Kick arse steam locos of the USA!
by steamtug on Jun.20, 2016, under Steam engines
Gidday team… It’s me your long lost bro from the rebel Southern states. Well Louisiana can’t get much further South now, can we? In a work update, they finally moved me and the other supervisor from a cupboard behind the door at the existing facility to the new construction project. They have me stuck in a classroom with 26 of my operations team, all reporting to me, ringing me up every 5 minutes that they have to get off work early today for a doctors appoointment, can’t come in today coz I’m sick, I want to take September off to go alligator shooting with my buddies, or deer shooting in August. Oh, I’m sick of it already, keeping track of so many isn’t easy!
So as you know, I have been doing design reviews of the final plant design (we are building 3 LNG trains, as you would recall) and now they have me in the classroom as one of the students with trainers from the construction company who joined the organisation not too long ago, and have no idea what they are teaching. So they keep asking Anthony and myself to clarify this n that. Or I can think of something complicated that needs to be taught, so I ask them the question, which they cannot answer. Hey, I’m not smarter than them, just been exposed to the detailed plant design specs which they have not.
Anyway, that’s work… I spend Saturday nights with the bike riders of Lake Charles. I turned up to a bar on my Triumph one night, and they took me in as a lost sole. Here’s a photo of me with Blue and his wife Bridget drinking a quiet beer and discussing how to turn an old Harley iron head he was given in boxes, into a “Bobba”.
Now the real reason I was inspired to write is because I was reading up on American steam locomotives. There is no real preservation movement anywhere around here for anything steam. I see some “Old thresher” reunions which is the closest they have to a steam rally, but they are mostly up around the mid west, and a long way north of here. So, I was doing some book research today about one of my favourite locomotives, the union pacific “big boy” and found out, they are just pussies compared to some of the other kick arse big locos built in the USA.
I always hated US locos compared to the British Pacific class A4’s that Sir Nigel Gresley designed. The US ones had big ugly cow catches, just 4 drive wheels that were ridiculously big, and silly bells! Well it turns out that they were the really old ones from the wild west. It turns out, that they did in fact build some very nice locos that were more about heavy haulage over grades, like the Sherman bank at 1 in 63!!!! For goodness sake, who in their right mind would take a steam loco up such a hill. But I guess you just have to work with what God gave you. So, forget those tiny “big boy” locos, which if you remember had 2 sets of 8 drive wheels, esentially 2 locos under one boiler. A bit like the Garrett locos that were designed in Manchester and perfected in South Africa with the NSWGR AD-60 class Garretts that pulled big coal trains out of the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, being one of my favorites.
Well to get up that Sherman bank in Ohio, Matt Shay designed a big boy loco with another set of engine, under the tender making a triplex loco! Wow!! It was also compounded, with high pressure cylinders under the boiler, and LP cylinders at the front, exhausting up the blast pipe, while the rear went through a big feed water heater then up a separate exhaust at the back of the tender. How good is that! But unfortunately, even with a huge boiler, the splitting of the exhaust meant there was never quite enough steam for the blast pipe so the boiler always struggled to make enough steam. It wasn’t really a success, but I’m sure we could sort that problem out!
Ooohhhh, look at me now. Reading up on steam trains. Don’t tell those boys on steam yacht Ena!! Lol… Happy Sunday…. and thanks for reading!
June 21st, 2016 on 8:33 am
G’day Mark ,
Glad to hear they are keeping you busy over that side. Wouldn’t want you to get bored and have to start playing with steamy things for something to do?
The Yanks had some big locos for sure. Helped by their huge loading gauge (but SAR had larger), they could fill this space with POWER. However, I was not too impressed with their feats tackling grades of ONLY 1:63 with such power. The line past my place goes up over ‘The Hill’ ( Blue Mountains ) to Lithgow. In steam days, a three-cylinder 57 class (4-8-2) would take 630 tons (not much in USA terms, but don’t they have ‘little’ tons over there, like their ‘little’ gallons?) out from Enfield along the flat ‘speedway’ to Penrith where water was topped up before charging up to Valley Heights, twelve miles of 1:60. At Valley Heights a 53 class (2-8-0) Standard Goods was coupled up as pilot for the next twenty miles of 1:33!!! to Katoomba. From here it was relatively easy drifting down to Lithgow through the ‘ten tunnels’, but before that, without the pilot, there was the 1:75 of Bell Bank before the highest point on that line was reached at 3,584 ft ASL.
While the slog up the hill was hard, the return trip took a lot more skill. 1,500 ton trains out of Lithgow could have a 57 as train engine, two Standard Goods as leading engines, and a 32 class or another SG as push up to tackle the 1:42 grade out of Lithgow to the tunnels where it ‘eased’ to 1:90, and the push-up engine dropped off. After getting to Katoomba, with handbrakes wound on on the train leaving Katoomba to help coming down, it was tricky to judiciously use the Westinghouse brake on the loco so you didn’t run out of air in the receiver. Also, there were a couple of ‘knobs’ on the way down sometimes requiring ‘steam on’ to get over, otherwise if stalled, the handbrakes had to each be knocked off, creep over the knob, then each wound back on again for the rest of the descent. Runaways were not common (only 1 officially) but there were plenty of tales about ‘fast runs’ down the mountain (with plenty of white knuckles I’ll bet).
It must have been challenging in those days and there weren’t a lot of (any?) creature comforts. It’s a lot easier on a steam launch as you are always going up the same size ‘hill’ and never ‘down’.