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At the risk of being controversial, if we look rationally at the superceding of steam by electric and diesel in the UK, it never made economic, social or engineering sense. As a prime mover, steam cannot be beaten. Guess wot they got in atomic power stations?
The engines are simple, have bags of starting torque, speed and guts, they are low tech, run forever ( some of the engines BR scrapped had been in daily use for 60 years) and they run on coal, which as any idiot knows, exists in vast reserves under the UK and the US. As for the 'day to day maintenance' red-herring, this consists of a man who can, at 4am, a] clean out an ash-can b] use a box of matches c] use an oil can d] turn on a water faucet and e] shovel coal into a box. Then do a shift as a Fireman.
Electric traction, as we have seen above, is wonderful but shot full of complexity and compromised design, imposes vast capital cost and is inflexible, since till fully wired up you got no receipts. Diesel traction is not as good as steam [ ie a gearbox or genset/electric motor plus the prime mover = complexity = cost ], it runs on fuel supplied by [ahem] foreign persons and you could argue produces just as much pollution, especially the particulates.
So, having destroyed the whole steam culture, sent 19,000 perfectly good engines to be scrapped, put 20,000 skilled men on the scrapheap, destroyed the infrastucture and transport links to many small communities in the North and West by ripping up 4000 miles of track, guess how much was saved? A piffling £28 million. And today the Rail network still strives to come up to a 'standard' that any pre-war 'God's Wonderful Railway' man would have dismissed with utter contempt.

Alan

BUMPADOODLEDOO!

Anyone got any more electric locomotives / machines / pics / info / - please?

Alan

Hey energy7, just saw your reply! Wish I would have seen it sooner, as quoted below:


Ahhh, so they were 4-8-8-2's! Don't know where I came up with "2-6-6-0's"!!!

Are you an "SP Fan", or an "All-Around Your Area Railfan" (or "Foamers" / "Ferro-Equine Philes", as the Old Timers would refer to us as).

Scott35

Sorry to be controversial, but the replacement of steam locos _did_ make economic sense!
First, Diesel and electric require a _lot_ less daily maintenance, not even counting the coal and water filling (especially the coal filling requires a lot of machinery in the stations and both are time consuming).
Second, the starting torque of electric and diesel locos is much higher than of classic steam locos. Especially in countries with lots of mountains the first electric trains ran _much_ faster (I'm talking differences of two hours or more!) than steam trains! For example across the Semmering (Austria) steam trains reached an average speed of 15 km/h whereas the first electric trains reached an average speed of 60 km/h!
Besides: hydro electricity (or electricity generated from burning gas or biomass) is a _lot_ more environment friendly than burning coal in a loco. Plus a big power plant is always more effective than a small loco.

And there's alway the fire risk with steam locos too.

Texas. Good valid arguments, and I sense I may be losing this, but I'll soldier on! Well, I guess we can't halt 'progress' but I would suggest that the slow Austrian steam-locos on the grade mentioned were maybe underpowered then?

It took longer? "Get up earlier." my mum used to say! I don't buy the 'time-saved-on-going-anywhere' argument. Concorde used whistle over the pond in no time. The taxi from Heathrow to London crawls along at walking pace up the choked M4 and you might just as well be in a horse and cart.
Such mountain grades as you mention would be the exception though- most railroads are built as flat as possible with cuttings and embankments to give long grades.

A piston-operated steam engine produces near maximum torque at standstill with a minimum of bits and will outperform any electric motor, dc / ac chopped wave or otherwise ever built, at start and low speed on a hp/hp basis. Look at any e-motor rpm /torque/amps curve - it's the achilles heel of the method that has thwarted engineers for over 120 years- poor acceleration, complex brush gear and interpoling, ac-dc conversion / transmission over distance and the associated losses. But it does take real experience, skill and intelligence to drive and plan the firing of the boiler on route in a steam loco, which in these modern days is eshewed as somehow unacceptable. E or D drivers just open a controller and don't need a fireman either.

Let's look at maintenance. The engines did require de-ashing, water fill, coaling and oiling and general TLC. But one could counter that these activities were done by very-lowly paid employees and that their actions gave locos and rolling stock very long working lives, maintaining capital value and a certain employee ésprit. Diesel and electric locos don't need any maintenance? You could let loose an ordinary Joe with an hours instruction on one? The heat efficiency of a steamer [c.10% at the track] will be a lot less than a power station-[c.20%] - but hold on a cotton-pickin' minute! - you ain't got it to the loco wheels yet mate! Or a Diesel-[35%] seems good, till you realise the torque at the shaft needs to go through a gearbox / clutch / alternator / switchgear / control circuit first and the torque at zero rpm is er... zero. In order to run either you have to import/refine the oil or build a vast transmission infrastucture first. Steamers hauled their own [and everybody elses] fuel from the pits/docks/opencasts. Coal still exists in vast reserves across most of Britain, N France, Belgium and the Ruhr. Noticed the price of oil lately? Good decision to abandon coal?

Pollution? Yes you could smell, taste and see it, [LOVELY IMO!], but it was not an insurmountable technical problem. London went 'smokeless' by law when I was a boy. The pea-souper fogs we got in London were like something out of Dante's Inferno- you could not literally see your outstretched hand, and they killed the frail and aged. Business responded by making 'smokeless fuels' available to city consumers. Diesel particulates are just as deadly, but near invisible, so that's all right then! Big power stations spew out acids and ash dusts too- in the seventies and eighties the UK neary exterminated the forests in Germany with acid rain pollution from coal fired power stations. The technical solution was -put gypsum manufacturing plant on the chimneys and make innocuous sheetrock with it.

As I said in my previous post, when the dust settled in Britain after the restructuring, a government white paper revealed total saving of peanuts. The new traction methods were no cheaper to run, they had less income with less track, the first diesel locos were a technical disaster, they still haven't finished electrification 45 years later and the Tunnel link is a bad joke! Rails' problems stem from crap management, poor financial planning, pressure lobbies and political interference, not the traction methods or the engineering.

Fires? Rare events on a well maintained road.

As to bio-fueled rail, the US railroads ran using wood as fuel initially. And fish!!! Unbelievably, one US railroad extincted a species of sturgeon by burning the dried fish as fuel. Now that really must have caused a stink!

Alan

You do have some good points. It seems like the UK had some big economic problems. In Austria and Germany, where I know the figures, electrification was a big success.

The efficiency of a modern power plant is not 20% though - Austria's most recent coal plant goes up to 35% and CCPP (gas turbine+steam turbine) plants go up to 55%!
Besides, Austria is on 78% hydro power, with a 85-90% efficiency, just as Switzerland (don't know any figures for Germany).

Right now Austria tries (to some extent) to increase the renewable energies by building huge wind farms (several megawatts each), steam power plants fired with wood chips, saw dust, grass cuttings, sewage gas,... things that have grown in the forest or meadow and would have gotten dumped otherwise.
Regarding the gypsum issue... in the gypsum the acids are bound and can't get out, so it's a lot better than blowing them out the chimney!
Smoke filtering and scrubbing technologies have really advanced in the last 15 years. Half of Vienna is heated from waste burning and pollution is less than that of most industrial cities.

Regarding the locos themselves: early Austrian electric locos usually had a transmission like the steam locos, and AC motors run on transformers with several taps.

More from Alan:




Pic 1. English Electric Main-line loco [airbrushed line drawing] showing a representational V16 blown 4 stroke diesel-engine in cutaway. Obvious similarities to BR Class 37, with its 3-split windshield, except for the frogeye and the cowcatcher. Love the windshield bars and the horns, soon to be crammed with dead flies! Engines would appear to be rated between 1000-1760hp, and locos available in standard or 3' 6" gauge. Blowers could be electrically-driven centrifugal fans or conventional exhaust turbo-driven. A turbo-charged V12 engine was also available.

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Pic 2. Another line-drawing representation of a mixed traffic loco, 6 in line blown 4 stroke diesel, again with a frog eye and cowcatcher.

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Click here for full-size image

Pic 3. Line drawing of a shunting loco, reminiscent of BR Class 08.

Pic 4. DC Generator assemblies. Note the use of 'electro-magnet' instead of 'stator'.

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Pic 5 . DC Motor assemblies.
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Pic 6. A loco under construction. The roof-mounted electric engine-cooling fan, drawing air though side mounted radiators, was a feature of later Class 37s. This appears to be a chassis only, with no bogies yet fitted. No cow-catcher, but still retaining the fly-traps.

One of the things that killed the development of the steam engine in this country was the failure of the outside vendors of all of the parts an engine needed.

Quick ferinstance, my area, the electrical parts of a steam engine, the turbogenerator, headlights cab lights etc.the injectors, on and on the list goes. As more and more of the railroads went with deseasel less and less of these parts were needed and as such the price went up until the companies went either into other business ventures or went out of business.

It was not economically feasable for the railroads to manufacture their own parts as much of them were patented and required specialized tooling to manufacture.

Here at the Strasburg, we now make a lot of that stuff, we will make you an injector, I am working on the manufacture of headlight and their reflectors. Ever see an 18 inch parabolic glass reflector? NOBODY makes them. Hopefully I can pry the money loose to set up shop.

The steam engine is a really inefficient machine. Most of it's heat goes out the stack. You can't string them together without multiple crews. Modern deseasels have one fella driving, with all of the other engines run by remote control.

Water was always the limiting factor. Water either in a tower or in a track pan had to have a supply maintained, and kept from freezing in the winter. More personell the railroad had to pay.

Quite a few railroads in this country tried english/european designs. Part of the problem is that most of those designs were made with the assumption that there was a short run, and a stop at night. Over here, runs could be thousands of miles over several days with only the crews changing. By going from steam to deseasel railroads could save lots of money not having to have large service centers in the middle of nowhere.

I still have pictures to post. getting the 20 minutes end to end to get them there is the hard part.

TW

Here are two pics from the electric locomotive 1009 in Assen, The Netherlands.

This was one of my favorites because of the big wheels with the spokes. 1D1.
Only 10 of these machines were built for the Dutch railways.
Voltage was 1500 Volts DC.

This was around 1972, My brother and I were standing on the platform.

1009 was towed behind 1151 direction Beilen.

1009 in Assen

1009 in Assen

The yellow train was a passenger EMU arriving at Assen Railway station.

The signal box was near the 12 sign. As teenager i quite often went after school inside the signalbox and had a chat with the signalman, and was sometimes allowed to switch the red lights on for the roadcrossing while he was pulling the lever to drop the roadbarrier arms.

Great those pre OHS days.
This is now all history. All extra track loops have been uplifted, signalbox gone and new station built with only two tracks.