Hello,

Did the PRR T-1s ever get east of Harrisburg?

Thanks.

Randy

OK but what was the Pennsy up to when others were buying 4-8-4's and 4-6-4's not to mention articulateds particularly the fast freight types?

The J1 issue with rail kinking has been covered quite thoroughly in the Keystone, and by Charlie Meyer, in several articles. There were other problems beyond the EQ. pins, and these were of a different nature, such as cab visibility. It would be quite interesting to assemble a list of all these changes from the original build, and their dates. Case in point, being the inside sander mod. I was told by an old head aeons ago in Altoona that this was done to keep the sand pipes from freezing. Might be true, but the main reason was increased visibility for the head end crew....along with handrail changes to the front end, and the check valve relocation, NCS.
As for Mr. Symes, he came back to the Penn in 1940, and was a huge factor in pushing for Diesel power from that time onward. The PRR became acutely aware of the value of Diesel power, primarily as a result of EMD experiences on the B&O. When Central placed orders for massive new passenger consists with E7 power for delivery ASAP, Clement had to respond. He sure did, and first resurrected the old 1942 E6 order. This was before any production T1 was ready to be built. Given the unclear status of passenger service after the war, the T1 production was not seen as a total waste, as in any event, they would eliminate a lot of K4s double heading. There is a point where Symes would have likely wanted to reduce the total number from fifty downward, but that would have been the case, regardless of what type of steamer was being considered. What we today fail to realize some sixty years on is the reality of Diesel power being a marketable advantage in the pursuit of passenger traffic. If Clement could have Diesels on the entire Blue Ribbon Fleet by mid '46 or '47, he'd have done it in a heartbeat! The T1 would not have been a waste in such an event, as there were, at that time, still plenty of lessor trains to pull.
As for the engineering staff at the Penn, it's no big secret that they lost some good people to the N&W during their "sleepy" years.

I'm not really a Pennsy fan, so my answer shouldn't be considered expert, but I don't think they did, or at least not much. One would ask, why would they go there? East of Harrisburg was electric territory for passenger trains big enough to use a T1; other places, the locomotive would be too large and too fast.

A T1 made it to Asbury Park, NJ. for Mechanical master's Convention of 1947, or was it '48. Normal T1 operation was west of Harrisburg, for sure. As for their use in freight service, which someone brought up....this was not normal, but certainly did occur, and has been documented in many photos. JJ. Young Jr.got one on a freight with an M1 in the Mingo Jct. area, among others. I received a photo of one on a REA unit reefer train on the Middle Div. from Gary Mittner. It happened !

A T-1 also visited several regional fairs in Pennsylvania, sometimes accompanied by D-16 No. 1223 and/or the John Bull replica. I've seen photos of a T-1 next to a shiny new Reading G-3 Pacific at the Reading Fair, as well as on display at Sunbury, Pa. I believe the T-1 also made it to the Allentown Fair as well.

Given that It is Raymon Loewy's Birthday, I guess it's as good a time as any to bring the T-1 back up.

On Slipping. Would articulation have helped or hurt? (I saw 1218 slip)
Also did the Duplex design simply point out why it was a good idea to connect all the "feet" together under the loco?
And last if tinkering with design how much slip reduction do you get when you decrease the driver diameter? (The 611 with it's smallish 70" drivers could haul like it had 80" drivers)

Some of you may be aware of this, but the PRR leased N&W J #610 where it was tested on passenger runs out of Crestline. There was quite a bit of surprise that 610 was able to get a 16-car passenger train to over 110 miles an hour. The issue with the Pennsy seemed to be the J's 70-inch drivers, as it favored a larger driver diameter (as it is said) for running at high speed. And you can only wonder what the opinion was on the Pennsylvania of such high-quality steam locomotives being built in Roanoke. Just an opinion offered for your comments.
lois

They are pretty interesting engines. IIRC, they burn coal and oil (at the same time). The coal provides a "base" fire and oil is sprayed in to boost the heat output when necessary. Weird arrangement, but I'm sure there was a good reason for it.

No need to sand the flues with the coal cinders scouring them!

> >On Slipping. Would articulation have helped or hurt? (I saw 1218 slip)

> Also did the Duplex design simply point out why it was a good idea to connect
> all the "feet" together under the loco? And last if tinkering with design
> how much slip reduction do you get when you decrease the driver diameter?
> (The 611 with it's smallish 70" drivers could haul like it had 80" drivers)

Articulation would not have been particularly attractive.

First, the dynamic guiding is all wrong for operation at very high speed, where the advantages of the divided drive over an equivalent 4-8-4 would have been most effective. A much stronger centering system would have been needed to control the forward engine, and the method used to control yaw and hunting on N&W 611 (and other engines with minimized overbalance) would not only have been dramatically compromised, but would introduce a two-period oscillation.

Then there is the additional complication and mass of the flexible piping required to get high mass flow with good flow streamlining to the forward engine. The scheme applied to the Alleghenies (of which Alfred Bruce was rightly proud!) could have been applied ... but all those joints (they are the expensive part, and just as many required here as on an Allegheny), and all that required space, and all the added mass, for lower high-speed performance, is not a solution with much appeal.

In any case, by the time you go to that much trouble, either a modified S2 or V1 design provides far more efficiency and high-speed potential than a reciprocating design.


Again, the problem with the T1 slipping was far more the consequence of high-speed slipping than the low-speed and starting slips that seem to keep coming up in these discussions (and which are expediently handled by the methods Bro. Laepple has described, or via a variant of sliding-pressure firing at extended stops, etc.) The problem is simply that of instantaneous reduction of adhesion due to suspension action, or lining faults, or any other of the many things that can cause a driver to lose adhesion momentarily. If an 8-coupled engine loses adhesion moemntarily, there are seven other drivers assisting its return to stability; if all eight start slipping, the ones that recover effective traction first assist the others in reducing rotational speed. On the other hand, if one of the drivers on a Duplex slips, that's 25% of the adhesion gone, and unsurprisingly at high power this will cause the rest of the drivers to break free and start to accelerate if the sliding coefficient of friction in slip is less than the mean effective torque due to piston thrust.

Now the evil of the Franklin gear comes into play: the gear is very precise and has good 'breathing' up to very high rotational speed. So there is nothing keeping the engine from spinning up to the point where steam admission balances. Here is where the lack of a divided throttle most hurts the design: There is no effective way to reduce steam pressure to the slipping engine (usually the forward engine) selectively, even though the Franklin air throttle would be fully capable of responding to quick transitions in throttle position without force effects from multiple poppets opening and closing.

Part of the problem is that it apparently was -- and I don't find this particularly surprising -- difficult to tell quickly when the forward engine chose to break loose at high speed. Even with 'perfect' human reaction time, there's a lot of acceleration that will take place in 3/4 of a second or so, all of which has to be scrubbed off before effective static-friction conditions will be re-established.

We've discussed some possible approaches to this, including a servo on the Franklin Precision reverse that would be automatically fast-acting, or some form of selective Wagner throttle in the steamline to the forward engine. (No butterflies need apply -- the control logic on that system was amazing for the '40s, but the actual throttling implementation stank on ice...)

The ideal thing in my opinion would be a two-part solution: First is to allow separate 'trim' of effective admission pressure to, and hence peak EP in, the forward engine; second is to provide self-throttling cam profiles on the forward engine (similar to the approach used in type D gear). I'd also recommend using the lateral-acting independent brake as traction control approach I have discussed previously, as that can easily be configured to arrest the slipping within a fraction of a revolution at little if any actual loss of effective hp from the steam.


Meanwhile, the hybrid coal/oil firing scheme isn't as weird as it looks; in fact, it is one of the best ways to fire a locomotiveif you can afford the overhead of required capital and maintenance (you have much of the 'worst of both worlds' in the latter respect!) One great difficulty with oil firing on locomotives is flameholding: if the fire goes out momentarily, even if it relights from hot refractory you are likely to have what are euphemistically called 'puffs' (and those amusingly-named explosion doors don't really help what happens...) Personally, I almost think it is priceless to be able to turn the oil all the way off with little or no deleterious consequence...

Some of the earliest approaches to oil firing in fact mimicked coal operation by providing a bed of refractory rubble onto which the oil was sprayed, giving very good atomization and carburetion over a very wide range of 'turndown'. Supplying baseline load with a coal fire makes firing up a much less stressful proposition than it is with any kind of direct atomized oil system, too.

Short-period firing changes is one of the areas where oil firing excels -- and you still have it, to the extent according with decent boiler life. Meanwhile, during the times you want to 'put a shot in by hand' to keep the coal fire stoked, you can get the furnace safely clear of 'rich mixture' before having to open up the firedoor, for those times the stoker isn't sufficiently precise or its jets directable.

Went back and read through this and the ultimate modern steam loco thread. It dawned on me that it was too bad that a T-1 had not survived. Especially when Ross Rowland was involved in the ACE 3000 project. That project would have benefited from test data from a duplex. The T-1 reminds me of the early attempts at a "flying wing". Part of the technology was ahead of critical control technology. It took modern computer technology (B-2) to control the craft, or to put it another way, the computer executes the pilots plan v the pilot directly controlling the craft (obviously true of most modern air craft).

Great discussion, and as usual on this forum, very informative.

Ross may comment on this subject (and Ihope he does) but I do not think there was anything to be learned from an as-preserved duplex that would not be attainable either through a knowledgeable reading of the C&O duplex test results on the one hand, and the thinking behind Withuhn's duplex-conjugating method (which of course is incorporated into the ACE 3000) on the other.

In my opinion there is little to be learned from the T1 boiler and firing arrangements, other than that larger grate area (and better antislipping control) might have cut down on the unburnt'fuel issue that led to the slipstream-induced minstrel-show problems. On the other hand, following the AAR push toward using properly-graded and washed coal that can be seen so prominently in publications like Railway Age in the late 1940s might also have helped. Be interesting to see a T equipped with Witte smoke deflectors, wouldn't it? ;-}

Something that never came up in the ACE design process, as far as I am aware, was optimization of either the suspension or the drive for extreme high speed. As I suspect was the case with the NYC A2a Berks (Classic Trains to the contrary!) I think the idea was to use better balancing and lightweight rods, etc. to make it possible to accomplish smooth running at 'normal' freight track speeds, with very limited augment and of course a relative absence of lateral thrust force issues on the track.

Something I have never seen addressed was the anticipated lateral in the driver axles. I'd expect positive lateral-motion devices (and some tread and flange profiling as appropriate) on the outer non-main driver pairs -- but T1s had lateral on the mains as well, which would throw much of the responsibility for guiding stability entirely on the compliance and damping arrangements in the leading and trailing trucks.

Situation on a preserved T1 would not have been directly applicable to a Withuhn conjugated duplex, even if there weren't likely to be a crapshoot with whatever level of modification had been accomplished on the particular example that was preserved... my 1947 copy of the chassis specs has a GREAT number of changes to the lateral spec, and of course the equalization rigging changed massively between the two prototypes and the 50 "production" engines.

(Oh yes... I have previously noted to some of the people behind the "Trust" that the type-D installation on "that other 611" is almost perfectly sized for application to one-half a duplex locomotive of T1 size. Since forensic restoration of that valve gear is in progress, with caring and deep pockets behind the locomotive's future, I think much of the uncertainty and expense of reconstructing that part of the installation on a "T2" is somewhat less a consternation than design-from-scratch would be, even given the relative convenience of modern CAD/CAM.)..

As to the ACE3000 project as well as other innovations in steam_tech, you might like to read "The Red Devil and other tales from the age of steam" by David Wardale - probably I don't tell you any news...

Mike

AFAIK, the ACE 3000 was designed for freight-train-speed. Probably there was no urgent need then to open another can of worms given the limited time frame. Some of the ACE 3000 group might have felt the high on oil prices might not hold on forever.

"Interesting" may be the right word, but then it'd be even more "interesting" to leave Loewy and go all the way towards the style of the BR10. :-)



Are you aware of any reports saying the serial T1 behaved better than Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers in daily service? I would be interested in reading them if the sources are available.

Mike