Steam locomotive water supply--purity control?
hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com
prevent (1) foaming, (2) scale formation, and (3) corrosion within the
boiler and steam lines. These could reduce engine efficiency and
boiler lifespan. Sometimes the water contains agents to reduce scaling
or create a sludge that is removable by backwashing.
In a stationary engine plant (like an electric power house) the water
could be pre-treated before use. But was that practical in steam
engines, where water towers and track plans were located at frequent
intervals along the lines?
Would anyone know accurately if and how water supply was handled for
steam locomotives?
Thanks.
[public replies please]
Candide
<hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in message
news:1137369297....@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Do not know how "accurate" my sources are (mainly books on steam
locomotives and travel in the age of such), but all state pretty much
the same thing; bag(s) of water conditioner were poured into the
locomotive tank after filling with water. Calgon? White King?
Phosphates? One does not know, but it makes sense as the cheapest and
easiest way to deal with hard water minerals. The cost of mechanical
water softeners at each water tower even then would have been very dear,
not to mention some locos filled on the fly through watering pans.
Candide
John McCoy
@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
> Would anyone know accurately if and how water supply was handled for
> steam locomotives?
Bigger railroads had water treatment plants at major yards, etc,
(unless the city water was sufficiently pure). Otherwise, the
water treatment was either dumped in the tender after filling,
or siphoned in thru the injector. Obviously pre-treatment was
better, when possible, since the undesirable matter could be
removed, rather than just encouraged to precipitate down to the
mudring.
John
Paul Hirose
Water Treatment Service and the Nalco company. Dearborn has a photo
and diagram of one of their installations in a yard of some
unidentified railroad. Water from a city main travels via 6" pipe to a
16' x 20' treatment shed, then to an overhead wood tank. Whatever is
in that shed uses a fair amount of electricity: the diagram says
"power supply 440 V. 3 ph., 60 cy."
The Nalco ad mentions wayside treatment systems, appropriate "where
installations of complete softening plants are considered not to be
warranted." Wayside treatment feeds the chemicals by "small automatic
chemical proportioning pumps, or by ball feeders of the by-pass type."
There's a photo of one of the latter; it looks as though the device is
actuated by water flow alone.
Nalco sold a portable "Nalcometer" which electrically measured the
amount of disolved solids in the boiler water, and the "Phototester"
for analyzing water impurities "on the basis of light absorption
through the sample being tested".
--
Paul Hirose <jvcmz...@earINVALIDthlink.net>
To reply by email remove INVALID
hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com
Paul Hirose wrote:
> My 1941 Locomotive Cyclopedia contains multi-page ads by the Dearborn
> Water Treatment Service and the Nalco company. Dearborn has a photo
> and diagram of one of their installations in a yard of some
> unidentified railroad. Water from a city main travels via 6" pipe to a
> 16' x 20' treatment shed, then to an overhead wood tank. Whatever is
> in that shed uses a fair amount of electricity: the diagram says
> "power supply 440 V. 3 ph., 60 cy."
Interesting. It illustrates the tradeoffs RR mgmt had to make between
treatment and maintenance. Sooner or late the boiler must be
intensively cleaning or even disassembled, so spending a lot of money
to delay the inevitable may not be cost effective. Further, it's one
thing to have treatment in a central yard where trains start their
trip, and another in wayside water plugs and track pans.
We can see one of the reasons steam locomotives were so labor intensive
and diesels were so much more attractive. We also forget how much
science and engineering was involved, even back in the 1930s, to
maximize the available efficiency.
The literature I read from the National Tube Company was interesting.
I would of thought a steel tube is a steel tube, but they come in many
different service grades and types of steel. The biggest differential
is seamless and welded; seamless was for boilers. They had charts of
various sizes and handling capabilities.
Like other old industries, this one is probably fading as well. I see
steam used less in industry. My office building uses heat pumps, years
ago it would've been heated by steam. Ships now use diesel engines
instead of steam engines. Electric power plants, either fossile fuel
or nuclear, still use extensive tubing.
John McCoy
@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
> Interesting. It illustrates the tradeoffs RR mgmt had to make between
> treatment and maintenance. Sooner or late the boiler must be
> intensively cleaning or even disassembled, so spending a lot of money
> to delay the inevitable may not be cost effective.
Well, every 30 days it has to be washed out, of course. And at
least every 4 years the tubes have to be taken out and the inside
of the boiler cleaned and inspected.
OTOH, an engine that was foaming badly won't make it's rated
power output, possibly stranding a train on the line, and if
the crew works thru it they may pull enough water thru the
cylinders to wash out all the lubrication, leading to a trip
to the backshop for cylinder boring and lining. So not attending
to water treatment could be very cost ineffective :-)
> Like other old industries, this one is probably fading as well. I see
> steam used less in industry. My office building uses heat pumps, years
> ago it would've been heated by steam. Ships now use diesel engines
> instead of steam engines. Electric power plants, either fossile fuel
> or nuclear, still use extensive tubing.
Other things than steam flow thru tubes. The chemical and
petroleum industries use steel tubing by the miles, altho I'll
grant that most of that is not under substantial pressures.
John
bras...@despammed.com
Hirose" <jvcmz...@earINVALIDthlink.net> wrote:
> unidentified railroad. Water from a city main travels via 6" pipe to a
> 16' x 20' treatment shed, then to an overhead wood tank. Whatever is
> in that shed uses a fair amount of electricity: the diagram says
> "power supply 440 V. 3 ph., 60 cy."
That just means you can run it off of the same power supply as the water
pump and the anti-freeze heating system for the tank, without a
transformer. We would need to know the amps or watts of the system as
well. Where I work it isn't that unusual to find indicator lights that
run directly off of 480 volt lines - with only about 0.6 watts of power
being consumed by each.
--
-Glennl
e-mail hint: add 1 to quantity after brasil.
George Conklin
<hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote in message
news:1137621427....@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Paul Hirose wrote:
> > My 1941 Locomotive Cyclopedia contains multi-page ads by the Dearborn
> > Water Treatment Service and the Nalco company. Dearborn has a photo
> > and diagram of one of their installations in a yard of some
> > unidentified railroad. Water from a city main travels via 6" pipe to a
> > 16' x 20' treatment shed, then to an overhead wood tank. Whatever is
> > in that shed uses a fair amount of electricity: the diagram says
> > "power supply 440 V. 3 ph., 60 cy."
>
> Interesting. It illustrates the tradeoffs RR mgmt had to make between
> treatment and maintenance. Sooner or late the boiler must be
> intensively cleaning or even disassembled, so spending a lot of money
> to delay the inevitable may not be cost effective. Further, it's one
> thing to have treatment in a central yard where trains start their
> trip, and another in wayside water plugs and track pans.
>
> We can see one of the reasons steam locomotives were so labor intensive
> and diesels were so much more attractive. We also forget how much
> science and engineering was involved, even back in the 1930s, to
> maximize the available efficiency.
>
According to a history of the O&W RR in NY, which hoped to recover from
its bankrupt state by shifting early to diesels, the projected savings over
steam engines was only 19%.
hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com
John McCoy wrote:
> Other things than steam flow thru tubes. The chemical and
> petroleum industries use steel tubing by the miles, altho I'll
> grant that most of that is not under substantial pressures.
According to a retired US Steel/National Tube employee, most of the
tube plants have been closed.
The U.S. steel industry suffered tremendous contraction in the last few
decades. Most of the old line steel makers (Bethleham, Jones &
Laughlin, etc) went bankrupt or merged out of existence. U.S. Steel
Corp, one of the original pioneering "big corporations" surived, but is
much smaller than in its glory days. There still of course is a demand
for steel but much less than before. In the last year or so, demand
has gone up as a result of industrialization work in China and India.
It's interesting that the news media, both general and business, used
to give "hard dirty" industries so much more coverage than today. A
steel company, gravel works, etc., would have full page ads in Newsweek
and Time. Business Week would have feature articles about industrial
plant expansion and talk about the nitty-gritty aspects. The fires of
the steel industry (literally) used to be seen as a sign of a nation's
prosperity and economic might.Today everything is about finance and
computers. Even coverage about industrial organizations is how they
use computers.
Annual Reports of large corporations used to have color pictures of
their company in action. The phone and electric companies would have
lineman and switching stations. Today's reports offer fewer photos and
stories and mostly numbers and financial issues, maybe a reproduction
of some consumer ads. Operational issues are described in MBA terms.
No more dramatic photos against a deep rich sky of their heavy gear.
Paul Hirose
> Dearborn Water Treatment Service and the Nalco company.
Based on a Web search, I think both companies still exist. Can't tell
for sure though. Nalco has no corporate history on their site and the
Betz Dearborn site is down today.
Getting back to 1941 Cyclopedia, one company advertises its "Signal
Foam-Meter" to warn of foam or high water in the boiler. Contact with
a lower electrode lights a yellow lamp and opens an automatic blowoff
valve. If the level rises to contact an upper electrode, a red lamp
comes on to warn the engineman to augment this with manual blowoff.
I've seen one of these indicators in a cab photo of a Southern Pacific
4-8-4. (I read it didn't work too well.)
An option with this system is a trough inside the boiler barrel to
catch foam and scum. The top of the trough is a little above the
normal water level. The sensing electrodes project into the trough and
trigger a blowoff to empty it of accumulated foam or excess water.
Many railroads added treatment chemicals directly to the tender tank.
I remember reading one engineer saying he used to attach his soiled
overalls to a wire and drop them into the tank. The detergent action
of the boiler compound got them spanking clean!
John McCoy
$Hd4....@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net:
> Many railroads added treatment chemicals directly to the tender tank.
> I remember reading one engineer saying he used to attach his soiled
> overalls to a wire and drop them into the tank. The detergent action
> of the boiler compound got them spanking clean!
I suspect that led to fairly short-lived overalls. Boiler
compound is fairly caustic, we used to try to avoid getting
it on our skin. Altho once in the tender, it'd be pretty
dilute.
John
hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com
John McCoy wrote:
> > Many railroads added treatment chemicals directly to the tender tank.
> > I remember reading one engineer saying he used to attach his soiled
> > overalls to a wire and drop them into the tank. The detergent action
> > of the boiler compound got them spanking clean!
>
> I suspect that led to fairly short-lived overalls. Boiler
> compound is fairly caustic, we used to try to avoid getting
> it on our skin. Altho once in the tender, it'd be pretty
> dilute.
IIRC, one reference to that practice was in the youth fiction book
"Superpower", a story about the construction of new Berkshire class
locomotive at Lima in the 1920s, as seen through the eyes of a young
man starting out work at the company. It said a boiler man would clean
overalls for the others in that solution.
I don't know how accurate that book was as to real life in a locomotive
works in that era. Everything was painted in a very positive tone--all
the workers had extremely strong work ethics, loved what they did and
built, and were very highly skilled. I suspect it wasn't quite as
pleasant as that book painted. I have no idea how technically accurate
the book was.