Re: (erielack) Triplex Musings

[William Shultz <wshultz1_@_twcny.rr.com>]

Exactly Rich,

That's why I am wondering if the appliances mentioned which all 
contribute to thermal efficiency directly or indirectly would have made 
a difference. Certainly firebox size needed to be adequate to support 
the boiler. Although the boilers were "big" for their day they weren't 
so large compared to locomotives built just a few years later.

These were all saturated steam, relatively low pressure beasts, what if 
they had the advantage of these appliances, what would the result have 
been? Obviously we'll never know, but it is curious and interesting to 
ponder.

It still wouldn't have circumvented another problem with the triplex 
design and that was decreasing weight on drivers for the engine located 
under the tender. As coal and water were consumed, the weight on drivers 
decreased which of course resulted in a lower fact of adhesion. With the 
short distances they traveled and the amount of coal and water consumed 
before being able to replenish it was it actually a problem? I don't 
have an answer for that one.

Regards,

Will Shultz

Rich Young wrote:
> 
> 
> The one common problem that ALL of those experimental
> locomotives (including the experimental  Baldwin
> 2-6-8-0) had was that they were under boilered and
> drasticlly under fireboxed.  Most of those locomotives
> were a marriage of usually two consol boilers. so even
> in the base thinking of having a consol with an
> optimum sized firebox for the boiler now you have
> doubled the size of the vessal without any increase to
> the size of the firebox. And to add to this was the
> fact that you did not have the technology to acurately
> measure true performance. By estimates the front of
> those boilers were barely hot enough to convert water
> to steam let alone create enough capacity to keep up
> with demand. There was an interesting article written
> ( late forties) in Railway Mechanical Engineer about
> this that while the base thinking was correct the lack
> of thermal dynamics needed in it's conception was what
> was lacking.  Basicll they needed a higher boiler HP
> to provide enough steam to keep up with the demand 
> and the appliances to help the efficiency.
> 
> Rich Young
> 

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