One possible cause of the whole massive driver thing of early engines, particularly Cramptons, various Broad Gauge engines and other older express locos (e.g.Singles), was due to limitations in available lubrucants which weren't much good with high speed motion, so using a bigger driver meant that the motion didn't have to oscillate as fast for a higher speed.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PSI?!?!? That is... *insanity*. The highest pressure non-nuclear steam plants the US Navy ever tried were 1200 psi, and they proved so troublesome that the last generation of USN steam machinery reverted to the old wartime standard 600 psi (before the gas turbine took over). And no, the nuclear machinery didn't go higher, either--in fact, the nuclear plants use saturated (not superheated) steam at a lower pressure than the 600 psi oil-fired plants did. Apparently, on the 1200 psi ships, the standard procedure for searching for a steam leak was to take a broom handle and wave it through the air near the suspected leaking pipe, making sure to not pass through any area that you haven't waved the broom handle through first. When the handle is suddenly cut in half by something you can't see, you've found the leak.
The concept of the Flaman Boiler is not too dissimilar to the concept of a Babcock and Wilcox M-Type marine steam boiler, with a lower water chest and water tubes feeding into an upper steam chest such as was used in U.S. Navy Ships.
The douglas self site certainly has a lot of interesting bits of history on it! The baldwin shay is godawful- congrats, you took an engine renowned for being hard to maintain, and then added more gears and made them harder to access.
What is really interesting about gauges? The seven foot gauge was proven to be more stable than the current 4’8” gauge. It would have allowed a whole lot more to be moved these days. I do believe that crossties would have posed a problem, though.
It would be really interesting to see into what Brunels gauge could have evolved. The question would be if it would have lead into a wider loading gauge in the UK? Crossties could have been solved and I think that this specific argument is sometime blown out of proportions. But I absolutly see the necessity for a unified track gauge accross a country, and Brunel simply was to late to the game. Best example is imho Australia, a country and continent that should be teeming with railways but whoes development was hinderet by the usage of several different gauges and incompability.
Thank you for doing the Pearson. It was just that they were a little rough riding (no, you don't say!) and they were a bit complicated, everything else was.... actually, not far off excellent. But two small problems equal one big one, and thus they were rebuilt.
I was wondering did you do a video on the Lombard Steam Log Hauler they were basically saddle tank locomotives used for logging and were built with tracks and had a guy on the front to steer the engine and they could swap out the skis for wheels as well turns out alot of them are still around rotting away in a forest on display or running in a museum theres also this other type of locomotive that was made to run on ice and was pretty much the same idea more or less but was powered by a single drive wheel
Big driving wheels are good for speed. The Stirling Single (8' 1" drivers) could do 85 mph. Wrt the HO2: I mean, you wouldn't need another loco per se, just a stationary boiler. But still. Leave that kind of thing to fireless locomotives, where it's actually practical and makes things _simpler_ Fowler's Ghost would fit well in this category, although IIRC you already mentioned it elsewhere (in "Worst trains" I believe).
In fairness, pretty much every engine terminal and shop already would have had its own stationary steam supply--remember, just about *everything* was steam-powered at the time, and you could greatly speed up the process of firing up a cold locomotive by injecting a good shot of shop steam into the boiler to get some pressure up and pre-warm it. Now, if you had it break down and had to park it out on the line in cold shutdown, well...
13:50 then the same company after WW2 build rollercoaster. And become one of the best rollercoaster manufacture in the world, at that time. Rollercoaster he made albeit not a record monster chaser nor super innovative, were insanely smooth with variable-diameter track bending (instead of fixed-diameter like other manufacture), heck, it even stood the time against more modern counterpart But, Schwarzkopf weren't a good businesses man. And then the company bankrupted, he tried to revived it again and then Mindbender Accident happen due to first bankrupt neglect, failing his attempt forever.
The H02's system is crazy complex and keeping it stable sounds like a nightmare. Which makes creating a steam locomotive system that CANNOT BE COLD-STARTED without 'shore power' all the more baffling. Also, that thing has more weird piping outside than your average Steampunk setting.
While you touched Austro-Hungarian Empire: please check out the "Landwehrbahn" gas-electric train, engineered by Porsche, for the military and used in ww1 in east Transilvania - Tihuta Pass. Normal gauge but absurdly tight radiudes and steep gradients.
on that pearson engine, i have to say they were successful. 16 years in those very early day is probably a very good run considering how fast technology was advancing, but more importantly, they were used in their various configurations until the rail network they were on was scrapped, not because they didn't want the engines anymore. on the high pressure locomotive, i don't think the need to use an outside steam source was seen as an issue at the time. the big boy gets steam from a plant in the facility to help get started. and period videos from british railways on youtube show them hooking locomotives up to other locomotives to help them get going faster than they would otherwise be able to. lawrie just did a video with a full sized locomotive and it looks like it took them many hours to get enough heat to be able to move under its own power.
Hey Darkness love the railroad content. Just wondering if you came across the BC rail electric locomotives used on the tumbler ridge sub? They are gf6c built by mlw and 7 were produced and bought by bc rail. Only one made it in preservation number 6001 the prototype model and its sitting at the Prince George forestry and railroad museum.
Those Pearson engines were actually very good for their day, as someone else remarks they had quite a long useful life by the standards of the time, and in view of the road they were required to work over. Whiteball Hill is no pimple; its steep, even for today's engines. The flangeless driving wheels were to allow a little more lateral motion on curves; the bogies had only limited play, revolving around a fixed centre pin. Not as uncommon as it sounds - the big Gooch 4-2-2 broad gauge singles were equally rigid, and had similar wheels. Single-driver engines were popular for fast running because, workshops being more primitive back then, it was believed that coupled driving wheels introduced problems of binding when axle and crank pin centres weren't quite aligned - as with the Fink engines. Interestingly William Dean, also of the GWR produced a standard gauge locomotive similar to the Pearson design, again a tank, which allegedly was so total a flop it was withdrawn, broken up and the sole photographic plate of it destroyed to deny it ever existed! It had flangeless drivers, with Dean's patent 'centre-less' bogies either end, and kept derailing so often that it (thankfully) never even left the yards. It was totally unsafe, and unconsciously designed to fail.
When an entire power grid goes down, restarting it is called a Black Start and is extremely difficult because you have to put power in BEFORE you can get power out, quite similar to how you had to put steam into the HO2 before you could start it. Power engineers go to great lengths to minimize Black Starts because of the difficulty involved and it just blows my mind the Germans made the CONSCIOUS DECISION to require Black Start techniques to start this thing.
I imagine the flaman boiler would have have had issues of limitations of overall heating surface ratio and heat reservoir. Superheater elements became frequently used around 1900 and would have made the benefits flaman boiler obsolete.
Hi Really enjoyed your video and thank you for the clip on C14 ,just a gentle observation the C14's wasn't converted to S14 which 2 was built after the 10 C14.as an improvement .Unfortunately these wasn't fit for purpose either 😢.Also to agree which another comment ,Yes I would love to see one rebuilt for a light preserved railway 😊.
I feel like the H02 could've worked better if it had like, a secondary tender of sorts that was just an auxiliary boiler, then again that'd probably require an extra crew or something
Interesting comparison to No 1 here (HO2 1001 ) the German Navy had very real problems with their high-pressure boilers used in their battleships and other warships in both the 1st and 2nd world wars. Now the problems in the first world war could mostly be written off as really lousy coal supplies. But in the second world war, the problems could be assigned to trying to over-engineer things, which sounds just like 1001 here. The British did all right throughout the wars just pretty much by sticking to older less efficient designs. IMHO the USN really solved the problem smashingly, the USN simply went to the boiler and turbine designs that had been used for years in onshore powerplants. The USN ships were able to steam for months at a time in the Pacific with comparatively little or no trouble with their power plants. The USN had a certain amount of difficulty with propellor vibrations but that is still an issue in high-power ships to this day.
The reason for the extremely large wheel was the lack of a cutof valve. A lot of early steamers, specially the one that where a bit faster had very large wheels. There was no point in having more than one because the engine wouldn't be able to start it anyway.
So if I'm underling you correctly about the first locomotive then Emily from thomas and friends was at one before being rebuilt into a tender engine was that weird looking tank engine?
I actually have an idea for making the Baldwin shay to actually ya know be serviceable So shays are designed to be easily serviced Right Ok so here's my idea Leave the pistons where they are but make it like the big boy where it works like a movable blast pipe move them further away from the boiler and make it so it can be unlocked with a standardized key and slid out completely for easy service replacement
The last one... If there was a primary steam generator, it would've been easier to start it from cold. I bet that was a nightmare to maintain. Better to stick with the proven design in that case.
Ah, German engineering, it we get X performance out of this simple machine, if we add this complex component we will get X+10% performance, and if we add this even more complicated component we will get X+10%+3% performance, and if we add this mind boggling complexity, and extremely fragile component, we will get X+10%+3%+0.5% performance, and our failure rate will only be 50%.
16:10 to get steam from outside is not really that strange. In this era pretty much all steam locos was started with outside air, cutting down the heat up time wirh about a hour. Typically the depot had a smal boiler running 24/7 with a decent steam reservare to heat up a number of steamers.
Just as an extra help, could you make sure all the engines you address are dated? Because I do not know when the German engine was made or the Baldwin Shay.
I did the middle suggestion bar so this is what came form it The first time you were able and you had to do something about the situation you had in your mind and I think that was the first thing you said
Person: "Baldwin, build me a tank engine!" Baldwin: "You got it!" B: *builds Shay model* P: "what.....is this......?!" B: "you said to build you a tank!" P: "A TANK ENGINE!" B: "Ooooooooh.....we f**ked up....."
Darkness the curse: 12:56 Ah yes bear witness to this PRECISION GERMAN ENGINEERING!!! Me: Ah yes Precision German Engineering otherwise known as PG&E..... OH GOD '0_o.
Come on dude! Not all geared steam locomotives are "Shays" Find the idiot that designed thing thing and name it after him. Please don't drag the good name of Ephram Shay through the mud on this thing
YOU'RE WRONG THERE ACTUALLY USING PRESSURE TO CRATE TO CREATE STEAM BUT A SIMPLER METHOD PROBABLY WOULD HAVE BEEN TO SQUEEZE WATER THROUGH A TINY HOLE UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE FROM A PUMP
One possible cause of the whole massive driver thing of early engines, particularly Cramptons, various Broad Gauge engines and other older express locos (e.g.Singles), was due to limitations in available lubrucants which weren't much good with high speed motion, so using a bigger driver meant that the motion didn't have to oscillate as fast for a higher speed.
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED PSI?!?!? That is... *insanity*. The highest pressure non-nuclear steam plants the US Navy ever tried were 1200 psi, and they proved so troublesome that the last generation of USN steam machinery reverted to the old wartime standard 600 psi (before the gas turbine took over). And no, the nuclear machinery didn't go higher, either--in fact, the nuclear plants use saturated (not superheated) steam at a lower pressure than the 600 psi oil-fired plants did.
Apparently, on the 1200 psi ships, the standard procedure for searching for a steam leak was to take a broom handle and wave it through the air near the suspected leaking pipe, making sure to not pass through any area that you haven't waved the broom handle through first. When the handle is suddenly cut in half by something you can't see, you've found the leak.
The concept of the Flaman Boiler is not too dissimilar to the concept of a Babcock and Wilcox M-Type marine steam boiler, with a lower water chest and water tubes feeding into an upper steam chest such as was used in U.S. Navy Ships.
Thank you! I was just gonna ask wasn't something similar used in marine applications!
Most marine boilers are three-drum designs, though, with two watertube furnaces feeding a single steam chest...
Thanks,I thought it looked familiar.
Ok, say it with me kids
A Shay built by Baldwin Locomotive Works is illegal
Ironic, because Baldwin later bought Lima, the primary builder of Shay-type locomotives.
Lima actually build Shay's after the original shay locomotive patient expired until Lima locomotive works was absorbed by Baldwin
I think these might be my favourite videos, along with "Best Trains".
The douglas self site certainly has a lot of interesting bits of history on it! The baldwin shay is godawful- congrats, you took an engine renowned for being hard to maintain, and then added more gears and made them harder to access.
What is really interesting about gauges?
The seven foot gauge was proven to be more stable than the current 4’8” gauge.
It would have allowed a whole lot more to be moved these days.
I do believe that crossties would have posed a problem, though.
It would be really interesting to see into what Brunels gauge could have evolved.
The question would be if it would have lead into a wider loading gauge in the UK?
Crossties could have been solved and I think that this specific argument is sometime blown out of proportions.
But I absolutly see the necessity for a unified track gauge accross a country, and Brunel simply was to late to the game.
Best example is imho Australia, a country and continent that should be teeming with railways but whoes development was
hinderet by the usage of several different gauges and incompability.
Thank you for doing the Pearson. It was just that they were a little rough riding (no, you don't say!) and they were a bit complicated, everything else was.... actually, not far off excellent. But two small problems equal one big one, and thus they were rebuilt.
I was wondering did you do a video on the Lombard Steam Log Hauler they were basically saddle tank locomotives used for logging and were built with tracks and had a guy on the front to steer the engine and they could swap out the skis for wheels as well turns out alot of them are still around rotting away in a forest on display or running in a museum theres also this other type of locomotive that was made to run on ice and was pretty much the same idea more or less but was powered by a single drive wheel
What happened to that one
@@fanofeverything30465 the one that travelled on ice and snow im not sure but the Lombard log hauler is still around
@@oddobscurecollectables9529 That's good to know
#1 is literally a steam engine that you need to jump start.
Very interesting video I never have seen any of these locomotives especially the Baldwin Shay.
there is some shays on the cass scenic railroad and still running
Big driving wheels are good for speed. The Stirling Single (8' 1" drivers) could do 85 mph.
Wrt the HO2: I mean, you wouldn't need another loco per se, just a stationary boiler. But still. Leave that kind of thing to fireless locomotives, where it's actually practical and makes things _simpler_
Fowler's Ghost would fit well in this category, although IIRC you already mentioned it elsewhere (in "Worst trains" I believe).
In fairness, pretty much every engine terminal and shop already would have had its own stationary steam supply--remember, just about *everything* was steam-powered at the time, and you could greatly speed up the process of firing up a cold locomotive by injecting a good shot of shop steam into the boiler to get some pressure up and pre-warm it.
Now, if you had it break down and had to park it out on the line in cold shutdown, well...
That's all they're good for though
13:50 then the same company after WW2 build rollercoaster. And become one of the best rollercoaster manufacture in the world, at that time. Rollercoaster he made albeit not a record monster chaser nor super innovative, were insanely smooth with variable-diameter track bending (instead of fixed-diameter like other manufacture), heck, it even stood the time against more modern counterpart
But, Schwarzkopf weren't a good businesses man. And then the company bankrupted, he tried to revived it again and then Mindbender Accident happen due to first bankrupt neglect, failing his attempt forever.
The H02's system is crazy complex and keeping it stable sounds like a nightmare. Which makes creating a steam locomotive system that CANNOT BE COLD-STARTED without 'shore power' all the more baffling.
Also, that thing has more weird piping outside than your average Steampunk setting.
Yes more experimental and strange engines finally getting attention :)
While you touched Austro-Hungarian Empire: please check out the "Landwehrbahn" gas-electric train, engineered by Porsche, for the military and used in ww1 in east Transilvania - Tihuta Pass. Normal gauge but absurdly tight radiudes and steep gradients.
on that pearson engine, i have to say they were successful. 16 years in those very early day is probably a very good run considering how fast technology was advancing, but more importantly, they were used in their various configurations until the rail network they were on was scrapped, not because they didn't want the engines anymore.
on the high pressure locomotive, i don't think the need to use an outside steam source was seen as an issue at the time. the big boy gets steam from a plant in the facility to help get started. and period videos from british railways on youtube show them hooking locomotives up to other locomotives to help them get going faster than they would otherwise be able to.
lawrie just did a video with a full sized locomotive and it looks like it took them many hours to get enough heat to be able to move under its own power.
Baldwin could probably have just mounted the cylinders on the left side of the boiler to avoid the Shay's patent.
Hey Darkness love the railroad content. Just wondering if you came across the BC rail electric locomotives used on the tumbler ridge sub? They are gf6c built by mlw and 7 were produced and bought by bc rail. Only one made it in preservation number 6001 the prototype model and its sitting at the Prince George forestry and railroad museum.
Those Pearson engines were actually very good for their day, as someone else remarks they had quite a long useful life by the standards of the time, and in view of the road they were required to work over. Whiteball Hill is no pimple; its steep, even for today's engines. The flangeless driving wheels were to allow a little more lateral motion on curves; the bogies had only limited play, revolving around a fixed centre pin. Not as uncommon as it sounds - the big Gooch 4-2-2 broad gauge singles were equally rigid, and had similar wheels. Single-driver engines were popular for fast running because, workshops being more primitive back then, it was believed that coupled driving wheels introduced problems of binding when axle and crank pin centres weren't quite aligned - as with the Fink engines.
Interestingly William Dean, also of the GWR produced a standard gauge locomotive similar to the Pearson design, again a tank, which allegedly was so total a flop it was withdrawn, broken up and the sole photographic plate of it destroyed to deny it ever existed! It had flangeless drivers, with Dean's patent 'centre-less' bogies either end, and kept derailing so often that it (thankfully) never even left the yards. It was totally unsafe, and unconsciously designed to fail.
When an entire power grid goes down, restarting it is called a Black Start and is extremely difficult because you have to put power in BEFORE you can get power out, quite similar to how you had to put steam into the HO2 before you could start it. Power engineers go to great lengths to minimize Black Starts because of the difficulty involved and it just blows my mind the Germans made the CONSCIOUS DECISION to require Black Start techniques to start this thing.
I imagine the flaman boiler would have have had issues of limitations of overall heating surface ratio and heat reservoir. Superheater elements became frequently used around 1900 and would have made the benefits flaman boiler obsolete.
my favorite was the wheels up on wheels locomotive it was a early attempt at a shay loco
Who else loves it when this guy goes full blown Chungus mode? 🤣
question: would you accept ideas for train designs from your fans, provided that there was a coherent design and reference picture?
On the shay, one thought with the cylinders under the firebox .. super heated steam = more power
Hi Really enjoyed your video and thank you for the clip on C14 ,just a gentle observation the C14's wasn't converted to S14 which 2 was built after the 10 C14.as an improvement .Unfortunately these wasn't fit for purpose either 😢.Also to agree which another comment ,Yes I would love to see one rebuilt for a light preserved railway 😊.
Re: Pearson.... dem wheels tho! ❤
TH-cam: "25 minutes ago: history in the dark uploaded this video"
The actual video: five days ago
This happens so much to me aswell
I feel like the H02 could've worked better if it had like, a secondary tender of sorts that was just an auxiliary boiler, then again that'd probably require an extra crew or something
Interesting comparison to No 1 here (HO2 1001 ) the German Navy had very real problems with their high-pressure boilers used in their battleships and other warships in both the 1st and 2nd world wars. Now the problems in the first world war could mostly be written off as really lousy coal supplies. But in the second world war, the problems could be assigned to trying to over-engineer things, which sounds just like 1001 here. The British did all right throughout the wars just pretty much by sticking to older less efficient designs. IMHO the USN really solved the problem smashingly, the USN simply went to the boiler and turbine designs that had been used for years in onshore powerplants. The USN ships were able to steam for months at a time in the Pacific with comparatively little or no trouble with their power plants. The USN had a certain amount of difficulty with propellor vibrations but that is still an issue in high-power ships to this day.
The reason for the extremely large wheel was the lack of a cutof valve. A lot of early steamers, specially the one that where a bit faster had very large wheels. There was no point in having more than one because the engine wouldn't be able to start it anyway.
So if I'm underling you correctly about the first locomotive then Emily from thomas and friends was at one before being rebuilt into a tender engine was that weird looking tank engine?
The EMD SD60MAC. Those engines were just a little bit too ahead of their time.
The ATSF "Beep." Literally a combo of a Baldwin VO-1000 and an EMD GP7.
Another mad science experiment by Baldwin was the 0-2-0 for the Bradford & Foster Brook (in the 1870s I think)
what's its name`?
I actually have an idea for making the Baldwin shay to actually ya know be serviceable
So shays are designed to be easily serviced
Right
Ok so here's my idea
Leave the pistons where they are but make it like the big boy where it works like a movable blast pipe move them further away from the boiler and make it so it can be unlocked with a standardized key and slid out completely for easy service replacement
The last one...
If there was a primary steam generator, it would've been easier to start it from cold. I bet that was a nightmare to maintain. Better to stick with the proven design in that case.
So the H02 effectively had to be jump started every time.
Imagine trying to sell a truck or a bus with that 'feature'.
Ah, German engineering, it we get X performance out of this simple machine, if we add this complex component we will get X+10% performance, and if we add this even more complicated component we will get X+10%+3% performance, and if we add this mind boggling complexity, and extremely fragile component, we will get X+10%+3%+0.5% performance, and our failure rate will only be 50%.
As a german that made me shuckle, true.
16:10 to get steam from outside is not really that strange. In this era pretty much all steam locos was started with outside air, cutting down the heat up time wirh about a hour.
Typically the depot had a smal boiler running 24/7 with a decent steam reservare to heat up a number of steamers.
Look at this beast, look at this madness!😂 Very cool looking though.
Maybe the single driver loco was the original and they became the Sterling loco or a predecessor to the Sterling?
12:31 It was worse in every way to avoid copyright
So basically the Garten of Banban of locomotives?
Hi, have you done the nuclear train yet? If you haven't please do. Thank you
would love to see a franco-crosti-flamman boiler hybrid for some triple stacked fun lmfao
Just as an extra help, could you make sure all the engines you address are dated? Because I do not know when the German engine was made or the Baldwin Shay.
I did the middle suggestion bar so this is what came form it
The first time you were able and you had to do something about the situation you had in your mind and I think that was the first thing you said
The Baldwin Shay looks like a mad Steampunk experiment.
Person: "Baldwin, build me a tank engine!"
Baldwin: "You got it!"
B: *builds Shay model*
P: "what.....is this......?!"
B: "you said to build you a tank!"
P: "A TANK ENGINE!"
B: "Ooooooooh.....we f**ked up....."
Darkness the curse: 12:56 Ah yes bear witness to this PRECISION GERMAN ENGINEERING!!!
Me: Ah yes Precision German Engineering otherwise known as PG&E.....
OH GOD '0_o.
The first one is the penny farthing of steam engines.
The fifth entry looks like a laughable prototype for the sterling single
Emily: "I was supposed to look like THAT?!"
Hmm it is called sterling class
To be fair these machines were hand design no computer modeling
I don’t Fink you know what you’re doing .
PRECISION GERMAN ENGINEERING
The Pearson looks like Emily from Thomas And Friends
The Omega single
Guh-sel-schaft
Come on dude! Not all geared steam locomotives are "Shays" Find the idiot that designed thing thing and name it after him. Please don't drag the good name of Ephram Shay through the mud on this thing
YOU'RE WRONG THERE ACTUALLY USING PRESSURE TO CRATE TO CREATE STEAM
BUT A SIMPLER METHOD PROBABLY WOULD HAVE BEEN TO SQUEEZE WATER THROUGH A TINY HOLE UNDER EXTREME PRESSURE FROM A PUMP
I think you "Mist" the point...
To bad they didn't have video way back then