Although Superpower was useful, I am beginning to think it was oversold.

This is the horsepower curves that Western Maryland put together from its runs from Hagerstown to Rutherford in 1947.

It seems that the 2-10-0 was superior to 4-8-4 and 4-6-6-4 in terms of horsepower until about 20-25MPH, and then produces a small benefit, but then at about 40 MPH really starts having an advantage.

My question would be on a road with the nasty grades the WM had, did they really get any value from this, or would an expanded fleet of Decapods, perhaps with an increased firebox and revised valve sizes, timing events, maybe lighter weight rods been the better answer to their needs?

I think you are reading that chart incorrectly. The M-2 and J-1 clearly have superior power output above 40 mph.

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The WM route from Hagerstown to Rutherford was WM to Lurgan then RDG to Rutherford. It was not steeply graded and power and crews were pooled. The 2-10-0's were huge, larger than PRR I1sa's. I'm not sure the WM 2-10-0's were capable of 40 mph without pounding the track into submission.

The WM 4-8-4's were apparently based on the RDG 4-8-4's and worked the fast freights between Cumberland and Hagerstown on WM and Hagerstown and Rutherford in a pool with the T-1's. The RDG T-1's worked the trains Rutherford-Allentown/Philadelphia on RDG.

Phil Mulligan

I think back to the story of the test runs of the first B&A Berkshires. The engine in question was on one of the early trial runs stacked up against what was then the most modern freight power on the B&A, an H-10a, heading westbound if memory serves from Springfield towards Albany. I'm running entirely off memory here as I can't remember what I ever did with the issue of Classic Trains where this was covered. Point being that the 1400 ended up passing the H-10 westbound. Speed in those cases is one thing, but the ability to keep up with the demand for steam is going to be another in that environment. And unless I'm mistaken true superpower designs were optimized for both speed and the ability to produce steam. Sure a 2-10-0 like what the Western Maryland could probably pull the paint off the walls, but at a certain point you're going to use steam faster than you can make it, flat ground or not. That may be where the 4-8-4s make up the difference. They can do the same work as the 2-10-0s and have plenty more to offer. It introduces flexibility that some other designs might not have.

Granted we're using the Western Maryland as the example here... Similar comparisons can probably be made of any other superpower or modern design against their forebearers.

I think it was more a case that superpower was sometimes mis-applied rather than oversold. Railroads seemed to have had a tendency to order steam power for the trains they wanted to run rather than the trains they were actually running. There are multiple instances of new designs being built that hit their range of maximum horsepower at 40-50 MPH being routinely assigned to ~25 MPH trains.

Bill Withuhn’s article “Did We Scrap Steam Too Soon?” (Trains, June 1974) provides an excellent look at the problems of mis-applied steam, along with some ideas for possible remedies.

It would have been very interesting to see what could have been accomplished with updated 2-10-0’s as you suggest.

I definitely need an editor upon second read.

I agree with you write; that was my intent.

In all the years we volunteered together and had lockers in the same block, I meant to ask him about that article and I never did, I don't know why. We talked a little about the ACE 3000 project, but in all candor I don't remember the substance of the conversation, other than falling oil prices kind of cooled interest.

He had a standing invite for fellow volunteers to visit him in DC, and I never did that either. I regret thinking, "sure, one of these days" on both counts, because he departed, retired, fell ill and passed.

Part of the reason I'm asking this is because I recently re-read it and I think he had proposed solutions that would have been experimental in nature and solved some of the technical issues with steam, but ultimately wouldn't have made a difference in the battle with the diesel electric. I just think the MU hose rendered most issues meaningless. I actually think absent World War II, steam would have died earlier-since a lot of the orders for early 40's steam were only made because diesel manufacturing capacity was directed to war machinery.

Since Bill was an MBA, I'm surprised he didn't lend more of an economic/business case a analysis to his article; I suppose he was trying to be a little thought provoking and I think, from an economic business case perspective you are really just providing detail for the obvious, that's not as much fun as a counterfactual.

It's funny, but I remember being in the mall and seeing that brightly colored Trains magazine in June '74. It was one of the first times my parents cut me loose and said be back at Sears in a hour. Finally, I thought somebody was going to give a decent hearing to steam.

There was simply no way for me to know that a little over two decades later, we would be on a crew together, behind steam engines. Ironically, Bill passed in June, the same month as that article was published.

Adding onto the point about the I-2’s, notice how there’s no data past 40 mph for 1111, or the 2-8-0, which isn’t the case for either the Potomac or the challenger (strong point in favor of super power).. Also, this data was in 1947, meaning the Potomacs at this point weren’t even a year old, so their data might not be as accurate as any of the other 3 classes.

Lima Superpower is most often associated with the NKP Berkshires. The Berks were a perfect fit for NKP's marketing and operational philosophy, of short, fast and frequent trains over a mostly level route.

The FT had 5400 HP of a large modern steam locomotive, but with 2 or 3 times the tractive effort. But that just encouraged the railroads to run longer less frequent trains that increased yard dwell times, waiting to fill out tonnage, and missed connections. That drove the high value shipments to the trucking industry even faster.

The N&W Y6b came the closest to having the characteristics of the diesel. 5600 DBHP at 25 mph and 160,000 to 170,000 starting tractive effort. And they had an official maximum speed limit of 50 mph. In an Oct. 1984 Trains article, C.E. Pond stated the the Y6b had a drawbar thermal efficiency of 7.5 to 8 percent. Whereas the modern fast freight steamer probably had no more than half that efficiency at 25 mph. I believe Bill Withuhn was trying to build on that philosophy, with the compound connected opposed cylinder duplex of his article and the ACE3000 proposal and patent.

I wonder if Ross Rowland was inspired by that June 1974 article. I also have wondered if that article had been Bill's college thesis.

In the Chicago-East Coast market, PRR and NYC used 4-8-2's for fast freight, B&O 2-10-2's, NKP and Erie, 2-8-4's. During WWII, B&O rebuilt some old 2-8-2's into 4-8-2's.

WM and RDG 4-8-4's probably handled the Alphabet Route trains that the NKP 2-8-4's had handled on the West End.

That said, the NKP probably needed the horsepower of the 2-8-4's most in order to accelerate from sidings on their single-track railroad.

Phil Mulligan

Phil - The B&O's 4-8-2 program went on I believe all the way into 1948. Not sure how many of those T-3 Mountains were added to the roster, but sure wish one of them (perhaps the very last one built) would have been preserved at the museum in Baltimore.


Les

As said earlier, I'm not sure if it was oversold. Misapplied is the better word....or more specifically, selling a design that isn't exactly suited for what it was going to be used for...and there are a number of examples of that--Challengers on the WM being one of several "was this really the best design for this particular railroad" moments. There's some others also like the Virginian Blue Ridge class 2-6-6-6s. With that said, there were probably just as many operating philosophies as there were locomotives--some wanted to run short trains, some wanted to run long trains, some slow, some fast, etc. Add in a myriad of clearance and other operating constraints, and a "one size fits all" design probably just didn't exist.

That was one benefit that the N&W didn't have to deal with. They knew exactly what they needed, built in their own shops to fit that need, and by and large standardized on a few designs compared to similar railroads. Whether those Roanoke locomotives would have been as successful on another railroad is up for debate, but they certainly served the N&W very well....and the shop guys somehow managed to counterbalance a powerful, yet compact 2-8-8-2 for daily 50+mph operation on the Bristol and Shenandoah Valley lines. The guys in Roanoke knew what they were doing.

I would argue that misapplied designs made it easier for the diesel manufacturers to dethrone steam, and the ones that got it right made for a much tougher sell (NKP, N&W, etc).

It may be valuable to look at different generations of 'Super-Power' as the design details are important.

The initial expansion of a good 2-8-2 into the 2-8-4 was remarkable, but the result was still a railbreaking drag-freight engine... just less damaging and producing better horsepower at medium speed. This, however, is precisely what superheater is bringing up: on a railroad that isn't using high speed, or that is tolerant of what we'd today call excessive augment, the original Lima Super-Power was the groundbreaking improvement it was cracked up to be.

We might note that Woodard's answer to track-wrecking was the Central Machinery Support 2-12-6, not exactly what you'd call a high-speed design concept.

Something I find interesting is that the early 4-8-4s more or less followed this design philosophy -- the original 3751 class being one example. These were 'heavy Mountains' with the improved firing and radiant sections tacked on; the balancing revolution starting circa 1928 made the wheel arrangement capable of high sustained speed even without recourse to three cylinders.

The revolution with 2-8-4s came first on the Erie, and then via the AMC with the introduction of 69" or better drivers and the use of a properly-steering trailing truck. I don't think we should understate the importance of the difference between 63" and 69" drivers at that time, even if it subsequently became quite possible to get decent balance into wheels that size or smaller (one of the points of the ACE3000 being it could use comparatively long stroke on 58" wheels and get away with it)

What hadn't happened yet was the revolution that, for example, transformed the D&H after Loree left in 1938. This provided a rationale for actual higher speed in freight operations, with the business rationale that power like 4-6-6-4s could run so much faster that overall tom-miles increased when the locomotives were consistently applied to use their higher speed.

A case of this inherent design philosophy is the Allegheny considered as an improvement on the high-speed articulated -- in particular the high-speed 2-6-6-4s. If you look at where the ridiculous weight 'overages' originated, much of it was in the large-diameter flow-smoothed optimized steam and exhaust tracting arrangement. That was basically unnecessary on an engine designed to run no faster than 50mph.

And while we're on that subject, consider a locomotive that made more horsepower than the Allegheny, the PRR Q2. This was magnificent power for running 150-car trains at wartime speeds. But not worth the added complexity over a J1a when your railroad has a 50mph freight speed limit.

There is another point to the diminishing returns to Super-Power, which was first manifest in the improvement of the Q2 into the V1 mechanical turbine, with slightly higher nominal peak horsepower. The primary reason given in the PRR records for 'not proceeding with' the V1 in the immediate postwar period was something inherent in the 8000hp of noncondensing operation: even with efficiency mod cons, the water rate was so dramatic that with the largest coast-to-coast cistern the locomotive would be lucky to have a best-case operating range of about 130 miles. Which is great if you're stopping for a crew change in about that distance, but not if you actually want to make use of sustained high speed capability. (One of the great steam-power coffin nails digs its point in here: that better boiler-water treatment necessary for modern high-pressure boilers is uneconomical to provide in water troughs...)

Something that might have been interesting to see was the N&W Y-7, which Ed King said was only 'not proceeded with' because of the prospective 83-car national train-length restriction. That would have given the advantages of the earlier Y classes without the profound loss of horsepower above about 40mph, with the higher speed a good simple articulated could turn.

It is interesting to consider how motive power development might have evolved if that 83-car limit had been imposed. There would be less 'upside' to "large" MUed locomotives unless high sustained road speed (as with the UP development from the DD35 through the Centennials) and this is precisely where the horsepower curve of a good modern Super-Power or duplex locomotive would be developed...

Now, I think steam went upside-down for reasons very different from train-handling ability -- the loss of cheap maintenance labor and the savings on water and fueling being two major ones. I have seen arguments that the switch to diesel, particularly early on in the East, was in no small part a consequence of better credit and access to equipment trusts based on wartime achievement... this accounting for the 50-locomotive provision of T1s, for example, and then the rigmarole involved in getting out of All That Equipment-Trust Obligation without comprimising the ability to fund expensive diesel-electrics. But that's another part of the 'oversold' story...

How would "car" have been defined?

It would have been interesting to see various attempts to get around this, imagine articulated or drawbar-connected 5 or 10-packs of hoppers, just like today's intermodal wells.

As you noted, once it was understood just how much infrastructure and costs (water tanks and shop facilities) could be eliminated though dieselizing, steam was done. Some railroads just took longer to understand this than others.

A high top speed and power at speed count for a lot less if you have to take water every 40 or 50 miles.......