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
