Steam engine locomotives.... do they really generate enough force to accelerate an entire million lb train?

Could this be why they demolished almost all of them?

Check this train-into-train crash of two, about 100 years ago. Jon Levi. Right at the beginning of the video.

Yup. The late model brutes could get near 6,000 hp.

[link to www.thedrive.com (secure)]

And here's what happens when things don't go right.

Awe inspiring considering it's just fire and water.

Steam trains ran on elements.

YOU could do it with the appropriate physics.

A million pounds is only 500 short tons.

You religious whackos, always doubt science even when it is proven technology from 160 years ago. But don't let facts get in the way of your big wizard in the sky bullshit.

It takes about 1.3 horsepower to make a kilowatt of electricity on a modern steam turbine generator.

How may horsepower are required to run a 270 MegaWatt generator at full load?

How mant typical normal houses can that one 270 MegaWatt generator supply electricity for?

:)

Steam power is scary powerful. Itw what the aliens use.

Investigate the difference between a fire tube boiler and a water tube boiler.

It is an engineering error that was made at the beginning of the steam engine era.

If you reverse the design - force the fire around the outside of the water containing tubes - the danger of explosion becomes simply a leaking cracked tube.

The Steam Automotive Club of America has built many water tube boilers and with the best designs have very few troubles.

All that said, the diesel electric locomotive system is more fuel efficient. The other little known fact is high powered steam locomotives pounded the hell out of the tracks. The diesel electric locomotive distributed the necessary forces among several engines and prove less damaging to the tracks.

In mountainous areas the overhead electric locomotive system becomes more efficient than the diesel electric system.

If you look on top of a diesel electric locomotive you will see what looks roughly like air conditioning units. Those are electric resistance loads. When these engines are heading downhill in mountains the traction motors are switched to becoming generators. The generated electricity is sent to load banks. Better than riding the brakes.

With an all electric locomotive the downhill locomotive feeds electricity back into the power line. Effectively the train headed downhill is helping pull the train that is headed uphill.

I love the old steam stuff, but also have a small command of engineering.

You would lose the intrinsic volume of the boiler needed to create usable steam.

I love crazy shit like this:
[link to www.thedrive.com (secure)]

But he really should have contacted the people at the steam auto club. He can get way more power out of a water tube boiler.

For a visual, search for a hot water pressure washer. The flame is below the tubes. The tubes sit in a spiral above the flame and the whole thing is inside a jacket.

Here is another little known fact.

Why does a steam engine go puff puff puff? or chug chug chug?

Answer - the exhaust steam from the pistons is sent up through the boiler. There are several effects from this.

The steam shakes up the fuel and blows ash off the fuel.

Also, there is a chemical reaction between steam and red hot coals. The hot coals rob oxygen from the steam (water) and creates free hydrogen. In this process a gas called "blue gas" is produced. If your boiler is properly designed to have adequate air flow the burning process is improved by blowing the exhaust steam through the firebox.

In WWII the heavy bombers were fitted with water injection system to the engines. When you inject water into an internal combustion engine you are making the whole process more efficient by extracting heat that would otherwise just blow out the exhaust. This would create more power to assist with takeoff with heavy loads.

Typically those heavy bombers had 3,000 horsepower per engine.

Water injection is still around in a few vehicles.

Studebaker made a light pickup that would get 20 miles per gallon of gasoline using water injection.

I'm not certain what pressures those old boilers made but this steam cleaner puts out 2700 pounds:

[link to www.pressurewashersdirect.com (secure)]

The pressure washers create a "wet" steam.

The Steam Auto Club of America runs the final output tubes nearest the flame so that the steam is a "dry" steam.

This makes the whole process more efficient.

The easier approach is to estimate the energy required to accelerate to cruising speed. Assuming no significant frictional losses, we can just look at the kinetic energy achieved:

Kinetic Energy = 1/2 m v^2

where m is the mass of the whole train and v is the cruising speed. m = W / g if you have the weight, where g is 10 m/s^2 the gravitational acceleration.

And then see if the steam equation indicates that much energy for the water boiled. Betcha it does.

Last Edited by oniongrass on 08/07/2021 10:23 PM

Douglas A-26 / B-26 Invader
[link to www.militaryfactory.com (secure)]

Water injected engines of 2,000 horsepower each.

Wikipedia on water injection:
[link to en.wikipedia.org (secure)]

For an example of faking the acceleration of a heavy object, look at the infamous advertisement for "Nikola" fuel-cell trucks, a nonexistent product they were trying to sell.

Actually the empty truck was rolling slowly downhill and they sped up the film.

[link to arstechnica.com (secure)]

Last Edited by oniongrass on 08/07/2021 10:27 PM

If you do a search for the highest power steam locomotives you will discover that the engine alone weighed close to or more than one million pounds.

They were hell on the track and the rail bed.

About 1978 one of the big railroad outfits did an engineering study to see if they could redesign steam locomotives to achieve close to the efficiency of the diesel electric locomotives.

Wasn't feasible. You see (perhaps?) that the railroads also own some very large coal mine properties.

Financially, it looks better to sell the coal to China.

What might not have been explored was whether it made better to create a synthetic diesel fuel using coal as the feedstock.

Former governor of Montana - Schweitzer wanted to build a synthetic diesel fuel plant but he could never get support for this proposal.

Financially we can use the coal here for other purposes. Like burning for over 50% of our national generation, before Obama choked that off by not even allowing coal plants to do regular major maintenance.

Now we rely on wind and solar? Obama made sure things are iffy. Things used to be so secure and reliable.

Talk about "spilling the guts"...

That is entirely the result of an early engineering error that was not recognized and changed. They just kept repeating the error. Those are fire tube boilers. The fire went through tubes and the whole boiler held the steam.

What has to happen is to run the water/steam through the tubes and the fire around the tubes. The largest explosion hazard will be wherever you create a manifold to collect the steam. Usually, when a watertube boiler fails you get a high pressure blowoff which is dangerous to anyone near, but there is never a huge explosion.

There is a different steam process that was never explored for use in a railroad locomotive.

Flash steam.

You create a coal burning high efficiency furnace that can be focused like a torch on a relatively small (perhaps spherical) boiler. You use small diameter piston pumps to force water into the boiler area at working pressure. The boiler area is at a high temperature and the water is instantly converted to steam. The steam goes directly to the driving pistons.

A variation of this can be seen in some early model diesel stationary engines. There was a hot (heated from underneath with an open flame) spherical bulb. Fuel was forced into this bulb where it vaporized into a smoke that became the fuel for the diesel. This concept was used in a few engines, but they were smoking SOBs.

This short video is of a small "hot bulb" diesel engine.

The operator uses propane to get it running. After it heated sufficiently the exhaust would be used to vaporize the fuel.

But if you were firing with coal and directing the steam to a spherical "hot bulb" all the water being heated at one time would be enough for one stroke of the steam piston.

The Shay steam locomotive used three vertical pistons to rotate a horizontal crankshaft that was geared to the driving wheels. This reduced the pounding of the drive wheels to the track. Smoother running drivetrain.

I found some images but didn't think they would post.

This is another hot bulb diesel engine. The guy is showing start-up and running the engine forward and backward.

The point here is you could build a Shay type vertical piston locomotive where the coal was creating a blue flame torch that focused the heat on spherical bulbs at the top of the steam pistons.

Ships weigh a lot more than trains and take more power. Not much for technical information...

Marine Triple-Expansion Steam Engine In Operation

The last running Big Boy steamer is doing a nationwide tour. Its in my town august 15

Steam engines have been built in every size from kid's toys to giants for ships. Here is a meeting of steam boat builders. I think it is Klamath Lake Oregon but not sure.

At about six minutes in there is a sidewheeler. Says it has a "water tube" vertical boiler.