Pictures in the link below is a Santa Fe Hudson with a very strange looking contraption on the front end. Does anyone happen to know what it is?

http://www.steamrailroading.net/cms/mod ... _photo.php

Folks,

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this was for track inspections.

Gerald

Actually, I believe that it was an enclosure for workers who were monitoring the engine's performance to ride in. The monitoring equipment would all be mounted inside the enclosure. Note all the cables, piping, and equipment box on the engine.

I would side with the performance monitoring idea. Knew a man several years ago that retired from NYC and he talked of something like this but I had never seen one. Sounds like what he described.

Numerous roads used something like this to take indicator cards, check valve events, monitor steam and valve pressures, etc. I recall some article somewhere by a retired NYC mechanical engineer who served time in one of these contraptions on the front of a new Niagara in 1945. He said the crew got rather nervous approaching grade crossings at speeds in excess of 80 mph!!

The ATSF design is much more closed in and substantial looking than most others I've seen photos of; most were open-topped, and some looked like they were mostly wood planks.

Definitely an enclosure for monitoring test equipment. When I was younger, one of my "mentors" was a retired locomotive test engineer. Art showed me a number of photos of locos with such enclosures. He rode many a mile in them.

Looks like a dynamoter car mounted to the front end. vbg

Tom C.

California,
You didn't know what that was?! Either you're joking, or its time to cut down on the chives.

It is difficult to see where some of the connections lead that are laying alongside the right side hand rail supports, but from some of the other connections it looks like they are instrumented to record cylinder and valve events, monitor base speed (pickup on pilot truck), and pressures at a variety of locations. The small line leading down to the enclosure from the feedwater heater looks temporary, perhaps it is connected to the float valve steam outlet to record when it calls for the cold water pump to run?

These enclosures were used for taking indicator cards. Maybe other data are being recorded as well, especially if there is a dynamometer car behind the tender. Note the pipes connecting with either end of the cylinder. These communicate with the cylinder of the indicator, whose piston makes a pen rise and fall with cylinder pressure. The indicator card was wrapped around a drum that made one revolution fore and back with each revolution of the crank of a steam engine (in the case of a locomotive, of the drive wheels). There will be a link with the crosshead for this purpose to drive the drum. The result was a graph of pressure in each end of the cylinder over the course of one power and exhaust stroke.

Indicators can be picked up in antique shops quite readily, along with standard textbooks for operating them. They were commonly used on stationary engines to check the valves, but not so often on locomotives. Most pictures of these shelters in use seem to be associated with tests of new or re-engineered locomotive classes. Nonetheless, every locomotive has ports on the ends of the cylinders for the pipe connections, although the plugs are often torched off flush.

I once got to see the volunteer crew at Greenfield Village's replica lighting plant take an indicator card of one of the engines there, but this plant is sadly out of service now.