Chesapeake and Ohio 1309 is Being Restored

Chesapeake and Ohio 1309 is Being Restored and may even be in service by the end of next year. It was the last steam engine built for the main line in The States and is one of the biggest locomotives in The World. It will run on The Western Maryland Scenic Railway. I can't wait!

 

Interesting that they stuck with compounds to the end, as a number of the later artics were simples.

 

I believe that quite a few of them could be switched depending on whether you wanted economy or raw grunt like the N&W Y6.

 

Not being too familiar with American Steam machines, I had to look it up! More here...

https://www.movingfullsteamahead.com/content/co1309

WOW!

 

Why the "stuck" when it comes to compounds?

 

And though this view is incorrect it was how they understood things at the time. Although the US locomotive builders set high standards when it came to mechanical design they were rather poor when it came to understanding the thermodynamics of the beast. Locomotives became bigger and did not offer the best return considering the mass of materials that went into them. Compare the C & O Allegheny with what was being achieved in Europe. The American machine should have been capable of producing 15,000 ihp. when scaled according to its weight and the real "stuck" was low power to weight ratios brought about because the advantages of compounding and how to achieve them was not well understood. Making things bigger without a full understanding of what you are dealing with is not the best way forward but many who were involved in the production of these enormous machines were unaware of how limited their understanding was. What they produced within the limits of this understanding was interesting and fascinating but it was never outstanding.

 

Yes. Every car had a V8 in the fifties but they were lucky if they produced 150bhp. One thing I will say is that the steam locomotives did the job they were designed to do very well. Necessity is the mother of invention and America had the advantage of a very high loading gauge and weight availability. Coal and oil were cheap and economy wasn't high on the agenda. European designers were forced to look for ingenious ways of producing more power but the Americans were quite content to just build bigger locos. This is mirrored in the automotive industry. Americans just shoved more cubes into the engines but Europeans experimented with turbo chargers, more efficient engines and even rotary engines, which my car takes advantage of. Imagine a 1.3l American engine with 231bhp!
These different climates lead to an interesting diversion in mechanical development in all fields of industry. Just look at farming. John Fowler created the ploughing engine with a winch and an engine at both ends of the field. The US had such big fields that this wouldn't have been possible. This lead to the development of humungous direct ploughing traction engines. Notice a pattern?

 

Off topic, but it does make me chuckle at wankel engines being referred to as 1.3 litres etc., when in pretty much every other aspect they are more like a 2.6L (fuel economy, power etc). Someone's definitely taken advantage of the 'displacement' measurement there

 

I don't think it is quite correct to say "economy wasn't high on the agenda". Economy is always high on the agenda, at least in peacetime. The key point is the relative balance between consumable costs (such as energy); labour costs and capital costs. In 1950s America, those were such that (with energy relatively cheap and labour relatively expensive), it made sense to trade energy consumption for reduction in manpower - hence, giant machines that weren't particularly thermodynamically efficient, but could be operated by two men. (I suspect the capital cost of, say, a Big Boy versus two smaller engines of combined equivalent capability may also have favoured the larger engine). In Europe, the balance was different, leading to different priorities, but the underlying driver was the same: economy.

Tom

 

It's classed as a 2.6 in every respect and always referred to as one. Mine's taxed as a 2.6.

 

You know what I mean, though, when an RX owner says '...and it's only a 1.3!' as if it's got a CG13DE in it.

 

You could look at 2 stroke and 4 stroke engines and ask the question about their equivalence based purely on the sum of the swept volume of the cylinders. Motorsport had to deal with this and the Wankel was just another i.c. type that was hard to classify and integrate.

Back to steam locomotives in the US. It has only come about fairly recently that American writers have been critical of the locomotives that were purchased for their rail roads. All too frequently they were not best suited for the type of work that they were obtained to perform. The Allegheny had far too much weight on undriven axles, had 5' 7" driving wheels and was built to haul heavy freight. It cost nearly twice as much as a N & W class A, weighed in excess of 90 tons more all for the production of an extra 1200hp. The Y6a was a design far better suited for slogging away at 15mph with 10,000 tons, it had far more adhesive weight too. It was also designed and built in house by the company that used it.

 

Moved for the first time yesterday after a rather fraught restoration programme.....
http://railfan.com/co-1309-moves-under-its-own-power-for-first-time-in-64-years/

 

Remember that N&W engines worked very well on the N&W as they were tailored to the job. Some were sold to the Union Pacific and did not work out well at all. N&W was essentially a low speed road whereas the Union Pacific a high speed one and had engines tailored to that job. The C&O engines were actually designed for speed but were used for grunt service somewhat in error.
Steam was much more a horses for courses design than the diesel electric is.

 

Not my videos:

 

It did a loaded test run yesterday - Photo on their FB page......
https://www.facebook.com/WMSRailroad/

 

The new Virtual Railfan camera in Cumberland, MD, has a view over the WM station there and 1309 was working a photographic freight charter this morning.....

 

Might it be as simple as railroads back in the 30s comparing the economics of IC operation with steam, rather than thinking in terms of (let's not forget) unfamiliar and barely developed technology on an absolute scale?