Steam & Excursion > Geared engines & conventional yard ‘work’, from earlier subje

SD80MACfan Wrote:
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> I still never understood why Shays weren't seen as
> reliable switchers by many of the class I's. I
> know that many of them owned Shays (UP, NYC, KCS,
> WM to name a few) but they weren't seen as yard
> switchers on a very big scale and railroads stuck
> with standard steam power.

Conventional, Geared-engines would not have worked well in day-to-day service on common, large commercial switching Yards....

A typical yard-job switcher had a low duty-cycle..meaning that most of the operating time was spent sitting and waiting, as well as lots of light-engine moves around the Yards. A typical, daily, duty cycle would have them dragging the cars around ( the useful ‘work’) to comprise less than 15% to 20% , of the workday.

In flat-switching yards, where a large part of the work is kicking cars, the capacity of geared engines to routinely serve in that function would not have worked, as speculated by post-er of remarks to the O.P.

Also, a large proportion of these car moves involved one or two cars at a time, the rest was spent running to the next assignment, including a lot of ‘coasting’ ( easy for a rod-engine, not so much for a geared engine)...

On hump Yards, other than slow speed rolling cars off the hump, the switching work involved hump trimmers, that corrected errant cars that went into the wrong tracks, or switching-locos at the departure yards, making up the trains....The actual time spent lugging cars around was a small part of the swutchers’ day.

A large part of the early succcess of the early diesel switchers was due to the fact that they were much better at “just sitting around, doing nothing”....the largest chunk of their workday.....

Rod locos did a better job of ‘coasting’ down the endless yard tracks, geared locos spend too much of their energy in whirling pistons and spinning gears, connected to tiny drivers....great for logging and mining, but not for day to day service— in actual use..
Also, many “logging roads” used rod engines for the same advantages & reasons....

You can bet that Lima had tried to sell Shays to the big roads, specifically for yard work,; but, the geared locos’ limitations soon showed they could not compete with conventional rod-engines for getting around the Yards quickly with light, or no loads, Shays do not ‘Coast’ as well as rod engines, piston speeds are too high for the life of the reciprocating pieces., rings, etc...Cruising speeds around the Yards were easier for the whirling equipment for rod locos...

Shays and other geared engines, could not survive, in rough, day-to-day yard service...years on end...

I hope this helps...

W.



Edited 8 time(s). Last edit at 12/05/17 01:47 by wcamp1472.