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Kelly, Thanks for the breakdown.Wouldn't this be a great "word problem" to have in a text book. Steam locomotive 2100 could be converted to burn coal or fuel oil. Coal cost X per BTU and oil costs X per BTU........so on and so forth.....I may have done better in school if the word problems were more fun!

The MCC certainly led the parade when it came to "mooching" just about anything, from oil, to fish plates, spikes, and even railroad ties. ( They were in the process of scrapping the W&N from Green Pond to Picatinny at the time). A old ex-GATX tank car was used to store whatever oil Earle and his crew could conjure up on his forays with the old oil tanker truck. A converted Briggs & Stratton lawn mower motor was mounted on a metal platform as a pump to remove the oil from the tank car, and eventually to the tender. There was a screen mounted to filter an impurities from the oil used. Complete with pull chord, this thing, an invention of Earle's, rarely worked properly. Once upon returning with a new supply, it was discovered that someone had also dumped an incredibly large amount of plastic pellets in the oil. The pellets were too small to be filtered thru the strainer on the pump and eventually made it's way into the tender. You can guess the effect this had on the firing capabilities of the locomotive. When the Newfoundland, NJ engine house came down in 1994 one of the items noticed in the rubble was that pump, and still intact . Couldn't muster up enough energy to save it.

I'd like to wish the folks that are trying to get the 2100 up the hill the best of luck. It is one more locomotive under steam. I am certainly not trying to criticize them. I'm curious to know more about the run. I post here in an effort to keep the knowledge circulating among us. I've learned alot reading posts on this board. Perhaps someone has learned something from mine.For the sake of conversation, if the 2100 stalled and it had a full head of steam and had plenty of traction, then it becomes an engine problem, or tractive effort. www.steamlocomotive.info shows the 2100 having a TE of 68,000 with a MAWP of 240psi. TE as I have ever heard it defined is the maximum force applied to the coupler at 0mph. A question I have is whether or not the "rated" TE of the steam locomotive is with pressure in both cylinders or not. As the locomotive starts to move the force at the coupler should rise relative to many factors. Assuming traction is not an issue (which it could be), we have steam pressure, reverser settings, cylinder diameter, wheel diameter, stroke (for creating a moment on the wheels), crankshaft RPM, back pressure, steam superheat temperature (which directly affects the average pressure on the piston), and other valve gear charactoristics. Does the 2100 have limited cutoff?? I've heard that limited cutoff tended to make engines stall at slow speeds. Without cranking any numbers, I'm guessing that the 2100 has about 72,000 lbs of drawbar pull at 10mph. The LS&I 30 series locomotives, for comparison, have 60,500 lbs TE with 200 psi MAWP. With the 50in drivers I'm guessing that it would have about 64,000 to 65,000 lbs of drawbar pull. Obviously as you start moving you start increasing your cutoff to the cylinders, possibly reducing the average pressue in the cylinders and thus hindering the additional drawbar pull. If you didn't increase your cutoff then other factors such as flow restrictions at the valves, superheater efficiency, nozzle back pressure, and overall boiler capacity will restrict the locomotive's ability to pull automatically. One of the great "advances" with the "Superpower" locomotives was minimizing all of these issues so that you could keep your drawbar pull up as the locomotive accelerated. Depending on how the above factor's affected each locomotive, I could see the 33 out pulling the 2100 at about 15 to 20mph. However, I could also see the 2100 out pulling the 33 at about 35 to 40 mph +. The boiler capacity and restrictions would be too great in the 33 to keep it up at speeds above it's HP peak (which I am guessing is about 25 to 30mph). The 611 would never have stalled on Saluda with the train it had if it hadn't slipped, and it would never have restarted the train if its TE was not greater than the effective weight of the train. Obviosly the crew had to properly use the tools provided by the locomotive to actually get the job done, too.I am curious to know what those of you that have experimented with steam think about the above perspective. Perhaps you have something I haven't thought about.What speed is the 2100 intended to operate on that 3+% grade??Ryan

I love how in this country we love to do things like make burning waste oil illegal. Now we are expending energy to dispose of hazardous waste products like fuels. I get the reasoning about this, and I'm not an opponent of air quality or anything. But don't you think that once that stuff is refined, we might as well get the BTUs out of it? Furthermore, is the emissions from burning waste oil worse than all the emissions we now produce hauling it from point of production to the approved disposal site? I think frequently people are extreme on issues like this to the point of contradicting their original intentions.This whole posting is sort of off topic. An interesting side note. A friend of mine who owns a Heavy Hauling business ( Markey Trucking ) in eastern PA has been collecting waste oil since the 1970s. He heats the garage completely with the stuff, and collected it long enough that he's got several years supply of fuel now, and is still collecting. I think the idea is ingenious, and a great way to deal with the current energy quasi-crisis.Regards,Trevor H.