As the fireman of a loco, I've experienced more than enough slippage from idiot engineers pulling the throttle out too fast. It also tends to pull the fire out the stack at the same time! Early artuculated designs didn't go through the process too well of equalizing the weight on the drivers. Also doing compound engines (Mallet designs) made for even more fun in the engineering dept. that they didn't figure on.
Knowing about how hump yard operations are done would help! Humpping a car is done with the car's braking system empty or closed off. If they were to have pressure in the brake line for the hump car cut, the cut would stop each time a car was disconnected and that would be one big mess! The braking system on each car is isolated or otherwise disabled while the hump operation is being done with the strong tendency of the system being emptied of air. Otherwise, when it comes to moving the cut after connecting the brake lines and opening them prepatory to charging the system, the cars that had air in them would be locked solid to the track until the pressure in the train line got high enough.
Sorry guy but the whole thread indicated different than that. While I won't disagree that there are some trains that did have air brakes in Europe, most of the trains didn't as exposed by other comments in the thread. Sounds basicly more like you're just a nitwit.
From the URL listed below: "While it is not technically correct to call them Mallets since they are not compounds as per the Mallet patent, simple articulateds like Weyerhaeuser #111 were identical in design concept to a regular Mallet except for the fact that live steam was delivered to both sets of cylinders at the same time."
What part of this did you not understand?
You don't know what sort of locos we're talking about in this portion of the thread even after reading the URL?
Since I have no idea *who* you're replying to here or what specific point you're commenting on since you don't do quoting, I can only conclude that you're just a nitwit.
You know, if *every* other person here quotes, and attributes quotes, in more or less the same fashion, and you're the odd man out, well, *you* figure out who ought to change the way they post.
Mallet's system of articulation is not the only kind.
What part of that did YOU not understand?
Just because there was (mostly) just one articulation system used in the US, doesn't mean they have exclusive use of the term to mean Mallet's articulation system.
Tell me, what would YOU call a simple engine using Mallet's articulation system given that "articulated" does not exclusively describe it?
Well?
Articulated on its own means generic articulated.
I'm not the one who jumped in to insist that "Mallet" really meant compound Mallet articulated.
Luckily for SP, they'd switched to ol by 1903, so when the Baldwin 2-8-8-2s they got in 1908 resulted in near asphyxiation of the engine crews they went looking for solutions and were able to go with a cab forward design.
Bob, unless you include the part of the previous post that you're replying to, nobody else reading the Newsgroup can have any idea of
*which* post you're replying to, who the author of that post was, or what point you're trying to make.
If you do as I did above; leaving the original poster's name at the top of the page -including enough of his post to provide a reference point- and then edit out the excess before you type in your reply, everyone will be able to figure out what you're talking about.
And we'd like that. A lot. Because an old fireman like you almost certainly has some information worth sharing.
The German railways (seven State railways) agreed in 1908 to fit all goods wagons with air brakes. The same standard was accepted by all European Interchange Treaty members circa 1910. From then on, all new wagons were built were either fitted with full air brakes or through piped for airbrake operation. Existing wagons were modified at the time of major overhaul or withdrawn from the pooling system. Of course there was a war from 1914, depression from 1918 (which resulted in major down-sizing of rolling stock rosters until c1930), the US depression from 1928 (which further affected Europe) and another WW in 1939. In German at least, this meant that the last non-air braked or through fitted wasn't withdrawn until about 1953-54. By 1932, which is the year I happen to model German Railways, unbraked and unfitted wagons were becoming quite rare.
A.Mallet patented a compounding system for an 0-6-0T loco for his proprietry
600mm (2feet) gauge field railway system. His customers weren't happy with the capabilities of such a tiny loco so he quickly designed an 0-4-4-0T with the front engine unit hinged to the mainframe which included the rear engine unit. He made the mainframe engine unit cylinders high pressure and the hinged engine unit low pressure to minimise steam leakage across the hinged join.
The term "Mallet" was applied to hinged frame locos because Mallet was the first to build that layout. Few French or European locos were built in that format.
US builders took up the concept because of it's simplicity and because there were no royalties to be paid.
So you cannot come up with a description for a simple expansion locomotive using Mallet's articulation system because "articulated" is too generic.
Perhaps you should not have jumped in with snide remarks about people who actually have rather more experience of different kinds of articulated locomotives than you do?
There is no such thing as "Mallet's articulation system". Never was.
Here's the facts: Mallet did not patent an "articulation system" because you can't patent a hinge with a set of wheels at each end. Patents are for *new* ideas, and that one had been around ever since somebody first hitched two horse-drawn wagons together. (And this was pointed out earlier in this thread by someone else.)
He patented the system of re-using the steam that had powered the high- pressure cylinders of the rear engine to power another set of low- pressure cylinders.
Therefore when we use the word "Mallet" properly, we're speaking exclusively of the sort of engine he patented and was named after him: a compound Mallet. Unless, of course, you're trying to say that because various folks use Mallet incorrectly to designate *any* articulated locomotive we must accept their incorrect usage.
But we don't. And as people who are -in theory- interested in steam locomotive technology, we shouldn't.
Example: one of my regular customers -now deceased- was a longtime Southern Pacific engineer named Tom Moore who ran cab-forwards from
1941 until they were phased out in the mid '50s. I once asked him teasingly why the S.P. engine crews always referred to the big L.A. roundhouse as the "Mallet House", since he was always adamant about correcting anyone who referred to a cab-forward as a "Mallet".
His answer was revealing. He said "Oh, it's okay when *we* do it! But
*we* know the difference!" What he was saying -in case it went past you- was that words have distinct meanings, and that if we begin using them interchangably they lose their ability to designate between the infinite variations of real-world objects.
That's why we have seperate names for different types of articulated locomotives: "Beyer-Garret", "Mallet", "Simple Articulated", and so on. "Articulated" is the generic word and tells us that the loco is hinged in some manner or other, but the individual proper names tell us *exactly* what we're speaking of, while using "Mallet" as a generic for any articulated loco does not.
This was nothing close to being a primary source. Just a railfan site repeating what other sites say without any attribution.
But of course it's on the web so it must be correct.
Some web pages refer to P. Ransome Wallis who was a popular railway writer so it is possible he originated this. Or could himself be repeating this.
His initial compounds were two-cylindered and suffered from uneven piston thrust.
It was preceded by the Fairlie and the Meyer that I know about. If it had been the first one it might be legitimate just to call it "articulated".
Or more accurately "semi-articulated".
I haven't found Mallet's patent on line, but interestingly page 461 of the Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology, Volume 39 at
formatting link
describes Mallet as "Swiss engineer, inventor of the compound steam locomotive and the Mallet articulated locomotive"
---------->"And".
Its bibliography reference, ie its source, is "1884, French patent number 162,876 (articulated locomotive)" which makes me wonder how many people who make this claim have actually read it or are just repeating something n-th hand.
It is a large book and takes a long time to download.
I don't have my copy of Jan Van Riemsdijk's book on compound locomotives to hand, but if any book has it, it would most likely be his.
Strictly speaking he didn't invent the compound, even the compound locomotive. It was just the first successful one.
James Samuel and John Nicholson had their "continuous expansion" locomotives on the Eastern Counties Railway in 1850, and there was a tandem compound on the Erie in 1867.
Compounding was invented by Arthur Woolf and patented in 1805 although this was for stationary beam engines. There was even an earlier invention in 1781 by a gentleman called Hornblower, but this was prevented because James Watt claimed it infringed his patents.
Indeed, on the SP cab forwards were often called "backup Mallies", and the long shed alongside the Dunsmuir roundhouse was called the "Malley house". Perhaps reasonable since the first cab forwards WERE compounds, but as time went on SP ordered only simple articulateds, cab forward or not, and eventually converted most of the compounds to simple locomotives.
Well, from his reply's position in the message tree, assuming we're using the best capablities of a tree structured news viewer, we can infer the target, and indeed his comment was generic to the entire thread.
Whoa - you and Twibil are getting a bit Procterish around the head and shoulders - perhaps you've had your heads into it a bit too much, and that CAN be one of the hazards of Procterology, but please don't leave your heads up and locked.
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