The Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum is working on the refurbishment of the interior of one of its 1941 Budd built all stainless New York Central 'Empire State Express' coaches, NYC #2567. In the process, electric baseboard heat is going to be installed where the baseboard steam heat was located. As a bunch of us were talking the other night, each of us came up with a different recommended amount of electric heat to install in the cars to keep them heated comfortably for winter operations.

Therefore, I was wondering if anyone can share their experience with how much (total wattage, wattage per heater, # of heaters, etc.) electric heat they already have installed in their cars, how has it worked, and under what winter conditions? Our cars were converted to 80-seat 2-by-2 walkover commuter cars by the New York Central and the museum will be keeping them in this configuration.

Please let us know. Thanks! For those interested, information on the work we are doing on our cars can be found on our R&GVRRM blog and some of the specific to the cars posts can be found here.

Regards,
Chris Hauf
Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum (on YouTube)

We tried electric baseboard heat in a number of our cars during their time with the NS Steam Program and ran up on a significant problem. The floor grills would get extremely hot at times, occasionally causing a passenger to burn their legs or ankles against them. It would probably be simpler, safer, and cheaper to install a heat grid next to the A/C evaporator. We used that system on one car and it was very sucessfull. Watauga Valley NRHS uses it on some of their cars also.

We installed baseboard heat on the Queen Anne's Railroad ROYAL ZEPHYR Dinner Train. These are New Haven Osgood Bradley cars...carbon steel w/stainless fluting....a.k.a."rust buckets". I don't remember the details, as I wasn't involved in the electric retrofit at the time. Normal household baseboard heaters were used, with individual built in dial thermostat controls. Thus, you could set each and every individual heater at the temp. setting you wanted......not too hot and not too cold. You could use all of them full blast, or every other one at light setting just to "knock the chill off". Overall, it worked very well.

The cars had 480V through wiring, with stepdown to normal 110V for the heaters, lighting, etc. We used as much normal "hardware store" stuff as possible, because it's cheap and plentiful. The interiors of the cars had been gutted prior to our use, so no effort was taken for historic preservation of the interiors.

I don't have a quick photo of the baseboard heat, but here's a brochure showing the interior of the ROYAL ZEPHYR. No, it's not historically accurate, but it did give these otherwise "junk" cars a new lease on life. It is appealing to the general public, and looked nice. The interior served it's purpose.

I'm posting this just as a reminder that although accurate historic preservation is desired, it is also important to have a realistic outlook on the use of the car, and tackle the "restoration expense" accordingly. Yes, the Strasburg car shop will fabricate from scratch the most minute detail of a car's mechanical system, but at the same time decisions are made to make the car 21st Century friendly.

Before the naysayers speak concerning the interiors, I'll remind you that there's still lots of cars quietly rusting.....
Made your restoration decisions according to goal, budget, and usefulness.

Ask our friends with streetcars and interurbans, they'll have a good idea of the amount of wattage you'd want.

If I recall my conversation with a BART design engineer, BART cars (70ish feet long and wider than a standard passenger coach) have about 20kw of electric heat. I believe it works through the HVAC ducting, they aren't baseboard or anything like that. I'm told the heat only runs during initial warmup, the rest of the day, it requires little heat especially with occupant body heat helping out. Often it must run the A/C to dissipate body heat.

I would say if riders are burning themselves on the electric heaters, they are probably too hot. I would also imagine they only have one setting, "high", and car temperature is managed with thermostats that cycle them on and off. The problem is that when cycled on, they become a burn risk after enough heat has propagated to the heater cover.

One option is to shorten the cycle time enough to prevent the heater cover from getting hot enough. Not far removed from a chopper. That's harder to control than a simple thermostat, takes more logic.

A simpler option can be borrowed from the streetcar folks. It is a fact that two identical heaters, wired in series, will make 75% less heat than those same heaters in parallel. 75% difference between warmup mode and maintenance mode sounds about right to me. Add a thermostat and you're all set.

Not a railcar application, but baseboard heat and burns caused by them is the same in any application.

The comments about overheating and burning is a real problem. One way to alleviate that and to provide even heat is to use the type that uses the electricity to heat a tube with fluid in it. This is closer to the old style radiators in that they don't overheat but supply a constant gentle heat. These are available in various voltages and wattage. You should run a heating load on the car just like you would do in any heating application to avoid over/under heating. I cannot help in that area since my area of expertise is refrigeration. Maybe there is a heating/air conditioning guy here.

Later!
Mr. Ed

Well, sort of if you leave residential out and go to industrial chiller cold water plants.

If it was my car, I'd rather go with a small boiler to supply hot water to the existing baseboard coils (assuming the circuit is sound) as option one. If the coils are shot, and air conditioning ducts are in the car, a simple electrical resistance coil box stuck in the fan output plenum will evenly heat the car using existing ductwork. Makes option 2. Hiding electrical baseboard units behind old guards along the sills of the car sounds attractive since the units are cheap and readily available, but they are really inefficient compared to other options and might be hard to control without going to individual controls for each seperate unit. Maybe not - depending on many variables. I'd follow the advice about a hot liquid coil rather than an open glowing wire heater to avoid the cycling and burn potential. Distribution and thermal mass matters.

KW don't matter as much as the combination of KW and effeciency. You can burn a lot of power making a little difference in comfort or a few KW making a real difference, so sizing the system by KW is probably not the best bet. You might try a rough comparison between a mobile home with skimpy insulation and your similarly sized car to get a semi-idea about the required BTUs. Then, you can buy baseboard units that add up to that BTU number and screw them in and hope for the best, but it is a matter of faith rather than engineering.

dave

I did the calculations, based on some mobile home information, maybe twenty years ago for a line up in NH that I was trying to help out. I came up with something in the neighborhood of 18 kW, for a 1930s built Santa Fe stainless coach.

The LIRR 2700 or 2800 series coaches (I forget which-) that were self-contained had a Detroit running a 17 kW genset underneath, which provided light, heat in the winter and AC (although not dehumidified) in the summer. So my calculation of 18 kW was in the ballpark.

I like Dave's idea, though, of a small boiler and circulating hot water. The genset can be sized that much smaller, as all it would do is run an oil burner and a circ. pump. Of course, I'd have the car lighting on the same genset; if you use a diesel, it can share the same fuel and tank as the boiler.

Unfortunately, you still have to protect against freezing, which is the downside to this approach-

Try a hybrid approach - 2 stages of 5KW each in the overhead replacing the steam heat exchanger. Your car may not have this arrangement, but it was common on lightweight Pullmans. That gives you 10KW. Then I'd go for an additional 10-15KW baseboard considering your location. This will give you a total of 20-25KW, which will keep you from needing to show up a day ahead of time to start the heat. Usually, the overhead heat will get the job done, but when temperatures dip, the additional baseboard heat helps kill the chill very effectively.

As for the heat transfer mode, you have options. You could go with hydronic heat either by re-using most of your existing steam coils or using new materials that are commercially available. I wish I had done this with a C&O lightweight I was working on, but opted for the electric option instead. C&O Pullman built cars from the big 1949-51 delivery utilized a warm wall design that was essentially an airspace behind the visible interior wall through which the baseboard heat could radiate up to the windows and through the wall panels between them. The more even heating from hydronic heat would be better in that instance. I noticed someone mentioned freezing - if you use oil or ethylene glycol (antifreeze), you shouldn't encounter that problem except in uber extreme conditions. I know of a few railcars with hydronic heating (ethlene glycol) which are/were very effective. You can use an electric powered heat exchanger for the circulating fluid. These are available commercially. A "boiler" is not really what you are looking for in this application.

Your other option is electrickerty. Standard electric furnace heating coils for your overhead will take care of that part. The baseboard part should ideally be a lower wattage per foot variety. Low output units are what Amtrak uses and at one time the Friends of the 261 had lots of new spares they obtained at auction and were willing to part with some. If I recall, it was about $3-4K for enough to do a whole coach, but don't hold me to that. The price at that time was about half of what they cost new. You can also obtain low wattage baseboard heat through commericial suppliers which you can find with some internet searching. You can use regular baseboard heat units (residential/commercial) properly spaced if your budget is REALLY tight, but with the amount of use you will likely see in your geographic location, I would try to avoid it.

I hope that wasn't too confusing...

Mike

Jiggle the chemistry of the circulating fluid with nonhazardous additives to lower the freeze point beyond expected temperatures, or include a very small secondary heat circulator to maintain above freezing temps. Or, try what we were doing with solar water heaters back in the '80s and use glycerine as the circulating heat transfer fluid. Avoid anti-freeze choices that make dealing with spills or leaks liabilities.

dave

I've seen a passenger car with baseboard heat using standard residental baseboard heaters, and I've also seen the problems of them being too hot for passenger seated next to them. All electric baseboad heaters come with a warning something like this:



Do you have sufficient room for your baseboard heater to be 12 inches away from your passengers legs, coats, purses or other objects? Probably not in most situations.

As for running them on high, here's the problem. Typical operation would involve taking a passenger car at ambient temperature and trying to heat it up to room temperature in a couple of hours or less. Steel makes a wonderful heat sink, and it takes a lot of BTU's to warm up a coach. Once it's warm, then maybe the demand won't be as much, but getting there usually means running the heaters at a high level.

The installation I saw was not satisfactory. Maybe there weren't enough heaters, or they weren't spaced correctly or there were other issues but in any case the end result in cold weather was two choices in seating, next to the heater and too hot, or on the aisle and cold.

I installed baseboard heating in the Gulf Mobile and Ohio car 5998. At the Museum of Transport, St. Louis County. While doing the installation I found that the heaters are in series with the thermostat. That thermostat is the item limiting the amount of heating that can be installed. My solution was to intall two thermostats controlled systems. I contacted the manufactures rep to find out the limit of the system I had to install. I was using a 120 volt system. There are baseboard heating systems using 240 volts, although not as common, that can handle larger heating loads.

Jim1522

First, I want to thank those who took the time to reply and sharing your experiences. We will certainly take them into consideration as we work on the car. For one, we have the benefit of an operating trolley museum, the New York Museum of Transportation, at the other end of our demonstration railroad so we can see what their operating cars have. NYC #2567 is our test bed for what will eventually see heat added to all six of our coaches and our RPO car which carries our headend power for the train set. (200KW genset producing 240V 3-phase. Capable of 480V for future upgrades)

Moving forward on #2567, we will need to add some type of new heating system vs. re-using the existing baseboard steam system which has been removed. The good news is that we are at a point where we are starting to put the car back together including all new wall panels under the windows, have yet to install anything, and thus have some time to experiment to come up with the best solution whether it is all baseboard, baseboard for initial warming with overhead for maintaining, or purely overhead. I will certainly post updates as we continue our work and please check our blog for additional updates. We also welcome continued insight into others' experiences.

Thanks!

Regards,
Chris Hauf
Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum

Perfect - a new hydronic baseboard system circulating hot water in coils located where the old steam coils were. Electric boiler and circulating pump. Can't do better.

dave

We installed electric baseboard heat in our handicap accessible combine during its rebuild. The system consists of six 2,500 watt units, three on each side of the car. Each side is on its own thermostat. There are seats down one side of the car and an open space with wheelchair tie downs on the other side.

Normal operation is to turn on both sides first thing in the morning. Then turn off the side where the seats are located, once the car has warmed up sufficiently.

I used a formula out of the McMaster-Carr catalog to determine the wattage and rounded up. The 15kW we installed might be a little high, but my thought was that it was better to be a little on the high side and let the thermostats work, then undersized and have it working continuously.

I was looking for low maintenance and ease of installation. If we had also installed air conditioning, then I would have probably installed the heat with the air conditioning unit.

John