I have seen where some cities take old trolley cars and fix them up with rubber tires and steering, turn signals, etc. I guess they take a standard truck chassis and slap the old trolley on top.(?)
Could the same or similar thing be done with a full size diesel or old steam locomotive? That would be cool. It would be extra cool to create a customized steering system, etc., to take advantage of the original diesel or steam engine instead of just slapping a train frame on top of a truck chassis.
This assumes, I guess, that you could move the driver out to the front of the locomotive. There would be huge blind spots otherwise, I think. This wouldn’t matter though if it was just a show vehicle or for locomotive racing.
Now that I think about it, I would be surprised if no one has done a locomotive-on-tires before, just as an exhibition stunt. People do all kinds of weird stuff with cars and there’s plenty of train enthusiasts out there.
Although, with an old steam locomotive, the wheels would have to be pizza cutter thin if you’re going to use that external drive shaft thingy. Would an inflatable pizza cutter tire support that kind of weight?
For reasons of traction and inertia, locomotives are built to be really heavy, too heavy for city streets. You’ll be better off building a much lighter mockup, so you won’t need two dozen tires.
If you have seen trolleys on tires, they were essentially trolley-like buses. A company built electric ones for a few years here in Anderson, but the company went bust.
Some specs on a typical North American steam locomotive in passenger service, taken from this site (and beware of the train whistle sound file that plays on opening the site), which is about a still-operating steam locomotive that makes tourist runs in the summer:
I think the weight would be a problem. Even replacing the steel wheels with rubber tires for road use (and again, making sure the drive rods didn’t interfere with the tires), you probably still be dealing with a vehicle weighing in excess of 3000 tons.
I think it was Howard Hughes who sponsored the design of a steam car (from a movie). There was a scene where he walked in, threw a hammer at it to see what would happen. It would have turned the driver into a cooked lobster in an accident that breached the piping. Not sure if a practical version could be made.
That cooked lobster result certainly happened enough with rail collisions. Casey Jones, AIUI was cooked as well as crushed in his fatal accident, forex.
But a lot of it would depend upon what pressure regime the steamer operated at, and the size of the resevoir of boiling water. Mythbusters did a look at hot water boiler explosions and found that smaller boilers just couldn’t get that devastating an explosion, but a 55 gallon heater, sealed shut, and heated til it exploded got four or five seconds of air time, with a concussive force sufficient to be fatal by itself within a few meters proximity.
Sigh. First and foremost steam cars predate locomotives. Second, the reason the locomotive came about is that the early laws for driving a steam wagon on public roads were incredibly restrictive (you had to have a flag man walking in front of the vehicle, and when he approached cross roads, he had to fire warning shots), so folks began buying up stretches of land and making their own roads, putting down rails to drive their steam wagons on. (This avoided the whole business of needing a flagman and having to fire off a gun.) Steam automobiles had a fairly rich history, dying out primarily because the leading manufacturer (Stanley, though White, and others including a fellow by the name of Henry Ford built them as well), never bothered to innovate their designs. The last steam car to be produced in any numbers in the US was the Doble which had performance comparable to a gas powered car of it’s day as well as meeting current California emissions standards. As late as 1953 McCulloch was considering entering the automotive market with a steam car.
As far as I’ve been able to determine nobody ever died from a steam boiler explosion in a car, and as Leno points out in the linked article, “modern” steam boilers used in cars cannot explode. That steam cars haven’t been seriously examined as a replacement for the internal combustion engine in cars has more to do with the people involved than the technology itself. And they certainly can be insured and licensed as Leno (and others) drive them.
Great information there, Tuckerfan. Thanks. And the Doble sure sounds like a neat technology.
I should have been more precise in where I was trying to go with my example about why I had a concern about steam explosions - I was thinking specifically a failure following a crash, which the linked article does indicate was a possibility. I mentioned the boiler explosions that Mythbusters did to simply illustrate how devastating a boiler explosion can be, if it were to occur.
It’s not something that would happen in normal operation: relief valves are a proven technology, after all; and Leno, himself, points out that in case of a simple failure of the boiler in a steamer, it’s going to be along one of the tubes - where it will act very much like a relief valve lifting - a controlled venting, not a massive failure of the pressure vessel.
(I’m not saying that something based on the Doble’s system is a risk for such a crash parboiling, it sounds pretty safe to me, too. Just trying to explain where I was coming from.)
AIUI, though, getting a new vehicle licensed is often a very different thing than restoring an old vehicle for road worthiness. Just off the top of my head, aren’t things like seatbelt laws grandfathered to exclude current models without the latest version, and often with specific exclusions for antique automobiles, too?
FTM, I don’t think anyone was burned by acid spills from modern lead-acid battery cars, but that didn’t keep various groups from insisting that the manufacturers prove that such a disaster couldn’t happen. ISTR having heard that even so, there were still rescue workers who said they wouldn’t work an electric car wreck.
So, I could see regulatory oversight as a major hurdle for getting new steamers put on the roads.
Again, the historical record of people being killed by steam explosions in automobiles appears to be non-existant. I can’t see how a pint of water in the form of steam would be enough to kill somone. (Give them a severe burn, yes.)
If there’s no laws prohibiting the use of boilers in cars (And why would there be? Its not like there was a rash of people being killed by them.), then it wouldn’t be a problem. At most, all someone would be expected to do, would be to have the boiler tested to prove that it wouldn’t pose an undue hazard in a crash or during normal operation. Not much different than what current new designs have to go through.
A pint of boiling water going to steam, no. But, from your own linked article, at least some Stanley Steamers ran off a 15 gallon reservoir, which is a different kettle.
Leno also goes on to say:
Which is something that I can see happening in a crash at 45-55 mph. Now, some of the spectacular locomotive explosions were caused simply by practices like tying down reliefs and running as hot as they could manage. Others did occur when the pressure vessel’s integrity failed during a crash at normal operating conditions.
Remember - a volume of water transforms into a huge volume of gas, when it flashes to steam. Basic ideal gas law: an ideal gas occupies 22.4 L per mole of gas molecules at atmospheric pressure and 0 Celsius. A mole of water is 18 grams. I realize that both these numbers aren’t exactly valid for water boiling under pressure, nor for what the resulting vapor will expand to, in case of a catastrophic failure of the containment vessel, but I figure they’re good enough to begin to illustrate the magnitude of the problem.
In 15 gallons of water there are approximately 3100 moles of water. (3780 ml/gallon; 18 grams water per ml of water; and rounding to the nearest two digits.) Multiply that by 22.4 liters of gas per mole, and those fifteen gallons of water are going to try to occupy nearly 70,000 liters. A comparatively huge volume.
I can’t put this into proper thermodynamic terms, but IIRC, the way that a failed pressure vessel will fail depends on a lot of things, but the biggest single factor is whether it’s failed in such a manner as to make it able to still retain some pressure on the fluid it is containing, or if the pressure inside the vessel drops to equal that outside the pressure vessel instantly. Paradoxical as it might appear, the smaller leak, with the pressure remaining inside the vessel, is less likely to rupture catastrophically, simply because the small failure does act as a valve, to make for a controlled conversion from fluid to vapor. But a large failure allows all the boiling fluid to flash to vapor immediately, and that has the effect of causing the vessel to explode, as all that vapor tries to expand to its proper volume per ideal pressure laws.
While the ratio of volumes with the smaller volume boiler would be the same in case of a failure, the absolute mass involved does play a factor.
Now, it’s quite possible that, at the pressures involved, a 15 gallon boiling water mass is not going to be able to become deadly. But I don’t know that, and I don’t think you can compare it to the relative safety of a 2 quart boiling mass.
Finally, while there may be no laws against boilers, the NTSB, I believe, has the authority to approve or deny any proposed new street vehicle for the US. And without a background of how steamers behave in test-crashes I can see years spent to get a baseline for comparison before the NTSB signs off modern steamer vehicles.
OTOH, I may be being excessively pessimistic - whatever technologies being used to prevent the possibility of BLEVEs with CNG vehicles may well be suffcient to make even 15 gallon boilers that meet modern safety expectations. You’re just getting some off-the-cuff thoughts from a former steam plant worker. I like steam, and generally I understand it, but it scares me, too.
Both Stanley boilers and Doble boilers were wire wrapped on the outside to contain the steam in the event of an explosion. And while 45-55 MPH crashes do happen (and Stanley’s were capable of doing over 100 MPH), the most common speed for an automotive collision, IIRC, is 30 MPH, which is why the government mandated tests are done at that speed. Now, admittedly, Stanleys were built at a time when cars were little more than glorified death traps, so it’s entirely possible that someone using that set up in a modern car could concievably die from steam burns, even though they were otherwise uninjured, but I kind of doubt that. After all, the engine compartments are somewhat sealed (and I think that Stanley kept theirs fairly sealed as well) so there wouldn’t necessarily be a lot of ways for steam to get inside the car.
Also, Stanleys generally used steam at around or below 500F, IIRC, (though it may have been as high as 900F, I do know that it’s lower than that commonly used in locomotives), which is certainly hot enough to cook you, but the steam’s going to lose heat as it expands. I wouldn’t say that it’s impossible for it to happen, but I would say that it’s highly unlikely.
And the NTSB does have the power to regulate automotive safety, and, in theory, could tie up the introduction of a modern steamer, I’d think that if someone wanted to manufacture an environmentally friendly design like this, that they could probably get a “fast track” approval on it.
