[PRCo] Re: Fw: 4-8-4 passenger speeds?

[Fred Schneider]

As I recall, the inch to the mile per hour was the general axiom.    
The Pennsylvania Railroad also ran 100 mile per hour speeds across  
Indiana and Ohio with K4s with 80 inch drivers when necessary to make  
up time.   Of course it depended on the load.   The last K4 into  
Lancaster was a fantrip in 1955 with about 18 cars.   I didn't ride  
it but John Bowman told me the engineman managed about 68 or 69 miles  
per hour westbound ... track speed was 75.   Of course we need to  
remember that the electrification from New York to Harrisburg between  
1933 (or thereabouts) and January 1938 shaved about an hour off the  
New York - Chicago running time.   Maybe it was only 30 minutes.

My best memory of K4s was a trip from Philadelphia to Atlantic City  
and back behind steam in 1956.   Sadly, that was several years after  
the water troughs at Ancora were removed so they had to stop in both  
directions at a water plug.   But it was still 70 mph across the  
flats of New Jersey.   A year later the PRR dropped the last fires.

The best improvement of all was when the railroad put Silverliner  
MP-85 MU cars into Philadelphia - Harrisburg local service.   It then  
became possible to take the same 105 minute schedule for 103 miles  
from Harrisburg to Philadelphia with only two stops (Lancaster and  
Paoli) and add a whole flock of stops (Middletown, Elizabethtown,  
Mount Joy, Lancaster, Parkesburg, Coatesville, Downingtown, Whitford,  
Malvern, Paoli and Ardmore) and still do it in 105 minutes.

The New York - Harrisburg running time collapsed back to steam  
schedules when Amtrak wisely moved the Philadelphia stop from North  
Philly to 30th Street causing a reverse direction move at 30th  
Street, and instituted Metroliners which just could not accelerate.    
Even with the high speed service, it's still not perfection.

On Nov 20, 2007, at 6:27 PM, Jim Holland wrote:

> wrote in message news:...
>> In article <1190832083.423168.115180 at 50g2000hsm.googlegroups.com>,  
>> Paul
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On a recent Empire Builder trip to Glacier Park, we saw in Havre  
>>> Mt a
>>> parked Baldwin steam loco. I believe it was 4-8-4, with 80" drive
>>> wheels.
>>>
>>> I was wondering whether one of those monsters would have pulled our
>>> current Amtrak 11-car consist at current 80mph speeds?
>>
>>
>> Yes.
>>
>> In the "old days" of steam (before the "modern" steam era when
> everything
>> was carefully engineered) the general rule was that the maximum safe
>> operating speed in miles per hour was equal to the size of the
> drivers in
>> inches.
>>
>> So, even using that rule (which turned out to be overly  
>> conservative in
>> the later decades of steam operation) a locomotive with 80 inch  
>> drivers
>> would operate a train at 80 mph.
>>
>> As the engineering got better and better, the speeds got faster  
>> without
>> increasing the driver diameter.
>>
>> The Hiawatha locomotives owned by Milwaukee Road, for example, had to
>> operate at 100 mph just to keep the timetable but had drivers in the
>> approximately 80 inch range.
>>
>> --
>> -Glennl
>> e-mail hint: add 1 to quantity after gl to get 4317.
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> Jim  Holland
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