This article strikes me as bizarre and ignorant of the history of railroads. How can one talk about why we no longer have steam locomotives without talking about diesel locomotives? It’s like asking why we no longer use sail for cargo ships. Though, some people want to reinvent that, because climate.
14 thoughts on “The Evolution Of Choo Choos”
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It has been alleged that after suffering a serious head injury, one evolutionary scientist claimed that when steam locomotives replaced horse drawn wagon-ways in around the 1830s horses didn’t go extinct. Therefore competitive extinction was disproved, Q.E.D.
For the more fully recovered, I take note that my beloved “Big Boy” locomotive appears to be a simple 4-8-4 design stretched to a 4-16-4 design by extending the boiler to cover the extra set of pistons in the 2nd ganged x8 drive wheels. The problem with this is you can’t simply keep ganging boilers on a locomotive to gain horsepower because it can no longer negotiate the most common curves on one’s line. The trick of ganging steam locomotives was typically used when there was a grade challenge on the line, like the Continental Divide for example. The problem was it was very difficult to co-ordinate the pull between them since even with the best flag men in the cab, there was always tremendous hysteresis. Electrical cabling between diesel electrics made this trivial by comparison.
Nevertheless I find myself highly irritated when I seen the Union Pacific parading Big Boy as it did across the mid-west just a few years back and yet felt compelled to add a diesel electric to the train “just in case”. Big Boy needs no help.
This press release from KU is inane on so many levels. The fact that a paper was published in a journal somewhere on this is ridiculous.
Take this quote…”I’d always been fascinated by steam engines because they’re the technological equivalent of dinosaurs,” Lieberman said. “They’re gigantic. We infer dinosaurs made a lot of noise. We know that steam locomotives made a lot of noise, but they’re no longer with us.”
Dr. Paleontologist has clearly never been around a modern train engine. They are pretty damn loud too, and BIG. Kinda blows a hole is his model.
And what strata are steam engines found in? Enquiring minds what to know.
Soft sciences are a complete joke.
It was beaten into my head in the first course in History of Science to beware the “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” fallacy. Just because Europe found it convenient to electrify railroads does not mean there is some cosmic law requiring it.
I think this is was published a few days early.
I think you missed the point of the paper, not hard since the article was all but incomprehensible.
The point is that steam WAS driven to extinction by diesel and electric locomotives and by examining the documented history and statistics they could get an idea of what to look for in the fossil record that might indicate extinction by competition rather than senescence.
When you talk about the various pre-humans and the question seems to be: Did they just die out, were they pushed out of favorable habitat, were they killed in some sort of conflict, were they hybridized out of existence? If all you have are bones, more likely, fragments of bones, what will show up that might help you tell one from the other?
I think it’s a bad article but that doesn’t prove it’s bad research. I see the glimmer of a novel idea, whether that idea is any good, I don’t have the knowledge to tell.
The pre-humans actually built a technological civilization — I learned this on the Joe Rogan Experience.
But what happened is they replaced their internal-combustion powered chariots with battery-electric chariots and attempted to replace their coal-fired generation of electricity with unwieldy wind turbines, and their civilization utterly collapsed.
Rand, steam locomotives are “choo-choos” because the steam blow-down from the cylinder on opening of the exhaust valve, steam that is directed through an ejector nozzle to draw the fire draft through the boiler tubes and then up the chimney, makes a “choo-choo-choo-choo” sound.
This design feature, of using an exhaust steam ejector nozzle to power the forced draft of the fire powering the boiler, is after the pattern of the Stephenson’s pioneering locomotive named Rocket, a pattern that was followed with only a few exceptions until the end of steam locomotives in commercial service well over a hundred years later.
The exhaust gas blow-down events of a multi-cylinder medium-speed diesel engine happen much too rapidly to produce this type of sound. Many locomotive diesels discharge their exhaust through a turbocharger turbine that makes a whistling sound.
So a diesel locomotive is not a choo-choo.
By the way, if there is a social apocalypse from which we need to reinvent industrial technology, I would start with building a low-pressure boiler directly feeding an ejector nozzle, without any intervening power take-off from a steam cylinder. I would use this to power a forced-draft fire. Such a forced-draft fire is a starting point of iron and steelmaking.
So instead of using steam power to pump water out of flooded mines, I would use steam power in this inefficient yet effective means of making a fire hot enough to reduce iron from its ore and turn that iron into a usable steel. In an alternative timeline, the Romans could have developed such a thing to initiate the Industrial Revolution two thousand years earlier. I think such a thing would have been well within the grasp of their level of craftsmanship, but they didn’ know why one would want to build such a thing. But we do.
When I defeat Humongus and become dictator of the wasteland, I want you in charge of my technology.
I appreciate your vote-of-confidence.
I have given considerable thought to the Road Warrior scenario.
“Choo Choos”
aka Dentures
One of the more interesting things about the replacement of steam locomotives by diesel-electrics is the evolution of the whistle. A steam locomotive’s whistle used steam from the boiler to produce the familiar whistle note. But a diesel-electric didn’t have steam to run a whistle, so the designers substituted an electric-powered air horn.
Only one problem — the early air horns sounded too much like that of a big truck, so to drivers accustomed to hearing a steam whistle at a railroad crossing tended to look for a truck in front of or behind them, not a train on the railroad. So the locomotive designers switched from a single horn to a chime of four or five horns, which could be tuned to make that mournful chord that we now associate with a train in the distance. Not exactly the same as a steam whistle, but similar enough that people accustomed to the old technology would be expecting a train, not a truck.
But the signs to indicate when it needs to be blown still have the W for whistle. The memory of the old technology still lingers in our language.
There was this gadget called the Hancock Air Whistle used on diesel locomotives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hancock_air_whistle.
The New Haven railroad used them. I saw pictures of New Haven passenger-train diesels with this small parablic reflector on the roof. I never knew what it was for — some kind of audio death-ray device to clear obstructions from the track?
The Wikipedia article linked above has an audio clip. It sounds like a steam whistle suffering from vocal fold paralysis. I guess the dish was to better direct the sound of this already weak-sounding air-powered whistle.
The steam whistle is an unmistakable sound of the steam locomotive, but some later type of steam locomotive also had a diesel-locomotive style air horn. A particularly powerful and fast 4-8-4 steam locomotive called a Niagara by the New York Central Railroad was said to have an air horn; so did a Chinese QJ-class 2-10-2type steam engine used towards their last days of mainline steam.
David Wardale, a mechanical engineer and steam-locomotive proponent who had worked on projects in South Africa (The “Red Devil”) the United States (the ACE 3000), China (an improved QJ locomotive) and UK (the 5AT Project) to effect a “steam renaissance” commented on the Chinese calling for redundancy, providing the QJ locomotive with both a whistle and an air horn.
He called putting an air horn on a steam locomotive a “sacrilege.”
I remember reading a story that the legendary Casey Jones had replaced his locomotive’s steam whistle with a custom rig of steam calliope whistles that gave the Illinois Central’s Cannonball Express an unmistakable distinctive note up and down the line from Memphis to New Orleans. The Casey Jones Museum and homestead is in Jackson, Tennessee. At least that latter part I can personally vouch for.
Steam powered locomotives are gone, but steam power is alive and well. It still produces over half of our electricity.
The author forgot to mention the effect of mine worker strikes on attitudes of rail executives in the late 1940s and 1950s.