kind of idle
on 02/18/2010 at 09:54 AM
Yea but Drew,
I don’t want quiet. I wanna hear the rumble and roar and the steam and the WOO-WOO of the whistle. The pretty blue engine looks good, no doubts about it. But I really love that Tornado and some of the really very old fashioned engines. You know, like from, the late 1800s. Not talking safety or comfort now. Just looks.
"Economical” varies with your needs. I’m pretty sure the DoT “hours of service” regs apply the same to train engineers as they do to truckers, but for that or any other reason, when the train stops, 600 trucks worth of cargo all stops with it. That’s not a big deal with things like a car shipment to Dallas or something, cos even if they’re all the same brand a city that size has enough dealerships that space for that much inventory in one lump is something already planned for, as is fluctuations caused by factors such as the above.
A lot of freight today, and nearly all perishables, are “JIT”, meaning “just in time”. Container freight is really nice for the versatility it gives (ship-train-truck), but JIT freight is a market they can’t really make a dent in, as arrival has to be predictable very nearly down to the hour. Do you know which of those 600 containers is yours, and when it will come off the train and be put on a truck to you? Hmmm....
Then again, customers wanting JIT freight hardly ever want more than a single truckload of anything, so perhaps their markets don’t really overlap at all.Regardless, several areas of the economy have found the savings on warehousing and inventory from JIT trucking “more economical” than the ability to get incredible volume cheaply.
There are pros and cons to all solutions Grumpy. And I have no idea about the DoT hours of service regs for engineers. Obviously such limits don’t apply to city bus drivers, as I posted about last week. And perhaps the trains stop for a moment to pick up fresh engineers. But they seem to keep going; I can hear them coming through the Jugtown mountain tunnels to the west of me all night long.
There is no reason that freight has to be huge to go by train. Just one of those containers could be yours, brought in from China on a boat, onto train on the west coast, chugged across America to a city or depot near you on the main lines, then trucked to your store or factory.
If the tax laws were changed a bit to give inventory space a break, JIT would die overnight.
Maybe, maybe not, I won’t claim to know. And please understand, I realize there are pros and cons to everything and I’m not dissing trains or container freight. Lowering warehousing costs involves both cutting down on the space you need (rent, utils, etc.) and cutting down on the employees you need to keep track of it, and labor is the largest of nearly any business owner’s bills. A when a train stops “for a moment” it spends a long time slowing down and a long time speeding up again. You’d be surprised how quickly and how much that cuts into your “___ miles today” figure. Truckers have the same problem for the same reasons, although I doubt to as great a degree simply because of the difference in mass involved.
The idea behind JIT is to just barely keep up with demand. So for example the pencil plant gets a week’s worth of erasers every week and never has to store more than a week and a half’s worth, rather than a month’s worth every month. Over time that adds up, especially when you get to large retail chains and seasonal items. If turkeys didn’t sell as well as you expected this year, whether you ordered week by week instead of the whole season’s worth can make a major difference in your warehousing needs for weeks or months afterwards, especially if you overstocked for several stores of a chain serving a major city. But in that kind of situation, 24 hours difference in delivery date can make the difference in whether or not you are out of stock, too.
So as I said, yes they each have their place, serving largely incompatible needs. Non-perishables and things that can be bought in mass volume tend to go by container and/or train. Perishables and “consumables”, things where matching the flow of market demand is important, JIT works well for.
I do believe the Tornado is old school steam, just newly made, that alone is great but if steam had the development of internal combustion it probably would be better! steam is great when pulling away, gets less efficient as it gets faster. Some time back a brit with a name like Penham sold kit cars with a patented new steam power plant, people were wary so he adapted it to take an Alfa Romeo engine, even using the sprint veloce version power was down and economy up, make you think?
Steam would be perfect for city driving as it would use no fuel when waiting and give good instant acceleration from standstil.Posted by Chris Edwards
02/18/2010 at 08:48 PM
I think there used to be a neat old car called the Stanley Steamer. And it could go very fast. But you had to carry quite a bit of water and coal with you, and it took half an hour to warm up in the morning.
Steam pressures in engines and generators can be very high, with temps much higher than the boiling point of water. Superheated steam tends to corrode pipes very quickly. It’s strange stuff and can be very dangerous. Most locomotives used superheated steam from 1900 onwards. So the only real advances that could be made would be a stronger boiler that could work at somewhat higher pressure, and some kind of turbine to translate steam pressure into rotational motion. But you’d need a hell of a gear set to multiply the high revs of a turbine into the low rpm torque needed to get a train moving.
Superheated steam tends to corrode pipes very quickly. It’s strange stuff and can be very dangerous.
When I was in the Navy back in the day, if there was a dry steam leak the boiler techs went looking for it by waving a broom in front of them. When the end of the broom falls off, there’s your leak.
Jay Leno owns 4 or 5 of them steamer Cars and has his own boiler mech to do nothing but help him keep the crazy things running. There is an episode of Cars on cable thats has him spainin all about why steam just wont work in the modern car compared to the efficiency of the ICE or even the Electric/ICE hybrids.
And yes, I sure someone has tried to invent a better steamer to refute that but so far its just eyewash for dreamers and luddites.Rich, steam has had little development for 100 years, our cars would look like magic to a 1950s mechanic. I am trying to find out about a steam car that was quick and econom ical that was sold in the Uk by a Aussy guy, for town work steam makes a lot of sense.
Posted by Chris Edwards
02/19/2010 at 07:48 PM
Chris, I spent a week digging up ways to possibly make steam work but the thing is it will require a dual fuel mechanism ( water plus heat source fuel like LPG) to heat the steam ( It dont boil on its own). No matter how its done, just the space for the tank/boiler makes it rather unpractical as an urban utility concept.Using LPG is just 2 big tanks a dumb guy has the chance to explode so I doubt that is gonna work from a safety point of view.
02/18/2010 at 01:25 PM
