Hi All

In the October of 1958 Southern Pacific Bulletin Pg 2 Management's Report to You it discusses the following;

TESTING with radioactive piston rings to study the effects of various factors influencing piston ring wear in diesel locomotives has continued at our Bayshore Shops since January of this year. The program to date has evaluated such factors as engine speed, engine power settings, fuel type, both distillate and residual, air cleaner designs and unused lubricating oils. a total of three sets of activated rings have been used and arrangements has been made for further processing of rings in nuclear reactors so that the program can continue.

Has anyone heard of this program and if so are there any published material on it? This could make an interesting short story.

Robby Peartree

My father, Lester Johnston, ran that project for California Research Corporation (CRC) where he worked as a research engineer. The locomotive was parked in the Richmond Refinery of Standard Oil of California. CRC was a subsidiary of Standard of California, now Chevron. I do not recall many details other than my father was impressed with how quickly they got wear and that they were able to measure wear in millionths of an inch by measuring the radian in the oil. I do not remember what model loco it was, but it was an EMD product. I believe that EMD also supported the project. There were solid lead boxes to keep and transport the rings in. My father told me about having to weigh the boxes to ensure there was no porosity in them. CRC had been the operator of Lawrence Livermore National Labs immediately after the War and they may have been involved in irradiating the rings. I believe this was at a time that Chevron was looking into getting into the railroad locomotive engine lube oil in a big way. This may have been a project where the DELO line of diesel lube oils was developed. My father spent his entire carrier working the engine lab at Chevron in Richmond. In the early years he worked in oil and fuel development and in later years he took over the design of the engine lab projects.

One accomplish he frequently talked about was building engine test beds where they controlled all the external parameters of the engine in test, rather than just recording them. Engines were run in a temperature controlled room where the combustion air, cooling water and oil temperatures and pressures were controlled to provide the desired test parameters. One of the last projects he worked was purchasing a 1800 hp single cylinder engine from Europe. This engine was hooked to a dynamotor and was used to develop very high rod bearing pressures to evaluate lube oil performances. As I recall he worked at CRC from 1942 until about 1985.

Thank you for posting David Johnston. Your father sounded like an interesting fellow to know. One of my cousins who come from a long line of enginerds was filling me in with his grandfathers accomplishments in the Milwaukee, Wi area in the power plant arena. He was chief project engineer in building the first pulverized coal fired power plant which I think might of been Racine, Wi right next door to Milwaukee. He did not design it but was responsible for building it. He was petrified of getting someone killed in this project as pulverized coal was new and still quite dangerous. Anyway the story to me was fascinating. The engineering that went into a final product was incredible and most of us do not realize what and how some engineers researched to come up with a new and improved product. Both your dad and my cousins grandfather had incredible stories to tell. In the case of my cousins grandfather, he did not like talking about it. He was stressed out to the max about the safety of his project though the story is told that nobody got killed and the project was a success. Anyway interesting story David. Thanks for sharing. Regards, John.

Thank you very much Mr. Johnston,
I must admit finding this tidbit in the SP bulleting yesterday was a surprise for me. I have a feeling the tests were done on stationary engines to keep the power outputs and other parameters in the desired range. It must have been an interesting projects your father was on. Unfortunately there was only the information I sited in the bulletin. Your story gives some great insight as to how they did it.

Thank You
Robby Peartree

That would have been the Lakeside power plant in St. Francis, just south of Milwaukee. Built by The Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Co. in 1917, IIRC. I had the rare opportunity to tour the plant from top to bottom while I was still in high school in the late sixties, just shortly after it was converted to natural gas and the coal equipment decommissioned but not yet scrapped.

You are correct about concerns that a powdered coal explosion would demolish the plant; because of this all the coal handling equipment was put in a separate building out by the lake with finely ground coal being conveyed into the plant itself. As I recall, the final grinding to powder occurred in ball mills located on the firing floor just outside each firebox. It was an interesting tour.

In case anyone's wondering, radioactivity makes it simple to trace where minute amounts of material have gone. The piston ring metal as it wore: did it go into the piston, the cylinder liner, the lube oil, etc?

I did this in a uni experiment in the seventies: press a sheet of gold onto a sheet of silver for a while and then measure how much gold moved into the silver, just from close contact. These were sheets about 3 inches square and 1/16" thick. Biggest bits of either metal I've ever held!

No doubt it would not be in the curriculum nowadays.

During the 1950's (Eisenhower Administration} the Government was big on finding civilian uses for atomic energy and a lot of projects involved radioactive materials.

However, the toxicity of ionizing radiation as a carcinogen was only gradually being learned. The amount of shielding required under current regulations would make such a practice impractical, if NRC allowed it at all.

Phil Mulligan