Best & Worst Locos to Drive

I saw a video clip of a Ty42 (DR Class 52 Kriegslok) doing a shunt in Poland with about 2000 tons on the drawbar

 

I doubt many currently operational conventional locos are going to get close to to this for shifting power:

http://www.railpictures.net/photo/575692/ (not my photo). Apparently built for shifting coal trains up a very steep (1 in 35) railway in Bulgaria. A colleague showed me some photos from a charter with one that took place earlier this year.

If I've done my conversions from metric correctly (*), it has a nominal TE of 79,000lbf - about the equivalent of two 9Fs...

(*) According to Wikipedia:

2 cylinders, 700mm diameter * 700mm stroke, which I make 28" * 28"
Boiler pressure = 16 kg / cm² = 227 lb/in²
Wheel diameter = 1340mm = 53.6in

So nominal TE = (0.85 * 2 * 28 * 28 * 28 * 227)/ (2 * 53.6) = 79,000lbf

Tom

 

Looks like that would take a fair time to oil up and sand! I made out 3 sets of sanders in the forward direction?

 

On googling for details I find, from the Llangollen Railway's website, that Black Prince's record was 2,200 tons, which broke a 1906 record of 2,010 tons by a GWR 2800.

 

Bit of a difference between hauling a short distance round a quarry and taking a train from Swindon to Acton though isn't there?

 

So what's the story of the GWR 2-8-0 then? (One assumes that, while shifting that load, it didn't also magically slip into full forward gear and shoot off at 120mph, while Collett and the infant Tuplin were on the footplate shouting "faster, faster...")

Tom

 

As matt37401 has said above:

If 71000 had worked straight out of the box so to speak, could we have been looking at a whole fleet of class 8 pacifics? Duke's a good loco, just the valve gear is tempremental, there's that & also it's apparently very fuel hungry so not completely economical too.

Amazing really to think that a 9F shifted 1000 tons by itself, although the youtube footage that appeared of those runs showed it on a pretty level looking section of track so that would've helped too. Love 9Fs personally meself, their sheer size alone is impressive. Always curious why were the centre driving wheels flangeless? That's given as the reason why they can't work on NR anymore due to the flangeless tyres not being able to clear the height of check rails.

 

Doubt it. There was't a need for them.

 

Quoting from The Great Western Eight Coupled Heavy Freight Locomotives by David Maidment; 2808 hauled a 2012 ton train under test conditions from Swindon to Acton on 26th February 1906.

A bit puny really compared with an Erie Railroad triplex Mallet pulling 15,300 tons on its own, but at least 2808 completed it's run without ripping the couplings out of the coal cars after only a mile and a half!

 

It was in 1906 and the production 28s had been in service for just a few months. Be surprising if they hadn't done some testing to see what the ultimate capacity was really.

 

In the days of steam, loads for goods were worked out as the number of wagons, and then individual wagons might be reckoned as 'Equal to...' as a proportion of a normally loaded open wagon. Tonnages were rarely considered as such, but a thousand tons was not outside the boundaries of the Grouped companies' eight-coupled types, 01, 02, 04, 28xx, 8F. The LNER P1s were designed with 1,200 ton trains in view, and the LMS Garratts, not the most efficient of engines, were entrusted with 1,500 and more ton trains.

Enthusiasts did love, enginemen often less. If the job was within the capacity of an eight-coupled type, most men preferred the older option. The 9Fs were ahead of their time: they would have thrived on fully fitted block trains running at 60 and possibly 75 mph. They were unhappy plodding along on unfitted pick-up goods.

The flangeless wheels, and there are other examples, were to allow the locos to negotiate tight(ish) curves. They had a long coupled wheelbase and considerable stresses would have been imposed on both track and machine without them.

 

Don't forget, it's downhill from Swindon to Acton.

 

I think the total train weight was 2178 tons, there was some discussion in the railway press at the time about treating a preserved loco in this way.

 

Frisco 1630 hauled a 2900 ton coal train this year, which is pretty impressive.

 

I believe Swindon is the same height as the top of St Paul's Cathedral.

 

An Austerity 0-6-0 tank engine, (J94), was designed to shift 1,000 tons on level track. I'm pretty sure the 9Fs shifted far more.

 

True - but not at line speed!

Jack

 

I don't imagine 2808 exceeded 25 mph while I think the triplex Matt H Shay reached a top speed of 16 mph. Of course the 9Fs were specifically designed to run fitted freight at speed as more braked stock was built, but they were an exception and I don't suppose Black Prince went very fast, or far, at Merehead

 

Further to the reply, above, from LMS2968, the second and fourth drivers on 9Fs had half thickness flanges, too. This point has been raised on here a few years back, by Ifixit4years, on the 'Preserved 9Fs' thread, in 'Steam Traction' (20th January, 2013). The post reads:

1 chain = 22 yards; 10 chains = 1 furlong; 8 furlongs = 1 mile.

The use of chains with regards to railway curves goes back to when the railways were first built. Land surveyors used chains (22 yards long, and formed from 100 links) as one of their tools for measuring land and laying out building works, so it was natural enough for railway engineers to use the same measurements for specifying track radii, and for the minimum curves over which rolling stock could work.

Surveyors also used the chains for measuring the acreage of land; 1 acre = 10 square chains.

For smaller stuff, they used a rod (also known as a pole, or perch), which was literally a wooden rod, 16 feet 6 inches long (or five and a half yards). So how did they arrive at such an oddball unit? They divided the length of a statute mile by 320 . . .

Actually, though they might seem a bit weird, the advantage of the Imperial measurements (as used in the British Empire) was that various trades ended up with units which were reasonably handy for their particular line of work - rather than everyone having to work to units which were either too large or far too small. If you look at engineering drawings for something the size of a double decker bus, what units of measure do they use, whether it's for the thickness of a piston ring, or the length of the roof? Millimetres!

If you ever buy a sheet of plywood, it's measurements are shown in metric units - but if you get an Imperial tape measure out, you'll find they are still 8 feet by 4 feet, just as they were when I was in primary school, and people who do fencing and dry stone walling round here still bill their farmer customers at "so much a rod"!

HTH

Jack (a.k.a., the Collector of Peculiar and Basically Useless Information!)

 

Well, you could hardly expect her to go either fast or far in such a restricted space - but, even so, if you look at the video clips, she was doing a lot more than the barely walking pace you'd get from an Austerity. Also, the work they did on the North East coal trains to steelworks proved that they could haul heavy loads up fierce inclines over long distances, and keep going.