Steam & Excursion > One Addition Gave This Locomotive A Few More Years Of Service!

Sometimes as steam locomotives aged they developed mechanical issues that needed to be addressed so that they could continue in service for their owner.  Here is one such example.

By 1949, Shevlin-Hixon Company's 90-ton Baldwin 2-8-2 #8 had already put in 25 years of service on the company's logging lines out of Bend, Oregon.  She had had a couple of wrecks and was rebuilt a few times to keep her available to pull the company's logging trains 6 days a week, nearly year around.

During her 1949 shopping at the S-H roundhouse in Bend, the shop crews discovered that she had developed some cracking in her cylinder saddle.  If this was not addressed, she would have to be taken out of service.  Casting a new cylinder saddle was out of the question due to costs and this was years before the stitch-pin technology we have today to address such crack in castings like hers.    Not to  worry, the shop crew had a solution that was both economical and expedient.

We can see their solution in the form of a pair of draw-bars that were bolted to the outer cylinder casting on both sides of the locomotive.  The bolts holding the 2 drawbars in place were tightened to their maximum to keep the cylinder saddle from cracking any further and to take up any slack that had already developed in the cylinder from the initial cracking.  This solution worked and #8 continued in service through the end of 1950 as we see in this photo.

It was in late November, 1950 that Shevlin-Hixon sold out to it's competitor across the Deschutes River, Brooks-Scanlon.  It was this sale that finally put #8 out of business, it was not the cracking in her cylinder saddle  That problem had been fixed as we see here.

Martin



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 08/15/20 01:34 by LoggerHogger.

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It has a very nice looking tender.  Extra oil capicity, doghouse, and safety railings.

tomstp Wrote:
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> It has a very nice looking tender.  Extra oil
> capicity, doghouse, and safety railings.

She recieved this tender from a trade with the McCloud River RR.  They got a pair of 2-8-2's from Alaska and gave the tenders that came with those engines to Shevlin-Hixon for use behind 90-tonners #4 and #8.  The McCloud engines got Vanderbuilt tenders from the SP..

Martin

Would such a repair be permissable today?  

That was a very clever and interesting repair to keep a locomotive going for another year or two.

Somewhere, I have seen that on another loco, but I can't remember the details.

Victor A. Baird
http://www.erstwhilepublications.com



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/20 17:08 by wabash2800.

I've seen photos of some old Santa Fe 2-6-6-2's with a similar cylinder straps.

Posted from Android

Nickle Plate USRA light 2-8-2's also had similar braces.
Ron Burkhard

When Short Line Enterprisis acquired ex-D&R #8 from Twentieth Century Fox Studios we saw that it had a brace on the fireman's side steam chest. While inspecting the cylinder we discovered the reason why, the casting had been cracked in an accident. This was the repair.

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The type of cylinder saddle extra support was a consequence of insufficient 
structural integrity.  The fundamental forces at work are the piston/cylinder head
strains against the driver crankpins...and the weak cylinder joint at the crux of the loco frame.

Newton's 3rd Law ..... "Equal and opposite reaction "... the force against the piston in lbs/inch squared,
is the same force applied to the pressured cylinder head ( depending on the crankpin position.).

The cylinder castings of the day tended to be of gray cast iron...not a very strong structural casting.
The "mechanical moment" of leverage between the frame holding the cylinder saddle and the
outboard forces against the driving crankpins tends to want to break the cylinders off of the saddle.
Thus, the cracking & breaking effects as seen in these examples.

The costant reciprocating forces, over time, tend break the cylinder saddle castings.
The designers and Master Mechanics of that period often were not fully appreciative 
of the meaning of Newton's laws.

When cast, one piece locomotive frames were first produced by General  Steel  Castings 
Corporation, their early, one-piece frames cracked at the same region -- the junction of the
cylinder saddle and the main frame.  The later cast frames had a wider-radius brace structures
at the intersection of the cylinders and the frame.  The wider radius castings can be 
observed at the current operational large loco restorations --- 2-8-4, 4-8-4, etc.

Sometime, get in real-close and observe the immense bracing cast into the frame structure & bracing
needed to fight against the drivers stuck to the sanded rail and the tremendous force of 300 psi
against both the pistons and the cylinder heads.    

Do the math on "pi R-squared" times the radius of a 27" piston,
times 300 psi...and you get the thousands of pounds of force on the piston rod,
the crankpins, an the pistons and cylinder  heads .
 It's the cylinder heads that move the train!!!

Never forget Newton's 3rd Law.  Which explains the mechanics' primitive solutions to cracked
cylinder saddles.   I LOVE the innovative use of the old loco drawbars to add the bracing!  
I can imagine the old mechanic deciding to fix the cracking problem, once and for all, damn-it!!

There's a Canadian 4-8-2 in the Steamtown Loco Collection, Scranton, Pa.,  with cracked cylinder
saddle that they'd ( CNR?) tried, multiple times to weld closed, ---- all the attempts, over the years,
couldn't fix the breaking forces at work ....  The welded areas were more brittle after the repairs,
and they broke more easily at the weld-repaired areas.  The frame at the cylinders, is still broken and
cracked, to this day...  A symptom of the earlier design attempts at one-piece cast steel frames..

​Stilts.



 



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/16/20 12:39 by wcamp1472.

The NKP installed a lot of these in the 1940's and 1950's on primarily their 2-8-2 locomotives.  The ones that were in good enough shape eventually got new cylinders.