NEW steam locomotive takes to the rails

[Brianetta]

Beardie, the Wardale 5AT design is an oil-fired reciprocating steam engine. It's based on a Standard 5 wheelbase (2-6-0), to make certification simpler, but aside from that is supposed to be pretty much a new thing. The cab is to be quiet and comfortable, and it is less reliant on watering facilities than older designs. It looks recognisably like a steam engine, but that's completely intentional: Wardale intends the look of the thing to be one of it attractions to passengers.

http://www.5at.co.uk/

If you want the 5AT right now, play Pikka's UK Renewal Set. It's not cheap to run, but it's pretty cool.

[Beardie]

Beardie, the Wardale 5AT design is an oil-fired reciprocating steam engine. It's based on a Standard 5 wheelbase (2-6-0), to make certification simpler, but aside from that is supposed to be pretty much a new thing. The cab is to be quiet and comfortable, and it is less reliant on watering facilities than older designs. It looks recognisably like a steam engine, but that's completely intentional: Wardale intends the look of the thing to be one of it attractions to passengers.

http://www.5at.co.uk/

If you want the 5AT right now, play Pikka's UK Renewal Set. It's not cheap to run, but it's pretty cool.

Yhea i do recongise the locomotive you have mentioned, so are they going to start builidng it for real (if so when), or is it being built as we speak.

[RFT]

As far as I know they're still at the design stage, seeking funding to speed the process up (And actually build the thing).

Sadly, not being able to trade on the usual nostalgia/history angle, they seem to be having difficulty getting that funding.

Were I to come into a very large wedge of cash, I'd be tempted to fund it - it's the ultimate steampunk toy, really.

[Beardie]

Were I to come into a very large wedge of cash, I'd be tempted to fund it - it's the ultimate steampunk toy, really.

Gone i will join you in that, course i doubt that i would be able to get it.

[ostlandr]

I think keeping the Stephensonian design is a case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Right now, diesels can only run on petroleum distillates or synthetic analogs (biodiesel, Fischer-Tropsch diesel, etc.).
A steam locomotive, OTOH, can be reconfigured to burn distillate, heavy oil, coal, wood, agricultural waste, etc.
Right now, wood pellets are cheaper per BTU than diesel. A third generation steam locomotive burning pellets would have near zero emissions, and use renewable, carbon-neutral fuel made from a waste product (sawdust). Or a Porta gas-producing firebox could burn cordwood or low-quality wood chips made from "trash" wood (Black Locust in particular has a high BTU value and literally grows like a weed) with low emissions using the same catalyst units found in wood stoves placed between the firebox and superheater flues.

Steam Turbine-Electrics combine the worst features of both steam and diesel locomotives.

[MHTransport]

That is so cool.

I've been thinking steam might be a good idea with newer efficient engines. And they could run on anything even coal gas, or garbage gas. Anything that can boil water, or even better sodium.

[Brianetta]

You want to boil sodium?

[MHTransport]

Just thinking aloud. You see a lot of talk about using molten salts with solar thermal power. And it has the advantage of being a closed system so no water stops.

Molten salt storage

A variety of fluids have been tested to transport the sun's heat, including water, air, oil, and sodium, but molten salt was selected as best. Molten salt is used in solar power tower systems because it is liquid at atmosphere pressure, it provides an efficient, low-cost medium in which to store thermal energy, its operating temperatures are compatible with today's high-pressure and high-temperature steam turbines, and it is non-flammable and nontoxic. In addition, molten salt is used in the chemical and metals industries as a heat-transport fluid, so experience with molten-salt systems exists for non-solar.

The molten salt is a mixture of 60 percent sodium nitrate and 40 percent potassium-nitrate, commonly called saltpeter. The salt melts at 430 F and is kept liquid at 550 F in an insulated cold storage tank. The uniqueness of this solar system is in de-coupling the collection of solar energy from producing power, electricity can be generated in periods of inclement weather or even at night using the stored thermal energy in the hot salt tank. Normally tanks are well insulated and can store energy for up to a week. As an example of their size, tanks that provide enough thermal storage to power a 100-megawatt turbine for four hours would be about 30 feet tall and 80 feet in diameter. Studies show that the two-tank storage system could have an annual efficiency of about 99 percent.

1

[Brianetta]

Well, that's a different thing to sodium, which is a reactive metal with a four figure boiling temperature...

[michael blunck]

[...]

I always wonder why the (younger) British are still using "feet", "Fahrenheit", "pound" or other unsuitable measuring units when decimalisation in currency already took place in 1971 and the Weights and Measures Act introduced decimal units for length, volume, weight, ... (that must be used for goods at the point of sale) already in 1985?

Needless to say that there´s a direct connection with still using oddities like inch and feet and the decline of British mechanical engineering, e.g. car makers, when the whole world was already using decimal tools and spare parts?

regards
Michael

[Kevo00]

The use of old measures has nothing to do with the relative decline of British mech engineering industry - more a combination of poor management, particularly in terms of commercial awareness, and an unwieldy structure of trade based unions meaning that it was hard to introduce new technology. Having said that the UK is still very good in manufacturing many high end low economy of scale products like sports cars and high end audio equipment, and our industry is still among the most productive in the world in terms of labour and capital inputs.

[ostlandr]

Not the whole world. Over here in the US, the government tried to switch the country to the Metric system back in the 1970s. This was extremely unpopular, and led to such oddities as (for example) a contract to rebuild a bridge being let in metric units (otherwise no federal money) even though the record plans for the bridge were in english units, all the fasteners were english and not metric, etc. The metric conversion was a complete failure over here, and we are finally going back to english units entirely. Well, almost- for example, milk comes in pints, quarts, half-gallons and gallons, but soda comes in 16 ounce, 24 ounce, 1 liter, 2 liter, and 3 liter bottles. For whatever reason, people simply prefer feet, inches, gallons, etc. I guess it's part of our culture- "Give him an inch, and he'll take a yard.", "walk a mile in his shoes", "six feet under", "the whole nine yards", "going a mile a minute", etc. Democracy implies the right to be wrong. The dog still wags the tail over here, at least for the moment.

"Here's good luck to the pint pot, good luck to the barley mow
Jolly good luck to the pint pot, good luck to the barley mow
here's the pint pot, half-a-pit, gill pot, half-a-gill, quarter-gill, nifferkin and a brown bowl
here's good luck, good luck to the barley mow (na, na, na) {here everybody takes a drink}

Here's good luck to the quart pot, good luck to the barley mow. . ."

BTW, now thanks to this, every mechanic in the US has to have two sets of tools- SAE and metric. It isn't unusual to find both metric and SAE fasteners on a US car built with domestic and imported parts.

[...]

I always wonder why the (younger) British are still using "feet", "Fahrenheit", "pound" or other unsuitable measuring units when decimalisation in currency already took place in 1971 and the Weights and Measures Act introduced decimal units for length, volume, weight, ... (that must be used for goods at the point of sale) already in 1985?

Needless to say that there´s a direct connection with still using oddities like inch and feet and the decline of British mechanical engineering, e.g. car makers, when the whole world was already using decimal tools and spare parts?

regards
Michael

[ostlandr]

Interesting. A container of molten salts could extend the range of a "fireless" type locomotive. Recharge it at night using cheap off-peak electricity to reheat the salts. Large installations of these could be used for "peak shaving", storing energy when demand is low and output is high, and releasing it when demand spikes or supply drops.

Back before the turn of the century, some steam-powered boats used something called a "Naptha engine." Naptha (a petroleum distillate) was boiled, and the vapor used to drive the pistons of the engine. A small portion of the naptha vapor exhaust was drawn off to feed the burner, and the rest was condensed for return to the boiler. Quite compact and efficient, if you don't mind sailing a floating bomb. A boiler leak or failure in a naptha engine is something best observed from a distance, by telescope, from inside a reinforced bunker. Can you say "BLEVE"?

This was back in primitive times, when New York City was scavenging methane from its sewer system, feeding it into engines originally desinged to power oilfield pumps from wellhead gas, and generating electricity.

Just thinking aloud. You see a lot of talk about using molten salts with solar thermal power. And it has the advantage of being a closed system so no water stops.

Molten salt storage

A variety of fluids have been tested to transport the sun's heat, including water, air, oil, and sodium, but molten salt was selected as best. Molten salt is used in solar power tower systems because it is liquid at atmosphere pressure, it provides an efficient, low-cost medium in which to store thermal energy, its operating temperatures are compatible with today's high-pressure and high-temperature steam turbines, and it is non-flammable and nontoxic. In addition, molten salt is used in the chemical and metals industries as a heat-transport fluid, so experience with molten-salt systems exists for non-solar.

The molten salt is a mixture of 60 percent sodium nitrate and 40 percent potassium-nitrate, commonly called saltpeter. The salt melts at 430 F and is kept liquid at 550 F in an insulated cold storage tank. The uniqueness of this solar system is in de-coupling the collection of solar energy from producing power, electricity can be generated in periods of inclement weather or even at night using the stored thermal energy in the hot salt tank. Normally tanks are well insulated and can store energy for up to a week. As an example of their size, tanks that provide enough thermal storage to power a 100-megawatt turbine for four hours would be about 30 feet tall and 80 feet in diameter. Studies show that the two-tank storage system could have an annual efficiency of about 99 percent.

1

[Brianetta]

I always wonder why the (younger) British are still using "feet", "Fahrenheit", "pound" or other unsuitable measuring units when decimalisation in currency already took place in 1971 and the Weights and Measures Act introduced decimal units for length, volume, weight, ... (that must be used for goods at the point of sale) already in 1985?

Not sure where you're seeing this sort of behaviour. People here in the UK in their 30s or younger were taught metric in school. The only instances of Imperial measures still in legal use in the UK are street signage (distances and speed limits) and measures of ale in public houses (but only ale). Youngsters will, of course, learn some imperial from older relatives and will hear the measures used in Hollywood's productions, but not to the exclusion of metric.

Personally, I can't estimate accurately in inches, feet or pounds. Temperatures in Fahrenheit are meaningless to me (and, I suspect, are objectively meaningless anyway). What I know of the Imperial "system" is that it's grossly inconsistent, with units being divided almost arbitrarily into 8, 12, 14, 16, 5280 or any other number that seemed handy at some point in the distant past.

5280, by the way, is feet in a mile. Utterly insane. It's still here because of the Americans.

[Ameecher]

I remember being taught at some point how to estimate imperial measures in metric measures. eg, 30cm = 1' and 2.2lbs = 1 kg. In small measures I use metric, ie, an A4 pages is 297mm long, not ~12" but I go 10 miles to college, not 16km. I also have a mass of 10st 7lbs, not 67kg but when baking a cake I use 400g of flour not 14oz.

It's ridiculous and the sort of thing buggers up space exploration vehicles. It's just what I've grown up with, at primary school you are taught small distances with a ruler and then you ask daddy how far it is to london and he'll tell you in miles and you ask mummy how heavy you are and she tells you that you are 4 stones. Madness. if you're gonna change the system, change it completely.

[RFT]

I don't think it really matters - there are some things where imperial's appropriate, some where metric feels better.

If you're running an engineering project then yes, Consistent units are important, but that's a project-management issue, nothing really to do with the way the general UK population swaps around between systems.

[michael blunck]

Not sure where you're seeing this sort of behaviour.

Here. In the cited Wikipedia article, and in tt-forums in general.

What I know of the Imperial "system" is that it's grossly inconsistent, with units being divided almost arbitrarily into 8, 12, 14, 16, 5280 or any other number that seemed handy at some point in the distant past.

I fully agree. That´s what I wanted to point out. Really scary that it seems to be still topical.

regards
Michael

[Brianetta]

Not sure where you're seeing this sort of behaviour.

Here. In the cited Wikipedia article, and in tt-forums in general.

Wikipedia gets edited by Americans. They use all those funny old measures way more than us Brits.

As for tt-forums, you have to expect this from any meeting place of train geeks. The railways are many decades old, and all the specifications, gauges, speeds and distances were in Imperial because it was still timely. Those specifications are still in use, because the same railways are still in use.

In other fields it's not so pronounced as this.

[athanasios]

Greece changed to metric long ago. When I was young some elderly people would still use old measures, but now they are gone and you don't hear those measures anymore. It needs some time to adapt, but it worths the effort. Euro was easier to adapt to. In the beggining I was converting every price in Drachmas. Now I am used and I rarely convert, unless it is for something very expensive, e.g. property value.

[Dave]

Needless to say that there´s a direct connection with still using oddities like inch and feet and the decline of British mechanical engineering, e.g. car makers, when the whole world was already using decimal tools and spare parts?

That's the best link, like, ever.

Seriously Michael, where did that one come from!? Not from the fact most of the industry was using millimetres in design long before the decline of the industry?

I would say that whilst generations of people who were brought up on imperial measurements exist, so does the use of imperial measurements.

That said, I don't think you'll fully cleanse Britain of imperial measurements for a long while yet. People work better in miles and miles per hour - but that's not ALL of the metric system so I think it's a bad judge of the peoples' relationship with said system.

I think as long as people know how to convert into metric it's okay... 2.54 centimetres in an inch, 30 centimetres in a foot, 90 centimetres in a yard, 0.6 kilometres in a mile, etc, etc, etc.

I don't have any trouble on the continent, for example, when I see a big circular sign outlined in red with 110 inside it - I know what it means...

I think you have to appreciate that the British stand for their traditional values more than anyone... It's just the way we're brought up... Seriously - next time you're in the UK, go into an old school British pub (not the sort of tourist bars in London) and ask for a "litre of beer". You'll either be set upon by old men questioning your roots and calling you every name under the sun (including the dreaded N word), or simply be laughed at in the face.

That's all there is to it really - you can criticise it, but it won't change the fact.