Interesting information. Most of the fire trucks near me, I
think are 750 GPM or 1,000 GPM. At least, back when I was
interested in that field.
--
Christopher A. Young
Learn more about Jesus
www.lds.org
..
"danmitch" wrote in message
...
Joe788 wrote:
On May 5, 4:59 am, Joe788 wrote:
Beautiful restored 1927 4-8-4 steam locomotive that on May
1st 2010
made a special overnight trip to San Diego.
My new girlfriend and I were walking in Cardiff By The Sea
on Saturday
when it passed by. Just an awesome sight to behold.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5VG5OQwTNE
Apparently this steam locomotive sat for years in a park
of some sort
before it was restored and put back into occasional
action.
Things like this aren't meant to be on display. They're
meant to run.
The latter maybe just my opinion but it should be fact.
Here are some questions for those who wish to share their
knowledge or
do the research:
How do they put the water in it? I'm not aware of any
water towers
that are located next to train tracks in the San Diego,
California
area.
How much water does this locomotive hold and how often
does it need to
be refilled?
In "steam days", railroads had many water sources ...
usually large
elevated tanks with large diameter drop-down spouts for
quickly filling
loco tenders.
Alternatively, the water from the tanks could be piped to
large "water
columns" ... vertical pipe-stands alongside the tracks with
a rotating
cross-pipe on top allowing the end to be positioned over the
tender's
water-hatch. Again, the diameter was large to allow a high
flow from the
reltaively low pressue source. One water tank might serve
multiple
water-columns.
Today, with few water tanks left, filling the tender is
often done by
the local fire department. Despite their powerful pumping
trucks, it
takes a LOT longer (a half hour or more is typical) than it
did with the
old RR water spouts (a few minutes). Fire trucks are set up
to deliver a
lot of pressure at relatively low volume ... just the
opposite of RR
water facilities.
How much does that loco's tender hold? I don't know,
specifically, but
several thousand gallons. It's almost always marked on the
outside of
the tender, usually on the rear face. It varied a lot with
the size of
locomotive, the RR's water policies, and the countryside the
loco was
designed to run through. In most cases, the tender could
hold enough
fuel to evaporate several loads of water. Thus the loco had
to stop for
water far more frequently than for fuel. The exact
proportion of water
to fuel varied with the intended service.
For example, locos operating the southwest, like AT&SF, had
large
tenders that were mostly just big water tanks. Water is
scarce in that
area, water tanks further apart, so they needed to carry a
lot of it.
Extra water-only tenders ("Auxilliary tenders") were fairly
common in
such areas.
Back east, say on the NYC, they often had tenders with huge
fuel
capacity and realtively small water capacity ... water was
plentiful.
Also of note was NYC and PRR had extensive "track pan"
systems that
allowed them to scoop water into the tender while the
locomotive was
moving at a reasonable speed. Thus they could add water "on
the fly"
whenever they needed it, without stopping.
The track pans were LONG narrow troughs set between the
rails in
appropriate locations, and kept full of water by a supply
system. The
loco tenders had an air-operated scoop that could be lowered
into the
trough by the loco's fireman. The motion of the scoop rammed
the water
upward into the tender's water tank with great force. Movies
usually
show the tender water-hatch being blown open when the tender
reached
capacity. Too high a pick-up speed (usually about 40 mph was
used) could
actually burst the tender. The scoop also had to be lifted
promptly when
the end of the trough neared or BAD things would happen. The
scoops were
designed to break away, but a derailment was always a
possibility.
One other variation was the use of condensing systems.
Widely used on
ships and stationary steam plants, these were never very
effective on
railroad locos as the only available cooling source was air
that had
relatively poor ability to carry away the large quantities
of heat being
dissipated. At best, only some of the water could be
recovered and
reused. Condensing locos were tried, and used, but rarely,
and only
under special conditions. In the USA, Union Paciific trid
two GE
experimental steam-turbine-electrics that had condensers ...
they were
failures. The only big, and mostly successful, condensing
steam loco
operations I know of were in South Africa. There, they had
to cross the
Kalahari desert where almost NO water was available. They
had a fleet of
large steam locos with HUGE condensing tenders that operated
succcessfully until displaced by Diesels.
Dan Mitchell
============