AHC: Survival of the steam locomotive

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For the US, mainline steam power could be prolonged, though not saved by butterflying John Lewis' leadership of the United Mine Workers. The late-1940's UMW strike spiked coal prices and so made diesels appear far more economical than they in fact were
Another possible delay would be to have General Motors not invest in rail transport by purchasing Winton. EMD was founded at the height of the great depression, when auto sales had nosedived and GM management perceived a need to diversify. So with a less severe depression, perhaps GM would leave locomotives to comparatively small specialist firms like Alco, Baldwin, MLW and so on. In as many words, diesel locos could not have come so far so fast absent the backing (at the time) the world's largest corporation.
Considering ALCO, Baldwin were some of the biggest loco makers at the time and many of the first generation products of ALCO and Baldwin set the pace (and some of the longest surviving designs) were from ALCO as well its very easy to say that without EMD, ALCO would take up the slack - whether domestic products, export designs or built under licence abroad such as in Australia where for example, EMD products could be easily substitued with more designs from either ALCO or English Electric (later GE) (such as in the case of QLD). More so, keep the ALCO-GE partnership going and EMD most likely can't make a dent in the marketplace. So the loss of that one manufacturer isn't going to retard the adoption of this motive power.
 
Possible causes-

An earlier and longer Oil Crisis in the west could help, leading to an eventual drop in oil use in favor of coal use, along with more centralized cities, thus incentivizing railroads in general and increasing proit margins, and clean coal (thus reducing air pollution issues).

Less coal strikes too?

Especially tue if government(s) subsidize coal mining and/or steam train production.

A west virginia infrastrucutre-focused president possibly. Robert Byrd is probably too late.
 

DougM

Donor
Let me start off by stating that I am a big railroad buff and love steam. I have traveled around the country to see steam engines and I have even ran one a (very) short distance in a yard. I have extensive library of information and books on this subject and while many things contributed to the death of steam engines the main issue you have to fix is not the efficiency or power (in general it took decades to equal the power of late steam ) and it could run fast too.
As for hand build, yes technically they were but for all intents and purposes they interchangeable parts were just as many as in anything built in that time. You could pretty much remove a part from any C&O H8 and put it on any other C&O H8.
The reason that steam went away was very simple. The things were complete maintenance hogs nearing ridiculous amounts of man hours to keep running. Between maintenance and repair and overhauls and inspections the hours for these things was just not practical, and I don’t see a way around this.
 
Most American railroads did burn oil.

UP converted a number from Coal to Oil fired, like the famous #844 in 1946
640px-Union_Pacific_844%2C_Painted_Rocks%2C_NV%2C_2009_%28crop%29.jpg
And still running as an excursion train today. It's the only UP Steamer that stayed in continuous service, never retired an brought back like the others
 
It's about 30% less efficent. That's not that bad.

Source: Look up the energy densities of each on wikipedia or anywhere else.

For dry hardwood.

Dry, that's the big problem, along with even more ash and residue than Lignite. softwoods are even worse

Edit: didn't realize this was an ancient thread
 

DougM

Donor
It wasn’t the cost of the coal. It was NEVER the cost of the coal. Many of the railroads shipped coal and more then a couple owned there own coal company.
The C&O Railway was one of the largest shippers of coal in the world.
It had modern steam. Some of it only a couple years old when they decided to do away with steam.
It was about LABOR. It takes huge amounts of maintenance to keep a steam engine running. When the railroad dumped steam they all cut the size of the maintenance dept. on top of that the steam engine takes a lot of work while it is being used. You have to lubricate the thing ALL the time. And of course it needs to be filled with water (not a short procedure on a big engine).
So it was all about the labor savings.
 

Md139115

Banned
I’m just piling on the necro at this point, but while the bleeding heart romantic in me is all for this, the engineer side has to point out that a steam engine (not just locomotives, all steam engines) in general wastes a lot of energy in forcing the phase change from liquid to steam. Now, a crafty condenser design absorbing some of the waste heat as the water recondenses back down to liquid can help, but the savings aren’t much and it would be very difficult to fit such technology on locomotives anyway. There is a hard upper limit on what the efficiency of a steam engine is, and that is much lower compared to an internal combustion engine.

This really is very difficult unless two specific scenarios existed. The first is that a country has far more cheaper and secure source of solid hydrocarbons (wood, coal, or possibly peat?) than fluid ones. The second is that the country is geared to tourism on an almost Italian level, with heritage steam trains being a centerpiece of that strategy.
 
I’m just piling on the necro at this point, but while the bleeding heart romantic in me is all for this, the engineer side has to point out that a steam engine (not just locomotives, all steam engines) in general wastes a lot of energy in forcing the phase change from liquid to steam. Now, a crafty condenser design absorbing some of the waste heat as the water recondenses back down to liquid can help, but the savings aren’t much and it would be very difficult to fit such technology on locomotives anyway. There is a hard upper limit on what the efficiency of a steam engine is, and that is much lower compared to an internal combustion engine.

This really is very difficult unless two specific scenarios existed. The first is that a country has far more cheaper and secure source of solid hydrocarbons (wood, coal, or possibly peat?) than fluid ones. The second is that the country is geared to tourism on an almost Italian level, with heritage steam trains being a centerpiece of that strategy.
Correct. It's not true that the Rankine cycle is inherently less efficient than the Diesel cycle in terms of basic physics (at the same temperature difference they should be similar), but the way it is used in locomotives with combustion at normal pressure and relatively low temperature means steam locomotives will be inefficient.

I should note, however, that even in cases where solid hydrocarbons are cheaper and more secure than liquid hydrocarbons, diesel locomotives are still more efficient than steam locomotives. I'm not completely sure if they're cheaper, but they're definitely more efficient, and they should be cheaper based on other factors. My assumptions were if natural liquid hydrocarbon sources weren't available at all, and even then I found diesel locomotives and artificial sources were more efficient than steam locomotives, as part of broader research:

When I looked at ways to survive/evade blockades with 20th century Germany in mind as a thought experiment, this issue came up. Normally diesel locomotives would be better, but since oil products are scarce in a hypothetical blockade I thought that sticking to steam locomotives would be preferred in this case. Their plentiful and cheap solid hydrocarbon (coal) supplies would presumably give them an advantage in simply having fuel available at all.

However, I found that even this was not the case. When checking the efficiency of early diesels (not the 35-40% efficient diesels of today), I found a WWII-era diesel locomotive produced about 15 horsepower per gallon per hour (i.e. 15 horsepower-hours per gallon). No. 2 Diesel fuel has an energy content of 128,100 BTUs per gallon by the same source, and from another source a horsepower hour is equal to 2544.43 BTUs. This gives 38,166.5 BTUs of usable energy per gallon of a WWII-era diesel, or about 30% efficiency for the diesel. By comparison, Andre Chapelon's steam locomotive rebuilds at the end of the steam era (1930's to 1940's) reached 12% efficiency, double the efficiency of the average locomotives of the time and a world record for decades (long after the end of the steam era). So the WWII-era diesel was 5 times as thermally efficient as the average locomotive, and 2.5 times as thermally efficient as the most efficient steam locomotive built.

This disparity was so great that I checked the thermal efficiency of the Fischer-Tropsch process for creating diesel from solid hydrocarbons to see if the greater efficiency of diesels made up for any inefficiency in using this process to convert available solid hydrocarbons to diesel. To my surprise, the process was more efficient than I thought, being about 25 to 50% efficient in both carbon and thermal efficiency. Using a diesel locomotive with fuel from an inefficient (25%) Fischer-Tropsch plant would still be 1.25 times as thermally efficient as using an average steam locomotive, and using it with fuel from an efficient (50%) Fischer-Tropsch plant would again be 1.25 times as thermally efficient as using the most efficient steam locomotive. So it literally requires less coal to provide a Fischer-Tropsch plant with fuel and burn the resulting diesel in a locomotive to move cargo, than it does to burn the coal directly in a steam locomotive. Any cost to run the Fischer-Tropsch plant would likely be offset by the greatly reduced maintenance costs, reduced idling fuel consumption of the diesels, lower transportation requirements for moving coal to the plant and moving fuel to the locomotive vs moving the greater mass of coal all the way to the locomotive, and in the elimination of water requirements, all of which have not been factored in to the above calculations.

Of course, the ideal choice is to electrify the railroads so that the fuel can be burned in a very efficient power plant with little efficiency loss, but electrifying an entire railway network can be impractical even over a long period of time. So the best option is to electrify whatever is possible and make sure all non-electric locomotives are dual-mode so they can use the network whenever possible without using fuel. (It seems easy to make dual-mode locomotives based on diesel-electrics, so much so that I wonder why it hasn't been done with almost all diesel-electrics- it seems a missed opportunity) The latter mode of propulsion for locomotives not on electrified lines is generally what the diesel Fischer-Tropsch is intended for.

There are some steam locomotive improvements since WWII by Porta that potentially improve the efficiency of the locomotive to 21% or 27% with condensing, and many of these technologies could theoretically be developed prior to WWII, but it's not certain and it seems these engines would still be outperformed if a similar amount of development was put into improving the efficiency of diesels and the Fischer-Tropsch process. Steam turbine-electric (turbo-electric) locomotives might actually be efficient enough with such boiler improvements to be viable, but they're not covered in this analysis, and even then I'm not sure about it (I'd still stick to diesel and Fischer-Tropsch, which seems a better bet).

The general lesson deduced from these calculations was that in places/situations where liquid hydrocarbon fuels are scarce or restricted, obviously the best solution is to reduce requirements for energy or transportation. But if something must be mechanized, mechanizing with solid hydrocarbon fuels (coal, wood gas, etc) or god forbid animal power is less efficient than using the solid hydrocarbons to run the Fischer-Tropsch process and then mechanizing with the resulting liquid hydrocarbon fuels (ideally diesel for efficiency). (Animal power is best compared by calculating the land requirements for growing fodder versus the amount of biofuels that could be grown on the same land and how much fuel it could produce if used in the Fischer-Tropsch process) Steam versus diesel locomotives are a subset of this comparison.
 
Diesel as a liquid is easier to handle and allows for easier and more precise control of the engine. Even with mechanical stokers, the fact that coal is a solid means it would be difficult to control the amount of coal entering the firebox.

Under the US Union rules, US Diesels had to keep the Fireman position on Diesel Engine filled.

It was a great job to have, as not a lot of work to do.

The biggest advantage of Diesels for freight, was the ability to MU, Multiple Unit control.
Need more power than what a single EMD F3 Could provide? You could add three more 'A' or cabless 'B' units to be controlled by the Engineer in the lead unit
 
I've always thought the best place for Steam to survive is have Norfolk & Western delay adopting diesel. Andre Chapelon coming over and working for them after France gets rid of steam and things go from there. If Porta get a hired at some point as well and given the cheap source of coal they have one could still have a steam road here in the US.
 
dual mode steam

Steam locomotives are actually more efficent at high speeds, while diesel electric locomotives are more efficient at low speeds. They currently have dual-mode diesel locomotives in the suburbs. They run as diesels in the outlying areas, and as electric locomotives under catenary closer in. Since electric traction is relative less efficient at high speeds, this is is not highly efficent for high speed running.
I have never heard this before. I am very skeptical that any realistic steam locomotive design would be anywhere near as efficient as a diesel with 3 phase AC traction at any normal railway speed. Diesels engines can reportedly run at close to 40% thermal efficiency in modern locomotives. The best steam turbines in power plants today do about 45% efficiency (though many in operation are still in the high 30's) and they use supercritical steam; I don't see how we're going to cram that kind of machinery into a rail vehicle.



*Just noticed this is an old thread*
 
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For dry hardwood.

Dry, that's the big problem, along with even more ash and residue than Lignite. softwoods are even worse

Edit: didn't realize this was an ancient thread

Many areas of the west have very long hot dry seasons perfect for seasoning lumber.

Perhaps an alternative to finding a place to season it all would be to process the wood into pellets. This would simplify stoking and allow it to be more easily dried. It could also allow the use of less desirable fuels. For example, when clearing overgrown areas of underbrush, the forest waste could be converted into fuel.
 
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