Heavy Metal

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The end of steam. The last steam locomotive delivered to a major US railroad:

source: 1953 Norfoll & Western #244

The Norfolk and Western Railway’s No. 244, the last steam locomotive built for a mainline railroad in the United States.

While other lines were converting to diesel locomotives in the early 1950s, the Norfolk and Western Railway remained committed to steam.

Unlike most railroads, the Norfolk and Western designed and constructed steam locomotives in-house. In addition, the company had ready access to locomotive fuel, as the railroad’s chief cargo was coal.

Completed in 1953, the No. 244 was the last of forty-five identical locomotives constructed by the Norfolk and Western’s Roanoke Shops. These engines were built to a design produced by Baldwin Locomotive Works eighteen years earlier. In 1955, the Norfolk and Western began to replace its steam locomotive fleet with diesels. The 244 was scrapped in 1958.

Steam locomotives are often classified by wheel arrangement, in the order of leading, driving, and trailing wheels. This engine has no leading wheels, eight driving wheels, and no trailing wheels. It is therefore classified as a 0-8-0 locomotive.

This type of engine was used for switching, or sorting cars in a railroad yard.

Any of you folks who are also following the electric vehicle threads ... you may be interested in the technological transition that killed the steam locomotive. Not the same as ICE vs. electrics ... but there are parallels. When the Union Pacific "Big Boy", and C&O "Allegheny's" had reached the pinnacle of 100 years of locomotive development, 10 years later they were out of service.

This was a frighteningly fast transition -- imagine yourself as President of Sante Fe, or Union Pacific with epic investments in steam and you gotta do something BIG to turn things around, compared to if you were President of Electro-Motive Corp about to reap a diesel electric windfall (the EMC-E1 below - a model featured many times all through this thread).

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Eclipsed (ie., beaten like drum) by the diesel electrics .. themselves only 20 years earlier relegated to "yard duties" (moving around other trains at rail yards .. basically "mules") .. the steam locomotives were soon all retired/scrapped.

Even in 1930 (11 years before the Allegheny's were ever built), seems with just a bit of executive foresight, it would have been easy to guess steam locomotives were NOT going to survive the technological transition.

Btw, as you will note what duty the N&WR No. 244 had when it was scrapped 6 years after its birth? "Yard Duty".
 
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That is absolutely massive, what am I looking at exactly?
Reduction gears for steam turbines. I'm not first hand familiar with stationary electrical plants. The propulsion and electrical generation on board the ship I was stationed on was basically the same. The high pressure turbine on the main engine turned 7k + rpm, the propeller about 230 if I remember correctly, almost 40 years since I went ashore for good, so it may be off a couple.
The teeth are arranged in what is called herringbone to equal out the thrust without the need for a thrust bearing on every shaft. The smooth grove between the teeth (radially) is to give the oil somewhere to go, not hydraulic in the apex of the teeth.
Our big bull gear on the ship was approximately 6 feet across, shaft diameter running through it was less than 24". The gears were all inside a big case with sealed access doors and encased in lead to shield noise for anti-submarine purposes. We also had prairie masker air belts under the hull to make us look like the wake of a aircraft carrier to a subs sonar, but that's another story.
 
Those giant stamping presses are very cool. Flat steel goes in and the whole roof of a car comes out. You can see a whole stack of them hanging on the right side of the picture.
Nowadays the sections are very flat and simple, no complex, or supple curves, just bends or dents to stiffen up the flimsy guage steel they use now.
 
Who was .. in retrospect .. apparently was ahead of pack by 1/2 a century in 1970 in the reuaable space vehicles that Space X (others) are flying now? Elon was just a gleam in Mom's/Dad's eyes :)

Ma Mopar (Chrysler Aerospace).

source: Chrysler's Radical Space Shuttle Design Was 50 Years Ahead of Its Time

The Chrysler Corporation (yes, the car company) used to have an aerospace department.

Though it's clearly not as well-remembered today as its cars, Chrysler did in fact built the predecessors to the Saturn V, the Redstone rockets that sent the Mercury astronauts into space, and—along with Boeing—the Saturn V's first, largest propulsive stage.

After it had completed all of these amazing projects, the space program started winding down. Cuts under President Richard Nixon meant that there was less money to spend on ambitious projects.

Chrysler still wanted a piece of NASA's budget, though. It was an expert in manufacturing spacecraft and wished to continue doing so. It got its wish when the Shuttle Program came along in 1972.

Chrysler realized that in order to stay in the game, it would have to propose a Shuttle of its own design, competing with other aerospace giants such as Boeing, Grumman, and Lockheed.

The result was one of the most unusual looking spacecraft ever proposed. It was also unconventional in its operation, having a single-stage powered by unusual aerospike engines that landed itself ballistically back on earth.

It was called the SERV, and if it was built, it would've had SpaceX beat by more than five decades

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source (click on text in middle of photo to get to link):


The German Heavy Gustav was the largest gun ever built. It was more than 150 feet long, 40 feet tall and weighed almost 1,500 tons. The steel giant Krupp A.G. made only two, and neither worked well.

The weapon derived from experience. After witnessing the success of other railway guns, the German High Command asked Krupp’s engineers to design a weapon to destroy the French border fortifications along the Maginot Line.

The Gustav’s barrel alone was more than 100 feet long and fired 31-inch-wide, 12-foot-long shells at an effective ranges of 20 miles. The ammo came in two varieties — a five-ton explosive round and a seven-ton armor piercer.

But the impressively massive superweapons were dinosaurs. It was too bulky, took too long to fire and required hundreds of troops to operate. For centuries, better artillery meant bigger artillery, but that changed during World War II.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwerer_Gustav

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