Unusual Locomotives | Hacker News Reader

Unusual Locomotives

douglas-self.com

118 pointsggoo42 comments

Almost on topic...

When we were kids, my brother studied a railroad atlas any time he wasn't in school or church. This thing was a monster, large book with hundreds of pages of maps. Literally county by county across the Unites States, all railroad lines and yards. I'd go to sleep Friday night while he sat in an overstuffed chair, studying. I'd wake up at 7:30 AM Saturday... he hadn't moved. Still there, a few pages further into the atlas.

As an adult, he worked for the Illinois Central as a hump yard operator. Later the Iowa Pacific, and ultimately found himself doing customer service for a small line in Texas, mainly shipping sand. His job frequently included finding 'lost' cars somewhere in the US, on any line that happened to be in that car's route. He was really good at it.

One notable call had him searching railroad yards in Missouri. He had a strong hunch that the misplaced car was on a spur where that yard stored cars that had lost their way. But he needed to confirm. He could have called that yard, but getting the right person to check logs or go hunt was always a hassle. So... He Googled up the yard, zoomed in on the spur and noted that Google helpfully displayed several businesses in a strip mall backed up to the spur. Mike dialed up 'Patty's Nail Salon' and the call went something like: "Hi Patty, this is Craig with the Iowa Pacific. I'm tracking down a misplaced car and I have reason to believe it is sitting on the spur outside your back window. Would you mind checking for a car with ID 123876?"

Extended pause....

"I'll be right back!"

Sure enough, there is was.

This is a great story, thank you for sharing. Do railroad atlases still exist?

You can get a somewhat expensive set of maps from Kalmbach media. When I was a teenager we had one book of maps from the same publisher, and it covered all of the USA. Now it seems like it takes multiple books and I can't find the one for California in their catalog. The intended market is rail fans and people who build model railroads.

For reference: https://kalmbachhobbystore.com/

I don't know about the US, but S.K. Baker’s 'Rail Atlas: Great Britain & Ireland' is excellent and regularly updated for this side of the pond.

Sites like that are the heart of the real potential of the internet. Not this meta crap.

It's also why I come to HN: for the random.

I was having a strange feeling I’d seen this site before, but only the style, not the content. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I remembered the page on the Paris pneumatic clock network: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/COMMS/airclock/airclock.h... (discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19441300)

The entire museum section is well worth a read, though a bit of a rabbit-hole: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/museum.htm

The N-wheeled cars page has also been discussed on HN before: http://www.douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/TRANSPORT/nwheelcar/nwhee... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19786560

> All locomotives more than 18 years old. Proof on file in pursuance of Title 18, USC2257

I love this site already.

The Hesston Steam Museum has a Shay Geared Locomotive, and I've always looked at those bevel gears out in the open, and wondered what OSHA would say about it, but compared to logging, it's probably the least of the worries.

With its crossheads, connecting rods and valve gear, a conventional steam locomotive has many external moving parts, which is part of their appeal - plus, of course, the whole thing is a moving part.

Some things just cannot be hidden away and you have to be careful - propellers, for example.

The Roaring Camp railroad above Santa Cruz had a Shay locomotive in service when I visited a few years ago.

https://www.roaringcamp.com/

I love the explosion in diversity of designs as everyone tried new things before settling on what worked best, the stealth chimneys, preheaters, turbine engines.

It's an Industrial Age Cambrian Explosion.

There must be someone, somewhere, obsessively making working models (3-D printed?) of some of these.

Of course. We make miniature working models, powered by coal and steam. If you just meant the weirder types of loco, then yes to that too - someone will be making one. Turbine locos are not unknown and the Model Engineer magazine has had a long series on turbines in general going for a while now.

3D printing is only used for dummy detail parts. We mostly can't afford the type of printing required to make working bits. Laser cutting, water jet cutting and CNC machining are more prevalent at the moment.

That parchment paper backdrop brings back extremely vivid memories. Glad to see there’s still some examples floating around.

I have a ridiculous question about the “backwards” trains.

What makes them backwards?

Putting the cab at the front makes the most sense for visibility and driver experience, but the way most steam locomotives worked is by humans scooping solid fuel out of a hopper car behind the locomotive called a tender, into a furnace located in the cab of the locomotive.

If you put the cab at the front, getting the solid fuel to the furnace becomes a more complex operation since the cab and the tender are now separated by the length of the engine. Once liquid fuels became a thing and the need for shoveling solid fuel waned, the cab could be moved to the front much more easily.

In the roaring days of the railroad, most railroads had dispensed with manually shoveling coal out of the tender. They used mechanical stokers to move the coal from the tender to the firebox.

Maybe in the USA, but they were barely used in the UK. From these discussions, it seems the (much) larger American locomotives and lower quality of coal required it.

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/mechanical-stokers.3374...

https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/manually-shovelling-coa...

There were engines with the cab in the middle. But then the fireman was out in the open (no cab) so it wasn't popular with them.

I'm not sure I understand this explanation. Does the location of the furnace matter with respect to the direction the train is moving, i.e. the direction in which the wheels are turning? I mean, trains can go backwards, right?

There can be consequences.

In the November 19, 1941 Hassan Tunnel fire accident between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara northbound Southern Pacific #4193 entered the tunnel on an uphill grade. The locomotive involved was an oil-fed steam engine and had a cab-forward design (AC-8) which meant, among other factors, that oil lines ran forward of the drive wheels, and leaked onto the rails.

Part-way through the tunnel, the locomotive lost traction. There was an attempt to back out of the tunnel, but a passenger applied brakes such that the train could not proceed backwards. A fire was ignited and the train ultimately burned with loss of 5 lives, 4 injured.

There's an extensive accident review I've found previously but cannot locate at the moment. The incident is listed here for November, 1941:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(1930%E...

http://espee.railfan.net/trainwrecks.html

Contemporaneous news story:

http://www.gendisasters.com/california/15629/hassen-tunnel-c...

The accident record seems to be here:

https://dotlibrary.specialcollection.net/Document?db=DOT-RAI...))

Note that spellings vary: "Hassan", "Hassen", and, in the document above, "Hasson".

INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION

WASHINGTON

INVESTIGATION NO. 2543

THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC COMPANY REPORT IN RE ACCIDENT NEAR HASSON, CALIF., ON NOVEMBER 19, 1941

Awesome info. Thanks.

NP.

I don't recall how I first ran across that, but the incident stuck with me. I'm glad I had the opportunity to look it up again.

The locomotive can go either direction. But if burns coal, the tender needs to be next to the firebox. And the fireman needs to be able to attend the fire, which puts him on that side of the engine too.

Why not just put the tender in front? I'm speculating here, but probably due to visibility. To get adequate visibility, you'd have to narrow the tender (reducing capacity).

The tender is much lighter, and shorter, so it is at increased risk of derailment when running right at the front of the train.

Locomotives can of course run backwards for long distances if required, but generally they have two top speeds - a higher one for forward running and a lower one for backwards.

Do you have some reference you can point me at? It seems pretty common these days to run commuter trains at fairly high speeds with the engine pushing at the end of the train. And a (not-empty) tender is much heavier than a passenger car.

The German BR01 Lokomotive can travel 75mph forwards but only 30mph backwards: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRG_Class_01

The difference with a passenger car is that the wheels on a car are mounted on a bogie which can swing independent of the car body. The front wheels of a steam loco are also usually able to swing from side to side.

This helps it enter and exit curves without derailing.

A tender(at least in the Styles used in Europe) is too short for this.

Ah, that makes sense too.

I wonder how much of a risk wind (from the locomotion) blowing into the tender/firebox would be.

This is not a problem, it won't put the fire out.

The real danger is when going through a tunnel, the backdrauught from the exhaust hitting the tunnel causes a surge of flame into the cab. The crew must keep the fire doors closed.

I wasn't worried about the fire going out, but for embers flying out into the cab.

Firebox doors are not that big and the cab is not that exposed. Also, there is a powerful draft into the doors, not out.

Search for "footplate ride" on youtube.

But then it would be tenderforward, not cabforward :)

If you are referring to backwards locomotives, the alternative name, cabForwards, should convey the idea. It's the usual arrangement of a locomotive, but reversed, where what is usually found at the front is at the back and vice versa.

Right but what’s different between that and just running any other locomotive in reverse?

I guess, the general layout of the cab? – As I understand it, these locomotives where popular for routes including long tunnels, where the crew would have suffered seriously from the exhaust. If you intend to run the locomotive generally cab-forward, you'd probably adapt the layout and also add a proper wind screen.

Oh. Derp. That makes complete sense. Thanks for helping me cross the finish line.

From memory, from things my father and grandfather told me (both trainspotters), being taken all over Britain to preserved railways as a child, and from searching.

Most locomotives for medium to long routes have a locomotive with a boiler in front, the cab/footplate where the driver and fireman work in the middle, and a tender of coal and water behind them [1]. Going backwards, there's even less view for the driver as the tender is square but the boiler round.

The large wheels are the driving wheels, and they need weight on them for good adhesion. That's also why they're huge, to increase the contact area with the rail.

The fireman needs to be between the tender and the firebox (under the boiler), to shovel coal in. They'll use most of the coal in the tender on a long journey, around 9 tons to go about 350 miles (550km).

If you put the cab at the front, you either need some way to get the coal, or a second cab for the fireman -- but then a difficulty in communication.

By the time appropriate innovations to avoid these issues were invented, steam was being replaced by diesel and electric power anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Peppercorn_Class_A2#/medi...

Addendum: realize it isn't a given that people know the words, as you probably didn't have a trainspotter father. On that picture, the cylindrical black then green part is the boiler, full of long copper pipes over almost the full length. It's above the firebox, which is between the large driving wheels. The pistons are at the front, just under the "Blue Peter" nameplate, connected with coupling rods to the driving wheels.

The small, front wheels provide stability (somehow, this is the answer I had age 7 or so).

The cab is the bit with 60532 on it; there are forward-facing windows as well as to the side. There are green poles on either side of the entrance. There's the entrance to the firebox in the middle, plus valves and levers to control the amount of steam/water etc (i.e. speed).

The tender has British Railways on the side, and is a separate part, semi-permanently coupled to the engine. It carries coal for the fire, and water to boil for steam. This is a long-range, powerful locomotive. Short-range ones could use smaller versions of all this, which could mean the coal/water being carried around the boiler, rather than in a tender.

If you look closely at the driving wheels, you can see the brakes (acting directly on the rims) and the sanders (apply sand to the rails just in front of the wheels, to increase adhesion if they're slippery with autumn leaves).

Around the front buffers (there's probably a name for the red-painted part) there is a coupling mechanism, a pipe to run air brakes, and another pipe to provide steam to heat attached passenger carriages.

> The small, front wheels provide stability (somehow, this is the answer I had age 7 or so).

I think that’s correct. My understanding is this:

The powered wheels are all in the same fixture. Their axes stay parallel at all times (they have to be because they are powered by a single set of linkages). To allow such wheels to go around curves, their flanges (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flange#Train_wheels) aren’t fitted tight to the rail. That means a train that only has driving wheels may not follow turns well, may start oscillating from left to right a bit, etc. The smaller wheels in front are there to prevent that by guiding the locomotive into bends.

I guess those wheels are smaller because they need not be bigger (I guess bigger wheels have larger life spans than smaller ones, but powered ones have shorter life spans than unpowered ones, and the design aims for equal average life span of all wheels)

> The smaller wheels in front are there to prevent that by guiding the locomotive into bends.

I think, in the US these are also known as "pilot wheels" for that purpose. The need for them (or the use you get out of them) also depends on track quality. If you run on lightly built track, the improvement is significant.

(Mind that track isn't fixed to the ground, it rather floats in the ballast, the stones in which the track is embedded. The built quality of the entire assembly has implications for stability and the kinds of speeds you can run on that track, especially with heavier locomotives.)

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