Thursday - February 18, 2010
kind of idle
Not much posting from me the past few days. Nothing much is striking my interest. I’m once again both fed up and bored silly with politics: same old same old, and it’s never going to change.
The Mouse Count is now at 2. And it took me making exactly two trips down there in the morning for them to realize it was in their best interest ($$) to toss the dead mice themselves. Or at least check the traps and call me for a disposal if necessary. Both mice caught in the same trap in the same spot, half way up the steel shelving unit that the employees keep their snack food and coffee supplies on. Beats me how the mice get there to get caught in that one trap, as I’ve got traps on the floor all around and on each lower shelf as well. It could be that they come down from the suspended ceiling. Which means the trap that catches them is the first one in line. Whatever.
I’ve been learning a bit about locomotives and “tractive effort”. Tractive effort is the metric used to express the starting and pulling power of a locomotive. While steam engines from days gone by produced their power from high pressure steam acting on a big piston that moved large and intricate levers, modern diesel locomotives use motors. The engine is only there to run a generator, and electricity runs a motor that turns the wheels that pull the train. It’s quite amazing just how much more powerful a solution this is than the old way. For example, the brand new steam locomotive (did you know there was such a thing?) called the Tornado, built in the UK to modern specifications for £3million, has a tractive effort of 2700 metric horsepower, or 2000 KW, which is about 38,000 lb/ft of torque.
This steam locomotive is just a slightly improved version of a standard choo-choo from back in the day. It is not a giant engine, or even a very large one, but it is representative of a size of engine that was very common at the time. It is classified as a “4-6-2” because it has 4 wheels under the boiler, 6 driving wheels nearly 7 feet in diameter, and 2 wheels under the firebox in the back. The very largest, and rarest, articulated steam engines (double sized boilers, 2 sets of driving wheels, and a hinge in the middle), such as the 2-8-8-2 could manage 152,000 lb/ft; these monsters were essentially 2 very large locomotives welded together. They could haul a lot of freight, but not always very fast. The very largest articulated engine ever built, a 2-8-8-8-4 Triplex could produce perhaps 199,000 lb/ft of tractive effort, but it could barely go 5 mph. A typical large American steam engine could produce 70,000-90,000 lb/ft.
These are big numbers. A whole lot of power. Enough to pull a train. Enough to pull a string of passenger cars when the electric trains freeze up in England due to Global Warming. And while the steam engines had a certain charm, a powerful magnificence you could understand just by looking at, they pale in comparison to a modern diesel “electro-motive” engine. The latest General Electric Evolution turbo-diesel locomotive uses a 12 cylinder engine to produce 4400 horsepower which turns the generators that run the AC motors to both sets of 6 drive wheels, and provides 166,000 lb/ft of continuous tractive effort and up to 198,000 lb/ft of starting tractive effort. Which makes today’s standard diesel locomotive just as powerful as the most potent steam behemoths of ages past, with far less maintenance, much higher speed, and orders of magnitude less pollution. It’s simply a better way. Night and day better. Oh, and that Evolution 12 cylinder engine not only makes as much power as the older 16 cylinder engine, it does it on less fuel and makes fewer emissions as well. And it’s quieter too. So it’s a better, better way.
For more on train physics, see this link.
So what can you do with engines like these? How about pull a line of freight cars 3 1/2 miles long? One super train, 9 engines I think, but it hauls the same load as 600 tractor-trailer trucks. One engineer at the controls. Possibly a fireman on board. One or two guys. In charge of 300 freight cars and 9 engines. 8 of those engines are run by remote control. Economical in the extreme!
Yes, containerized shipping has come to the railroads too. Those odd looking freight cars in the video are called intermodal double stack wells. “Intermodal” because they carry trucks on the train. Two shipping modes together. But they could just as easily be called “internodal”, because each “car” is actually several cars in one. Thus “nodes”. Each sub-car, or node, is a hollow steel frame that can carry two standard shipping containers stacked one on top of the other. The containers sit low in the car, down between the wheels, which keeps the center of gravity low, so they can go around corners faster. Unlike regular boxcars, which have a set of 4 wheels under each end, the intermodal’s wheel sets are shared between the cars or nodes; this cuts the rolling resistance down 40% and provides a smoother ride for the cargo. They are also called “multiple unit articulated double stack cars” since the shared wheel set has a hinge point for each car on it, thus the articulation. But I think “intermodal double stack wells” is just as long-winded a name, and even more train-tech-speak. Any railroad insider would know that those things are both articulated and double stackable. Not trying to confuse anyone even more, but the set of wheels under any train car are called “trucks”. So a tractor on trucks pulls a trail of cars with tractor truck trailers on them, over the tracks. That’s a train today. And the tracks themselves, made of rails and ties, are called a roadbed. The ties, those great baulks of timber that the rails are nailed to,"sleep" in the stony bed of the road, the rocky road, so they are also called “sleepers”. Got it?
Trains have their own vocabulary. Look up “switch frog” and “outside slip”.
The internodal double stack wells come in several sizes and configurations, but mostly they are built as 3 and 5 node units. The only downside to their use is the internodal part: the extended wheelbase of the shared wheel sets makes for a larger turning radius, which limits their use to single run tracks without tight curves, and to double run tracks where the second set of tracks isn’t too close. But they save so much money that my guess is that the old tracks will be moved and modified to allow their use. It’s a better way, and that’s what drives the free market.
All aboooooard!
Posted by Drew458
on 02/18/2010 at 09:54 AM
Filed Under: • Daily Life • planes, trains, tanks, ships, machines, automobiles •
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