Steam & Excursion > Plenty Of Power On the Milwaukee Work Train-Auburn!

It was a cool April day in 1952 when Al Farrow came out to watch Milwaukee 2-6-6-2 #57 and her short work train back through the yards at Al's home town of Auburn, Washington.

What the task of the day was for is not recorded, but the impressive power assigned to the train shows that Milwaukee took the job seriously.


Martin



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/16/14 03:57 by LoggerHogger.

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Looks like some kind of plow on the flatcar, perhaps to open up the ballast shoulder and relieve trapped water. Or perhaps to create or re-shape ditches. The engine's power would have been needed to pull it.

and speaking of the Milwaukee Road, did a road trip last week to Avery, Idaho to see PNWC's former Twin Grove 185 lounge car. what a neat town of now all of 16 people. these folk have done a wonderful job with their Milwaukee Road depot, now a museum and post office, and the Twin Grove....LOVELY country, worth a visit. Arlen

Agree about the 'ditcher'. The original use for a Jordan Spreader wing blades was to contour the ballast pile and form a drainage ditch at the bottom of the pile. This photo shows two or more blades to make the profile. The more sophisticated Blades were custom made for the RR, or had different adjustable angles.

Some examples in here:
http://www.trainweb.org/JordanSpreader/sectionlist.htm

Surprisingly, the 57's 82,720 lbs. of tractive effort isn't very much greater than that of a booster equipped L3-b USRA heavy Mikado of, up to, 77,349 lbs.

-John

Could you even run the Mike with the booster engine all day long? I always assumed they were very inefficient, and wasted a lot of steam, but that did not matter because they dropped out as the train gained speed?

Kimball Wrote:
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> Could you even run the Mike with the booster
> engine all day long? I always assumed they were
> very inefficient, and wasted a lot of steam, but
> that did not matter because they dropped out as
> the train gained speed?

Sure you could. But you cut out the booster at higher speeds.

Tractive effort is important starting, when pulling a heavy load slowly, or working slowly upgrade. As speed increases and the valve gear is hooked up tractive effort decreases on any steam engine - with or without a booster.

Don't know what you mean by wasteful and inefficient. They increased tractive effort, and that was what they were for.

-John

-John

Ironically the flat appears to be numbered 261.

Al Seever
Phoenix, AZ

What I meant is that the Mallet can do its rated TE all day long, like to pull that plow/spreader at a walking speed. Seems like that is a quite different job than what the booster was designed for; working for only a few minutes getting a train started.

As far as I know, the wheels on the booster continued to roll on the tracks at the higher speeds "all day long", but the steam to the booster was cut off so it wasn't making power. Assuming the booster was a reciprocating engine, then that stuff was still probably moving too, unless there was some way to unclutch it. Assuming it wasn't unclutched, then the whole mechanism was still moving all the time. You just couldn't feed it steam fast enough for it to make any useful power.

If the above is true (and since I'm guessing, it may not be), then I can't immediately see why, if you were only moving few miles an hour, that you couldn't be feeding steam to the booster all day long and getting power out of it. If anything that would probably be easier on it than dragging it around unpowered at 50 MPH.

There was an idler gear between the booster engines crankshaft and the trailer truck axle, which could be disengaged as speed increased.

This could be manually controlled by the engineer, or there was an attachment on the reverse lever that automatically disengaged the booster and shut off its steam supply when a certain cutoff was reached.

-John

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