They don't look like this:
And they don't sound like this, or this.
I'm not a complete troglodyte. Steam power is very labor intensive. It took several hours to go from a cold-iron state to ready to roll. Railroads needed roundhouses to store and maintain them, hostlers to get them ready for the road and to oversee shutting them down. It took two men to run them, an engineer and a fireman. They needed frequent stops for water or the railroads had to install track pans. If the railroad used coal-burning locomotives, they needed huge coaling towers to fuel them and ash pits to dump the ash from the coal. The railroads had to use a lot of trains to supply themselves with coal, maybe 20% of the freight traffic was to supply the railroads with coal. If the grade was such that an extra locomotive was needed to help haul the train over a mountain, that locomotive needed its own crew.
Diesels take one engineer to run them. If two or three or four diesel units are needed to pull a train, they just hook them together and one engineer runs them. They don't need coal or water, just a tankful of diesel fuel and they can run for long distances. Diesels are very efficient, but they are also extremely boring. The romance of railroading ended when the fires were pulled on the steam locomotive in the 1950s. There is nothing to see and they look and smell like trucks. Nobody would have bought the book "Thomas the Diesel Engine."
Diesels are boring.
3 comments:
Diesels are just more efficient. It would be great if we could get Congress to rebuild a sensible rail system. It would cut down on oil consumption, reduce vehicle traffic on intercity runs, and bring back the club car!
Maglev, of course, not coal.
I spent some time in your archives awhile back and saw this.
I was pretty impressed with your knowledge of old trains.
I really liked the one about how they scooped up water from trays in between the tracks and how much work they put into some of those systems you mentioned.
I live right next to the tracks and hear them fuckers all night long with their horns,then I go to work 20 miles away and the shop is right next to a rail road yard so I get to listen to 'em there too!
Lurch, I think the day is coming when we are going to regret the post-WW2 destruction of much of the rail network. I know the diesels are more efficient; supposedly back in the early `60s, the Brits calculated that steam cost 4 times as much to run, and that was when the Brits were running their steam engines into the ground.
Busted, the track pans were fascinating. The New York Central did a lot with them on their main line to Chicago.
Post a Comment