North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Could you elaborate on this? Other than cost/efficiency savings not panning out what are the sentiments/what is the present condition?

 

Why is it still referred to as oil fired when its running on diesel? A bit miss leading!

Likewise, I see the HRA event coming up features a talk on oil burning, maybe some truths about the diesel firing on 2253 rather than patting each other on the back and painting a rosy picture would be helpful for the movement?

 

The S160 is in use today. I'm told that it is using a lot more fuel than it should be doing but, as I have no experience of the loco in its current configuration I can only go on heresay. I don't know what the personal sentiments of the two drivers who made the comments are.

 

I suspect its unlikely to be made public but I'd love to see a proper review on this. Omaha's conversion was always going to include a lot of learning but the projections for miles to the gallon wouldn't have been totally unknown as S160's were available as Oil burners when originally built. I'd be interested to know the differences (modern upgrades) that were incorporated and the what worked, what didn't, and what could be improved with learnings since conversion. For its actual figures to be so different from what was expected there must be a cause for that. Unless the projections were wildly different from what was achieved on the original oil burners of this class....

 

Miles per gallon! As a diesel loco does 2mpg if you are lucky, there is so way that a diesel oil fired steam loco would do anything like that.

Try gallons per mile.

 

Reading that, I had an intense urge to bang my head on something very hard. Is the unofficial motto of the NYMR now 'Never use a volunteer when you can hire someone?' (I wonder if the fact that paid employees are probably somewhat less likely to tell you that you're running things badly has anything to do with that?)

I'm just mentally comparing this with the incredible penny-pinching I hear of in some parts of another line, one which I have some engagement with. (Although perhaps the SMT there have learned that if that particular sub-group of volunteers there is given absolutely no money at all, they will somehow scrounge what things they need.) Cannot the people running things at the NYMR get it into their minds that the line needs to be positively miserly with every last penny?

The cynic in me ("Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision." - Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary") wonders if those in power have worked out that that the hapless CEO is no longer effective in being a target for incoming criticism, and have found someone they hope will be a new deflective shield? Just because he's Trust Chairman, that doesn't mean he has any power in the organisation.

Mind, my best wishes to Mr. Philip, and I do really hope he can turn things around; although I do not rate his chances of success highly, given the constraints he will have to work within (see e.g. above). Moreover, the cynic in me thinks that those in power at the NYMR still haven't taken on board the analysis that they have a simple choice: i) remain in power; ii) possibly save the NYMR. (I won't bore everyone by repeating the uncomplicated logic that indicates that the NYMR cannot be saved, if those currently in power remain there.)

Noel

 

Now that seems better than an A4. Nice headboard and correct discs for a boat train as well.
I will just grab my coat and run

 

An earlier Chairman bemoaned the fact that he had no power in that position, but I always believed that although, technically, he was right but in reality he had enormous power of influence, but failed to make any use of it and was content to wallow in his self appointed role as rather a lame duck. I do not know the new Chairman, but I do hope he has a far greater sense of his own power of influence; what little I have heard of his CV suggests that he will. The "hapless CEO" seems to be good at making savings - the main problem being that she has consistently chosen the diametrically wrong areas to make those cuts - engineering budgets over admin. She doesn't seem to appreciate that a well run business needs to be supported by a properly funded engineering side, and that engineering side is what draws the customers in the first place.

The big question for me will be seeing whether the incoming chairman can bring about a significant change in attitude at Park Street, and whether the outcome will be a change in attitudes or, if necessary, personnel; I think it will have to be one or the other.

 

A little off topic but we were very fortunate to have Repton as a visitor to the Swanage Railway last year. It looked the dogs 'bits' hauling a rake of southern green coaches out of Swanage. <BJ>

 

Diesel is oil. What did you think it was?

There's a technical paper somewhere* which compares the costs of modern steam (using light oil) vs. diesel on the Brienz-Rothorn Bahn. I think, from memory, it concluded that there wasn't much in it; however, that is for a narrow gauge rack railway, and one of the advantages of a rack railway as far as steam locomotives are concerned is that they don't need to power downhill, whereas the diesels do. So it's probably not even remotely comparable. But it would certainly be nice if someone could do a similar paper for the S160.
(*It used to be online, but I can't immediately locate it now.)

 

If I've remembered correctly, the figure I was quoted yesterday was that the S160 was using five times as much as one of the diesel locos. Don't take that as undisputed fact, though.

 

technically Diesel is a type of Internal Combustion Engine. Diesel Fuel is any fuel that can be burnt in a Diesel Engine.
Diesel in a UK Road Garage is usually A1 Gas Oil. In marine use its normally referred to as MGO, Marine gas Oil.
As a lad I spent an afternoon filling up a procession of Suffolk Ambulances and Fire Engines with MGO from one of HM Warships as they had run out due to shortages as a result of Industrial Action. the last fire engine provided the fueling crew with a taxi to Yeates in Ipswich. The use of Diesel as an aftershave didn't seem to put off the local girls

 

A quick google comes up with the following:

"To maximize long-term cost-efficiency, the S160 conversion was designed by FMW Solutions to run on multiple liquid fuel types. While it currently runs on an 8 gallons per mile fuel economy using standard oil/diesel, trials are underway with cold-pressed rapeseed oil and recycled cooking oils. Once tax clarifications are finalized by the government, switching permanently to these sustainable bioproducts is expected to drive fuel costs down even further. "

Whether that is anywhere close to being correct I know not.

 

Fag packet calculation.

From the NYMR annual accounts, in 2025 they burnt 1,082 tons of coal to run 24,831 steam miles - an average consumption of 97lbs / mile. (That includes everything - all lighting up, steam tests etc - so obviously depends a bit how efficiently you use your fleet. It feels broadly similar to what we are seeing at the Bluebell on our large locos.

97lbs/mile is 1146 MJ / mile based on an average energy density of coal of 26MJ/kg.

For diesel fuel, given an energy density of 37MJ/litre, that requires fuel usage of about 31 litres / mile, or about 6.8 gallons / mile.

So if they are getting 8 gallons / mile, it feels the right order of magnitude. It's a bit higher than equivalent efficiency would suggest which suggest there might be some room for optimisation, but it is hard to imagine you are going to get the number down much below 6 or 7.

You do have to be very careful interpreting numbers as to what is in scope. I have deliberately chosen (and not just because the numbers were to hand!) "total coal / total miles" to include all coal costs, including standby etc, because that is realistically what you have to pay for. If you could measure only running usage, it would be less than 97 lb/mile.

To put that figure in context, the NYMR ran 27,811 diesel miles with 172,204 litres (37,850 gallons) of fuel - so 1.36 gallons per mile.

Apologies for the unholy mix of metric and imperial units!

Tom

 

I did an even rougher calculation (with some probably questionable figures which Google AI gave) - taking the thermal efficiency of a steam locomotive as around 6-7%, and the overall thermal efficiency of an early diesel-electric loco of around 25-30% (the engine itself is around 40% but once the losses in generators and motors are accounted for, and power used by auxiliary systems, I suspect 25-30 is reasonable) then based on those numbers, an oil fired steam loco should realistically use around 5 times as much as a diesel loco on the same fuel.