Royal Scot Locomotive

Painting of LMS Royal Scot 6161 "King's Own" by Murray Secretan

In service from 1930 to 1963. King's Own Royal Regiment Museum Lancaster has a page about this loco, as does Wikipedia.

3 cylinder compound locomotive steam engine
This is only image I could find of a three cylinder engine. Sad, very sad.

In my mind, steam locomotives have two cylinders, one on either side of the front of the engine. The piston in each cylinder drives the wheels on that side through a connecting rod. Turns out that some locos have three and even four cylinders. The Royal Scot has three as shown in the drawing above. This means that the straight axle between the second pair of driver wheels has been replaced with a crankshaft. The center cylinder is slightly elevated so that the connecting rod clears the axle of the first pair of driver wheels.

This post on on the Trains Forum page about three clinder engines offers some explanation:

The three cylinders are high on my list of unique designs that never took off over here in the US.

3-cylinder locos had a speacial exaust chuff as well, from the four chuffs per driver revolution on normal engines, 3 cylinders had six chuffs, making for some very interesting “stack talk”

While here in the US they never really took off, they became fairly common across Europe. Among some notable European 3 cylinders is the A4, thats right, the “Mallard” was 3 cylindered, along with her sisters who still operate today!

[3 tiny pictures that purport to show the center cylinder of 3 cylinder locomotive. They made no sense to me. Perhaps they would if you were familiar with these locomotives.]

The center cylinder yielded more power in a smaller locomotive, the #12 (pictures above) is an 0-8-0, but still produced more than 60,000 lbs tractive effort! Thats more than some 4-8-2’s and 4-6-4’s of the time period!

Unfortuantely, the 3rd cylinder was difficult to service, and the costs related to maintenance outweight those saved by fuel economy. These engines became known as “Roundhouse Queens” as they sometimes spent longer under repair than in operation.

This is probably more than you wanted to know,

The Great Western Archive has audio recordings of a variety of steam locomotives. Simple, i.e. not compound, engines sound different than compound engines.

For a while I was thinking that steam locomotives could have been improved by using steam engines with several smaller cylinders running at high speed, like a diesel engine, but that would have meant using gears to transmit power to the wheels, and making large gears that would take the load may not been economically feasible in early 20th century. The Shay locomotives built for logging industry did in fact do this, but they weren't carrying the enormous loads that mainline freight trains did. Diesels got around this problem by using electric generators and motors. I suspect electric motor technology in the early 20th century wasn't up to the task.

Train to Heaven

“A Steam Locomotive Bound for Heaven, from Journeys through Heaven and Hell” (1872) by Kawanabe Kyosai. Courtesy Seikado Bunko Art Museum

Via Flares Into Darkness

Streamliner

Streamliner 435 - Fabio Araujo
252 piece jigsaw puzzle

I usually don't have much luck tracking down the origin of pictures used to make jigsaw puzzles but this time I think I found it. Fabio has a web page about this image, including a YouTube video showing the sequence of layers it is made from.

On a barely related note, I think I figured out why steam locomotives only have two pistons driving large wheels and why automobiles and cars have multi-cylinder engines. 

While I'm sure 19th Century engineers understood that multiple small pistons could do the same amount of work as one large piston. It does make the machine more complex, and when you are just trying to get something to run, simpler is better. So I think they were kind of locked into that mindset. But another factor has to do with the state of machine tool design. 

Each part made on a lathe requires multiple cutting tools. In the 19th Century, each tool was set up individually, so if you were making multiple parts you had to go through the whole setup procedure for each part. When the 20th Century rolled around, we got the turret lathe, so multiple tools could be set up one time on a turret and when you needed the next tool it was simply a matter of rotating the turret to the next position.

Also, large pistons are big and heavy, so once you have it chucked up in the lathe, you want to do as much work as possible before you move to the next one. Smaller pistons are easier to work with.

P.S. It took me an hour and a half to complete the puzzle.

Steam Engine

Steam Locomotive Detail
90 piece jigsaw puzzle

That's some fancy paint on the wheel - orange around the outside shading to red in the center. Threw me for a bit because my glance of the thumbnail showed me an all orange wheel. Where do all these red pieces go? I figured it out.

Pic of the Day

Locomotive by Bill Peet

Bill Peet was a Disney artist that worked on everything between Snow White and Dumbo. He also made some kid's books. I don't know where this picture fits in all that, but it's pretty great.

Via Just A Car Guy

Terence Cuneo

Steam Locomotive by Terence Cuneo

Terence was a prolific English painter.

Via Just A Car Guy

Pic of the Day

Winter in Toronto, Canada

Pic of the Day

Steam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago rail yards (December 1942)

I haven't been reading much, mostly, I suspect, because I haven't been sleeping all that well. But when I sit down for lunch today I pick up a book that's been sitting on a pile that's due to be sold to Powell's and it pretty much captivated me.

The books is methland by Nick Reading and it is about the methamphetamine craze (epidemic) that swept the nation, especially the way it has affected small town America. The first town he focuses on is Oelwein, Iowa (I'm still reading the prologue.), which has a roundhouse. Cool! I like roundhouses, so I go looking for pictures, but I don't find much. The photo above is the best of the lot and it has a tenuous connection to Oelwein: The Chicago & North Western Railway extended to Oelwein Iowa.

Looking at Google Maps, it looks like there is still a big rail operation there. There is a big yard with 100's of cars. Looking at the Open Railway Map, you can see that the only active line goes to Des Moines, all the other tracks heading out of Oelwein have been abandoned. I suspect the only reason they are keeping the track to Des Moines open is that Oelwein has a big yard where they can store a large number of railroad cars.

Pic of the Day

1953 Buick Special waiting on the train

The composition of this photo is just great. It really puts you (me) in the scene. I stumbled over it while looking for something-er-other. I don't remember where I found it, and Google's image search wasn't much help. It might be a scene from the movie Emperor of the North, starring Earnest Borgnine and Lee Marvin. The movie was made in 1973 and is set during the great depression in Oregon.

Update hours later. I just realized that while it could be a scene from the movie, a 1953 car would be an anachronism.