How might have steam evolved if not ended in the 60's?

[popeter45]

if steam production had stayed into the modern day how might have designs changed with this times?

Mechanical Stokers?, modernised Diesel like controls from cabs either end?, in cab signalling etc

 

[Western Sunset]

Steam production evolved into the production of electricity via coal and nuclear power stations. More wholescale electrification of routes should've taken place, rather than the dead-end of dieselisation.

 

[pdeaves]

I suppose there might have been some development tending towards this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5AT_Advanced_Technology_Steam_Locomotive. Some concepts used in Leader might have come up again (like a cab at each end, 'modern traction-like'). Maybe even thoughts such as used in Switzerland(?) briefly of overhead electric to power a boiler heater. But I think they would have been interesting asides and not led to wholesale fleets. If diesel hadn't have been so well developed at the time I think we would have, as Western Sunset says, gone for electrification (which I think was part of some plan anyway until overtaken by events).

 

[gg1]

Were there ever any experiments with steam-electric locomotives anywhere in the world, ie using a steam turbine to generate electricity which then drives traction motors?

 

[pdeaves]

Were there ever any experiments with steam-electric locomotives anywhere in the world, ie using a steam turbine to generate electricity which then drives traction motors?

Apparently, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilmann_locomotive tells all (usual caveats, etc.)

 

[gg1]

Apparently, yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heilmann_locomotive tells all (usual caveats, etc.)

Very interesting thanks, I did google but couldn't find anything.

 

[ac6000cw]

Were there ever any experiments with steam-electric locomotives anywhere in the world, ie using a steam turbine to generate electricity which then drives traction motors?

Yes (particularly on railways that earned a lot of their revenue by hauling coal) - a few US experiments listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_turbine_locomotive#Electric_transmission

But on something with the space and weight restrictions of a locomotive, IMHO having steam as an intermediate stage between burning coal and the generator shaft is just making it far too complicated and compromised versus burning (more easily handled) liquid fuel in an internal combustion engine.

As Western Sunset suggests, much better to burn the coal in a more thermally-efficient power station and electrify the railway... which is why railway electrification started over a century ago - if you have the traffic density to offset the extra infrastructure costs, the operating costs of an electric railway are somewhat lower than steam e.g. no fireman, no legions of steam loco servicing staff (and facilities), drastically fewer locomotives for the same traffic etc.

 

[contrex]

As Western Sunset suggests, much better to burn the coal in a more thermally-efficient power station and electrify the railway... which is why railway electrification started over a century ago - if you have the traffic density to offset the extra infrastructure costs, the operating costs of an electric railway are somewhat lower than steam e.g. no fireman, no legions of steam loco servicing staff (and facilities), drastically fewer locomotives for the same traffic etc.

I think most railway engineers thought electrification was the future, and they were building steam to fill the gap until that happened, as early as the 1890s.

 

[etr221]

There was a fairly serious American project in the 1980s for a 'new generation' steam loco, the 'ACE 3000' see https://www.american-rails.com/ace-3000.html , https://locomotive.fandom.com/wiki/ACE_3000 and probably elsewhere.

Earlier (c1950), both the Chespeake & Ohio and Norfolk & Western RRs experimented with steam turbine electric locos see https://www.american-rails.com/turb.html and https://www.american-rails.com/m-1.html ; the N&W also experimented with converting one of their 4-8-0 switchers to one man operation, but I forget details.

Also something to think about are the various Sentinel projects - in particular the SMU (steam multiple unit) built for Egypt (and I think elsewhere)

 

[Taunton]

As Western Sunset suggests, much better to burn the coal in a more thermally-efficient power station and electrify the railway...

Then it's probably more efficient to burn diesel fuel in a more thermally-efficient diesel power station (there are lots of these round the world) than in new-build diesel locos, and electrify the railway, as well. yet that wasn't done either. There are a large number of downsides with electrification as well, which commonly get ignored in any theoretical discussion.

Not for nothing has the USA not electrified a mainstream trunk route since the 1930s.

 

[HSTEd]

Not a steam locomotive but the Union Pacific GTEL programme tried to burn powdered coal - the ash content played merry havoc with the turbine blades and they gave up pretty rapidly.

 

[Cricketer8for9]

And how would a modern steam engine (or more accurately the sheds) dealt with the coal dust, cleaning etc needed to keep the locos working?

Wasn’t it the difficulty in securing labour to do these dirty and unpleasant jobs which meant that Steam was that more expensive (in total costs) than diesel and esp electric?

 

[etr221]

Not a steam locomotive but the Union Pacific GTEL programme tried to burn powdered coal - the ash content played merry havoc with the turbine blades and they gave up pretty rapidly.

There was an early 1950s British project (North British Loco were the engineers, Ministry of Fuel and Power the sponsors IIRC) that went the same way

And how would a modern steam engine (or more accurately the sheds) dealt with the coal dust, cleaning etc needed to keep the locos working?

The American ACE project I mentioned above reckoned I believe to have a solution for all these - the idea was that it could be used interchangably with diesel locos (including multiple working)

And to some extent, you assume continuation of using coal fuel: I'm not sure that this is a given.

It would be interesting to see how some of the ideas featured in Bulleid's Leader project might have turned out had that gone a different way.

 

[HSTEd]

And how would a modern steam engine (or more accurately the sheds) dealt with the coal dust, cleaning etc needed to keep the locos working?

It'd be interesting to see whether more modern heat exchanger technology and electric auxilliaries could make a closed loop practical, at which point proper chemical control would seriously reduce scale problems.

That would substantially reduce the labour requirements for maintenance.

 

[Irascible]

The Reid-Ramsey Turbine-Electric.

The Douglas Self Site, Reid-Ramsey, steam locomotive,Reid-Ramsey, turbine

douglas-self.com

The Reid-MacLeod Turbine.

The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Reid-MacLeod

douglas-self.com

The Armstrong-Whitworth Turbine-Electric Locomotive.

The Douglas Self Site, Turbine Locomotive, Armstrong-Whitworth

douglas-self.com

That site is full of wonderful bizarre creations. Thing about steam is is the expansion is decoupled from combustion, so you can leave it to expand as slowly as you like - so direct ( and theoretically more efficient ) attachment to wheels is perfectly practical. Steam powerstations are more efficient because they have room to be.

The obvious next stage of steam evoluition was to burn oil, which removes heaps of disadvantages - unfortunately it's more thermally efficient to burn oil in a diesel. I wonder what sort of boiler pressures you could practically get up to now though.

 

[AngusH]

That site is great, I find this one to be really odd:

The Swiss Electric-Steam Locomotives.........Lasik

The Douglas Self Site, Swiss Electric-Steam Locomotives

douglas-self.com

Electric-steam locomotive - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A steam locomotive that used electric overhead supply to heat a boiler and produce steam...

A very particular case though...


It's a shame some of the other ideas didn't get very far though....


edit: It seems electric pre-heating of boilers is more common than I thought, various new build designs seem to use it as described on the wikipedia page

 

[E27007]

WW2 was probably the end of deep thinking for improving the British steam locomotive.
All was not lost!
The South African Red Devil, 4-8-4 3feet 6 inch gauge, modified from a member of an existing class therefore experimental measurements can be validated by comparitive tests.
The Red Devil achieved 30% reductions in coal and water consumption. Maximum drawbar effort showed 40% improvement, and all achieved on a modest budget for the developments.
Here it is:

South African Class 26 4-8-4 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[RT4038]

WW2 was probably the end of deep thinking for improving the British steam locomotive.
All was not lost!
The South African Red Devil, 4-8-4 3feet 6 inch gauge, modified from a member of an existing class therefore experimental measurements can be validated by comparitive tests.
The Red Devil achieved 30% reductions in coal and water consumption. Maximum drawbar effort showed 40% improvement, and all achieved on a modest budget for the developments.
Here it is:

But it didn't reduce the number of footplate staff by 50%, nor could it run in multiple without any additional footplate staff.

It may have been more efficient than previous locomotives/the type it was converted from, but still was not efficient enough to beat Diesel Traction. South African Railways did not proceed with any further conversions, in spite of the improvement shown. An interesting idea, but too late. not efficient enough and so a developmental dead end.

 

[E27007]

But it didn't reduce the number of footplate staff by 50%, nor could it run in multiple without any additional footplate staff.

It may have been more efficient than previous locomotives/the type it was converted from, but still was not efficient enough to beat Diesel Traction. South African Railways did not proceed with any further conversions, in spite of the improvement shown. An interesting idea, but too late. not efficient enough and so a developmental dead end.

I do not think the OP intended to raise a steam vs diesel topic:

if steam production had stayed into the modern day how might have designs changed with this times?
Mechanical Stokers?, modernised Diesel like controls from cabs either end?, in cab signalling

I believe the topic is to speculate upon the development and improvement of steam locomotive design by Gresley, Stanier etc and their successors, a flow of advancement and development which lost momentum due to WW2.

Were there ever any experiments with steam-electric locomotives anywhere in the world, ie using a steam turbine to generate electricity which then drives traction motors?

Yes , here is a link, not all of the locomotives in the article have electric traction motors, some employ transmissions by gears to the driving wheels.

Steam turbine locomotive - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[RT4038]

I do not think the OP intended to raise a steam vs diesel topic:

if steam production had stayed into the modern day how might have designs changed with this times?
Mechanical Stokers?, modernised Diesel like controls from cabs either end?, in cab signalling

I believe the topic is to speculate upon the development and improvement of steam locomotive design by Gresley, Stanier etc and their successors, a flow of advancement and development which lost momentum due to WW2.

Understand what you are saying, but what would have been the impetus to develop steam locomotive design further? Gresley and Stanier already knew that the Internal Combustion engine had been developed and was competing with steam railways, being applied to both road (passenger and freight) and to air (passenger mainly). Neither designers did ever so much development for freight traffic (it was Beyer-Peacock with their Garratt design that moved forward a bit in this regard, although it was largely eschewed by the Domestic railways, but even they, with mechanical stokers and oil firing didn't hold off conversion to Diesel traction for long).

One would have to imagine a scenario where the IC engine had not been developed - the world would be a completely different place. If no-one had the nounce to develop this, why would there have been the skill to further develop steam engines? It is a bit like trying to imagine modern day canals if the steam engine, or IC engine, had never been developed.

By all means look at the last ditch attempts to improve steam efficiency and project them forward - the problem is that Diesel traction was just so much better that they were all instantly obsolete. ( As it didn't matter what candle manufacturers did, the incandescent light bulb was always going to win). Economic reasons may have extended their lives, but no-one re-invested in the technology. If coal was still going to be used, then the technology was there to either (a) convert it into electricity for traction purposes or (b) convert into oil (as both Germans and South Africans do/did) and use in diesels.

 

[Irascible]

One would have to imagine a scenario where the IC engine had not been developed - the world would be a completely different place. If no-one had the nounce to develop this, why would there have been the skill to further develop steam engines? It is a bit like trying to imagine modern day canals if the steam engine, or IC engine, had never been developed.

In a world with no oil we'd have run out of coal by now & be burning bulky materials, or heating water with solar power - I think the ultimate evolution of the external combustion engine really is a power station.

A point from the original question that slipped past - the PRR *had* cab signalling in steam locomotives.

 

[Strathclyder]

Not a steam locomotive but the Union Pacific GTEL programme tried to burn powdered coal - the ash content played merry havoc with the turbine blades and they gave up pretty rapidly.

UP built this loco themselves rather than ordering it from GE/Alco, using major components from diesel (Alco PA-1 as the cab unit), electric (the chassis from a withdrawn Great Northern Railway W-1) and steam locos (the fuel tender from a withdrawn Challenger), the end result being as close to Frankenstein's monster in locomotive form as was possible to get. It lasted in service from late 1962 to March 1968, having racked up roughly 20,000 miles in that time (compared to at least a million miles for each of the standard GTELs), having been deemed a failure due to excessive soot buildup and blade erosion (hardly a surprise considering the fuel source).

 

[randyrippley]

If steam had persisted it would have had to have taken a cleaner, more efficient technology direction.
Something on the lines of low quality powdered coal which could be contained in a sealed delivery system feeding a fluidized bed furnace heating a boiler.
By using limestone powder in the bed you can capture sulphur, while NOx can be minimised by regulating the furnace temperature.
The steam generated would drive a turbine, while there's a possibility of the exhaust driving a gas turbine

 

[Pigeon]

In a world with no oil we'd have run out of coal by now & be burning bulky materials

Nah, we had 300 years of coal left before Thatcher destroyed the mining industry. All of a sudden the figure magically dropped by an order of magnitude overnight, despite there being no change in the amount of coal that was still down there. Yeah, right.

Developments in locomotive technology: we would have had to get rid of the direct involvement of humans in the firing process. The need to have someone stood there with a shovel to move the coal from the fuel stash to the firebox (while looking into the firebox to see how much and where it was needed), and the need to lay the locomotive out so as to make that possible, had been a drag pretty much from the start of locomotive haulage; the attempts to find a way round that so far had been inept and clunky and more trouble than they were worth in most cases, so the situation remained.

Some of the disadvantages are of course obvious, but among the less obvious ones are all the compromises consequent on having a big hole in the firebox to chuck coal in through. You can't have the firebox above atmospheric pressure, so you have to create the draught by sucking from the other end, which more or less compelled you to do it by using the exhaust steam to power an ejector because a great big fan running in filthy abrasive hot gases never worked very well for very long. This in turn compromised the efficiency: it interfered with the free passage of the exhaust steam, it made condensing the exhaust steam far more trouble than it was worth unless you were running in a desert, it also constrained the path length over which the combustion gases gave up their heat so they went up the chimney with a considerable amount of energy still in them and again made efforts to overcome this tend to end up being more trouble than they were worth. Also, you inevitably had a pretty large minimum amount of air being supplied above the firebed rather than below, which in turn compromised your control over the combustion process. And the combustion has to take place in a large mass reacting slowly, and both reacting and being fed from the top down, which makes it slow to respond to changes in load, as well as tending to less ideal combustion.

So I'd be thinking of carrying the coal as dust rather than lumps, making automatic handling much more straightforward, and injecting it into the firebox (which wouldn't look much like a "normal" firebox) by steam jets, with air supplied by fans operating in clean cold air and the draught powered by the positive pressure blowing from the firebox end. Combustion takes place through a Porta-style gasification process using the steam as an intermediate in the reaction, in a comparatively small amount of reacting mass. Centrifugal vortex separators remove solid particles from the hot gases before they leave the firebox, to prevent loss of uncombusted material and fouling and abrasion of the tubes. The boiler is at least partially a water-tube type, to reduce mass and conduce towards higher pressures. After the gases have passed through the boiler, the remaining heat is used for preheating both the feed water and the combustion air, and the final exhaust temperature is little above ambient. Condensing the exhaust steam both recovers more heat and increases the efficiency of the actual engine bits.

You still have the fireman, of course, to regulate all these processes, but he doesn't have to shovel coal and he doesn't have to stand in between the boiler and the coal all the time. He's watching gauges and adjusting valves and stuff, and he does it sitting down in the cab like the second man on a diesel, only rarely needing to get up and mix it with the dirty bits to clout something or other.

You have considerably more freedom in how you arrange the various parts, and you are no longer necessarily dominated by a huge and heavy boiler as the principal and overwhelmingly biggest component which more or less dictates where most of the other parts go. The result looks much like a diesel, but doesn't end up being down on one side to let you get past the boiler or whatever. The actual engine parts are probably high-speed units driving bogie axles through gearing, which reduces weight, means you don't have to worry about "hammer blow", allows you to have no carrying axles, and lets you use a thoroughly-designed and properly effective suspension system so all the novel gadgetry doesn't get shaken to bits like it usually did.

The centrifugal separation of the flue gases makes it a much cleaner device to use, as all the muck either burns or remains in the ash pan, and doesn't accumulate in the smokebox or come blurging out of the chimney all over everything. You have a single point of crud removal to deal with on shed instead of having it all over the place. Similarly the fuel storage and handling is done by enclosed parts so it doesn't spray coal dust everywhere like a conventional open system does. Condensing the steam re-uses most of the water and makes it practical for the water for what topping-up does need to be done to be properly treated and purified, so the boiler needs less maintenance, doesn't get insulated by scale, and can rely on a water supply containing surfactants to improve heat transfer. The lower thermal masses in the steam production system enable it to start up in a time limited by thermal stresses rather than plain massive thermal inertia, and the much-simplified decruddification processes mean it can keep going for much longer with only refuelling and emptying the ash pan before you need to shut it down and let it cool off to do more complicated things to it.

Multiple unit working is much the same as with diesels, since all you need to do is transmit indications and control signals between units by whatever method is most convenient. You do need to provide multiple duplicate control panels at the fireman's position, so the number of units is limited by the number of panels, but that's not serious since we very rarely want to hook up even three in multiple anyway. (Insert aside about the panel of engine and air indicators to the left of the driver in old DMUs.) Similarly you can implement advanced signalling systems by hooking them into the same bus.

Why? I'm not sure, but it's still fun to think about. Maybe Westinghouse snaffled up all the patents on diesel engines or something.

 

[WAO]

The steam loco even in its final form was little different from Stevenson's Rocket; using a coal fire in a firebox feeding a fire-tube boiler. The steam was therefore in a large diameter drum whose thickness and therefore pressure and temperature was limited to c17 bar and >200C. A water tube boiler, having smaller diameter tubes has a much higher potential: power station boilers operate at c170 bar and >550C, giving much higher efficiencies (any more and the turbine blades creep...). The coal fire has very intense radiation, causes more metal deterioration and is not well controllable. A gas flame, whose heat transfer is gentler has an automatic burner, easily controlled without a shovel. You could stoke from your laptop! Whether the complexity of a steam turbine with either geared direct drive or -alternator/traction motors would be better than pistons and motion I couldn't say. Perhaps Princess Anne would have had the answers had it/she survived Harrow.

As has been said the place for steam is in the power station, producing electricity.

WAO

 

[Irascible]

Nah, we had 300 years of coal left before Thatcher destroyed the mining industry. All of a sudden the figure magically dropped by an order of magnitude overnight, despite there being no change in the amount of coal that was still down there. Yeah, right.

[snip]

You still have the fireman, of course, to regulate all these processes, but he doesn't have to shovel coal and he doesn't have to stand in between the boiler and the coal all the time. He's watching gauges and adjusting valves and stuff, and he does it sitting down in the cab like the second man on a diesel, only rarely needing to get up and mix it with the dirty bits to clout something or other.

Well we were burning oil & gas as well as coal, and it'd not just be us - wihile there's no excuse for Thatcher, I think the NCB might have overestimated reserves a bit also, but ok maybe that would be "running low on coal, especially the good stuff" - do you really want to have to install tonnes of scrubbers?. Just like you can burn pretty much anything you can vapourise in an IC engine, obviously you can put anything combustible in a firebox - wonder how well compressed wood pulp works, or any other compressed biomatter ( in energy density terms, not amazing, I'd imagine - hence why you do this in a power station! ). Much higher pressure systems are also an obvious way to go which I think needs fairly radically different boilers? I think direct-drive turbines probably didn't get investigated enough before the end of steam too - turbines aren't very efficient at low speeds so perhaps geared reciprocating cylinders for low speed & the turbine can pick up later, just as hydraulic transmissions change stage. Axial-flow turbines are naturally progressively "compounding", take a bit of space though...

If you can put the fireman in a cab watching indicators you can automate the whole thing - that leads to interesting concepts like the locomotive knowing the road so it can predict demand, and *that* leads to ideas about changes for drivers, too.

 

[Bevan Price]

I think we would have followed the example of Germany, and used oil-fired steam locos more extensively. If steam had survived into the mini-computer era, I think that the job of fireman would have been abolished, with control of the oil supply entirely performed by computer, pre-programmed for specific routes and train loads.

 

[D6130]

Perhaps Princess Anne would have had the answers had it/she survived Harrow.

By the time she was destroyed in the Harrow accident in 1952, 46202 "Princess Anne" had already been converted into a standard 4 cylinder piston driven locomotive.

 

[AngusH]

Why? I'm not sure, but it's still fun to think about. Maybe Westinghouse snaffled up all the patents on diesel engines or something.

Now I wish to see such a unit constructed....

The possibility of a universe where diesel engines didn't work out.

Or possibly a situation where coal is being mined and transported but the distances make electric operation expensive.
(I think there was an attempt by some american coal transporters in the 1970s along those lines)


A bit like the electric steam locomotive, it might well work very well in some specific situation....

 

[Pigeon]

Much higher pressure systems are also an obvious way to go which I think needs fairly radically different boilers?

Yes - you need to go to water-tube boilers to keep the diameter of the pressure-containing parts manageably small. Some systems even use an ultra-high-pressure sealed circuit purely as a means of transferring heat to the merely much-higher pressure parts, although the main reason for doing that is to help deal with scale, which I'm envisaging dealing with by means of a closed water cycle. I suspect that on working it out in detail, it would turn out that you'd ideally want some combination of water-tube and fire-tube sections going from water to full-pressure/temperature steam in stages, rather than doing the whole lot in one jump (indeed even with a conventional boiler you're essentially doing this once you add superheating).

I think direct-drive turbines probably didn't get investigated enough before the end of steam too - turbines aren't very efficient at low speeds so perhaps geared reciprocating cylinders for low speed & the turbine can pick up later, just as hydraulic transmissions change stage. Axial-flow turbines are naturally progressively "compounding", take a bit of space though...

Yes, I always think it's a particular shame that 6202 never really got a fair trial. Previous steam turbine experiments had mostly been too underdeveloped and unreliable to draw any conclusions from, but with 6202 the idea seemed to be to keep it as simple as possible to have as few things as possible to go wrong, and it seemed to work; it was good enough that it could share the regular duties of its class in the normal way, and it did seem to be the case that it was at least as good as the reciprocating version. Really, that alone would have been justification for developing the idea further at least for express passenger use, because it eliminates hammer blow which becomes a worse problem with the square of the speed, and the poor low-speed performance is of less concern.

I'm pretty sure 6202 used a transversely-mounted six-row axial turbine (with a separate three-row one for reversing), so they don't have to be gigantic at locomotive power outputs. I think a lighter, simpler and less potentially troublesome adaptation for low speeds, if that had been found necessary, would have been a torque converter (aka continuously-variable hydraulic transmission) with lock-up at high speed, similar to the transmission on the 150s but with a solid rather than fluid coupling for the high stage.

If you can put the fireman in a cab watching indicators you can automate the whole thing - that leads to interesting concepts like the locomotive knowing the road so it can predict demand, and *that* leads to ideas about changes for drivers, too.

Yes. I was trying to avoid thinking too much about automation and rather assume a similar level of technology for control and feedback functions as was used on the diesels that replaced steam, which would still probably leave a fair bit more for the fireman to do than the diesel second man was left with. Adding computers can come later, as it did for diesels.