operating classic steam today, it's wonderful. The visual and audible spectacle is unmatched.

It's all good!

(Enough of the thoughts from this fanatic.........to me, steam has possibilities!)

Regards,

Randy

Hugh,

It looks like I need to buy you 5 pints.....hopefully not at one sitting! You certainly have the hutspa!

Since you have a working copy, perhaps you need a copy of the new addition for a keepsake?!

Cheers!

Randy

In my opinion, after reading this, this makes 614's performance more remarkable, not less.

Ross' comment about CSX and BN losing interest because of the drop in oil prices is another example of the short-sightedness of the corporate world. You would think that after two oil embargoes and appropriate shocks in 1973 and 1979 that someone would question how long it would be before there would be more trouble on that front. Well, look where we have been since then, and where we are now. . .



That in turn unfortunately reminds me of another saying--"It's hard to soar with eagles when you have to work with turkeys."

I don't think the issue was ever that 614 performed splendidly ... or that one of the principal aims of the 'testing' was to show the Foster-Wheeler engineers what 'real-world operating conditions' on a staybolted locomotive would be like.

I don't want this thread to turn into a 'toidfest; my questions are only peripherally about Ross himself. The subject of whether the 614T tests were primarily 'political' was discussed here in 2006, and I think that was enough for anyone.





That is scarcely 'shortsightedness', it was sound business practice for that era. I've always said that one person to blame for the demise of ACE was Saddam Hussein, for deciding to finance the continuation of the war with as much oil at $15 a barrel as he could provide; certainly by 1986 both price and supply were at levels making coal-fired steam a dubious gamble to develop. If I remember correctly, Chessie was clear in considering steam a 'hedge' against higher diesel prices, rather than a fundamental improvement in coal-train operations or a true competitor to contemporary diesel-electric power in general service. I think BN thought that way!

If oil prices drop, and look as if they'll stay dropped for a fairly long period of time, it's good business to hold off on implementing an approach that only pays 'dividends' under restricted conditions. Now, if Chessie were seeing this, and wanted an excuse to get out of working with ACE, it would make perfect sense for them to continue discussions... with unfeasible demands. Insistence on complete condensing, prototypes running within a three-year timeframe (at substantially ACE's expense), etc. are in my opinion examples of just such demands...

The chief concern I had at the time, and still have, is that an eight-drivered design with limited boosting was not exactly suited to coal-train service, especially in summer. There is a certain sense in retaining the 'all-purpose' design (think of it perhaps as a modern 4-8-4) if there are alternative markets for a standard design -- again, let's follow the Hamilton/Dilworth model that views locomotives as 'units' -- when there are oil price shocks or the threat of another effective embargo.

However, as a coal-train locomotive, the ACE 3000 was as miscast as, say, an Allegheny. Porta clearly realized that, and repeatedly said so, and designed follow-on locomotives more specifically suited to coal-train service. I can understand Wardale's similar attempt being deprecated by ACE (and I suspect the tale of that attempt from the ACE management side would be interesting reading) but why were Porta's later designs, and perhaps more importantly the thinking behind the design details, not promoted effectively?

The description in Wardale's book of the final meeting with the Chessie people on June 11th, 1985 (p.409) would read like farce except that there are underlying semantics, some of which were noted in Wardale's discussion... but not all. Why was there so little apparent communication between Porta and ACE on the one hand, and the Chessie technical people on the other? In particular, when Porta had abandoned compounding in the designs, why was his reasoning not communicated compellingly ... or else why was some form of condensing not included on a variant of the higher-horsepower ACE designs?





In a world of more-or-less rigged carbon credit agitation, with an Administration avowedly hostile to any form of clean coal combustion ... let alone trying to burn mine-run coal in a staybolted firebox under variable road conditions, without a practical baghouse or fine-ash separator(!!!) Show me a place for coal-fired steam that is intentionally made to look diesel-like in this world...

Yes, there could have been research into alternatives to dependence on foreign oil. They would have been more or less where the Carter administration had them -- Fischer-Tropsch syngas and then liquid fuel synthesis, perhaps with effective nuclear power. (Or my old favorite, SRC -- the fuel of choice for your coal-turbine Eldorado...) Note that unlike the situation in the Seventies, there's plenty of fuel to go around... it is just priced where the world claims to want it.

So the argument collapses down to precisely what Ross et al. were following: bottom-line cost-effectiveness of the steam alternative, and not some cobbled-up idea of preserving national economic integrity in the event of another embargo or OPEC cartel price-fixing action.


[Oh, by the way Randy, you owe me six pints, and I'm working on a seventh. (I have the new, smaller version, but it takes more work to read it, so size of the pint is a wash! ;-} )

And we'll make it Black Douglas, if you please. And toast Mr. Wardale, and Mr. Porta, and Mr. Rowland, as we go...]

The only differences I was told about by the publisher was the dust jacket and the pictures are a second scan of the originals hence the loss of quality in the second edition.

You are welcome to debate the who and where for's of ACE and the people involved. The bottom line is how much was phisicaly produced at the end. Nothing phisicaly of new metal cut. Yes much testing was done but it only has value if applied to an end product. No one would agree on the end product ACE should produce. Then the money ran out.

As to Dave's book, again reading it many times it will teach you much but it's still has little value unless you phisicaly produce something at the end which works from that knowledge.

If there was anything that I have learnt from Wardale and Porta's writings is that it's not the end of developing steam technology but as far as they got. The writings are there to encourage you to go further and that it has to be done phisicaly to prove your theories.

Nigel's points have merit.

Physical results from a great deal of theory, conjecture and analysis in Davids's book could be summed up in the display at the time point of the 3:30 on the clock of the following video........

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eR8h03yShu8

To me, this is the essence of what the Red Devil represented. Now she rests quietly in the basement of Monument Station hoping to not to meet the torch.

Even at rest, doesn't the Red Devil represent the most advanced steam locomotive development accomplished to date?.....(even if some the alterations have been disabled or removed.)

This is an abandoned technology, which only a few have carried the design torch forward from the 1950's versus literal centuries of design expertise on diesel electric technology to the present.

Any gains made are valuable. In today's business environment, getting any tangible development done is an outright accomplishment. Pressures of profitability, production and operating schedules rarely leave room for incorporating new proven product, let alone radical departures from conventional technology. The general public, even upper management within a given corporation don't have a concept of the intense challenges of getting a design proven and commissioned for full continuous operation. My co-worker call this challenge "......blood running down the walls". It's a very long way from theory to proven results.

Get the new hardware built, put it through 16,000 - 24,000 hrs of full load, in-field trials.....then, prove and market your low life cycle costs and high operating efficiency.

Current operating examples of either new construction or preserved advanced steam recip technology, being, the Tornado, the Duke of Gloucester, SS Badger (steam ship with Skinner steeple compound) to name a few, can yield valuable information in operation and durability.

Regards,

Randy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR8h03yShu8&app=desktop

I'm going to have to get that flick!

Until you do, here's your (ultimate?) high-tech-steam "train porn":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVYS7xj3eic

I've already said more than I should have on matters involving persons involved in the project.

The truth is that the critical corporate decision makers on this matter based their thinking COMPLETELY based upon their assessment of the relative risk of high priced oil and NOT AT ALL based upon their opinions of the designs of a prototype steam locomotive. I was a participant in the meetings that determined BN and Chessie ending their funding and the design merits ( or lack thereof) were not ever discussed nor pertinent.

The principle engineering questions the FW engineers wanted data on were the amount of running gear stresses absorbed by the boiler vs. the frame and the firing differences when fuels of widely different btu values were used under a range of throttle settings. There were many others.Perhaps of critical importance was the opportunity to have the software writers get a basic understanding of the demands upon a steam locomotive under all operating conditions ( including but not limited to extreme cold).,. The 2 head writers told me repeatedly that the education was invaluable and critical.

Obviously I was very disappointed when the crash in the price of world oil ended the project as I believe that the ACE 3000 would have proved itself well in service.

Some things are beyond our control.

Onward and upward.

Ross Rowland

Unfortunately, that is where the economics left the project. We can sit here all day and speculate about design, etc., but the price of oil dictated a speedy end to the project before it really got much further.

This is similar to the story about the end of a hoped resurgence in mainline electrification in the United States. During the energy crises of the 1970s, Class I railroads were investigating electrification as an option. I believe UP or BN installed energized overhead on a section of mainline to see how it interfered with radio and train control. However, unlike steam, GE had already developed AC locomotives that could operate at high transmission voltage. It seems the only buyers were power utility railroads, where some of these locomotive still soldier on.

It would have been interesting had both projects gone further.

Is it just me, or does that part of South Africa look an awful lot like parts of the Union Pacific or the Santa Fe?

How close could we come with black engines numbered in the 800 series?

*redacted*