Giants of Steam

by Jonathan Glancey

  In the aftermath of the war, in 1948, Giesl returned to the United States, where he hoped to fit many inefficiently draughted locomotives with his highly efficient ejector. In the event, he equipped just one large Chesapeake and Ohio Railway 0-8-0 switcher (shunter), while his design for a special twin ejector for three 6,000 hp Chesapeake and Ohio turbo-electrics was abandoned when all work was stopped on steam development in 1951. That same year, Giesl returned to Austria, where he made an agreement with the Schoeller Bleckmann steelworks licensing them to manufacture the Giesl ejector, of which over 2,500 were eventually made.

  The Giesl ejector was a blast-pipe comprising a longitudinal row of nozzles which discharged steam through a deep oblong chimney. The ejector’s great step forward was in minimizing the ‘shock loss’ in conventional draughting. This reduced back-pressure on the pistons, while simultaneously allowing for a stronger draught through the boiler tubes from the fire-grate, and a higher degree of superheating. This meant that lower grades of coal could be burned at higher rates of combustion. In East Germany, for example, a lignite-burning class 50 2-10-0 fitted with a Giesl ejector developed 1,600 ihp at 50 kph (31 mph), compared with 1,100 ihp for the standard machine. It is hardly surprising that 390 Deutsche Reichsbahn class 50 and class 52 2-10-0s were so equipped.

  Initial approaches to British Railways, in 1957, were rejected, but after the matter had been raised in parliament, British Railways agreed grudgingly for a trial installation on a double-chimneyed class 9F 2-10-0, on the proposition that the locomotive would be able to produce the same power using lower-grade, and thus cheaper, coal. The Giesl ejector fitted to 92250 showed no more than a 4.5 per cent reduction in coal consumption, and little in the way of increased power, in tests made at Rugby in 1959, burning normal Blidworth coal at moderate firing rates. Burning lower-grade coal, however, was the point of the exercise, and in this respect the experiment was never properly seen through, creating the erroneous impression that the Giesl ejector was not nearly as efficient as its designer claimed.

  Then, in 1962, 34064 Fighter Command, an unrebuilt Bulleid Battle of Britain light Pacific, was fitted with a Giesl ejector. The objective was to minimize spark emission, which was a serious problem with the unrebuilt Bulleids, causing many line-side fires in southern England, for which compensation had to be paid to farmers. Thus equipped, Fighter Command proved so successful that it was decided to fit all forty-nine unrebuilt Bulleid light Pacifics with Giesl ejectors. The British Railways board, however, vetoed the agreement that had been drawn up with Schoeller Bleckmann, on the grounds that the locomotives had only a three- to four-year working life ahead of them.

  If Fighter Command was so improved by a Giesl ejector, then what might have been the result if the device had been fitted to hundreds, or thousands, of other British Railways locomotives? We shall never know. There was, anyway, no rational answer to be had. From 1963, British Railways was determined to rid itself of steam as quickly as possible and management had little appetite to improve a form of traction it considered old-fashioned. This does seem a shame, as the Giesl ejector performed wonders elsewhere in the world, on locomotives both old and new. Indeed, in a letter to the Railway Magazine in November 1966, the steam locomotive engineer Kenneth Cantlie took issue with those who dismissed the Giesl ejector based on British Railways’ one-off experience with 92250: ‘In Kenya . . . a class 59 Garratt hauls 1,170 to 1,200 tons on the long 1-in-66 grades of the main line. When fitted with Giesl ejectors, they have hauled 1,500 tons at slightly higher speeds. Other classes have shown similar increases. In Nigeria, where increased hauling power is also the requirement, ejector-fitted River class locomotives have taken 780 tons at the same speeds as the normal 660 ton trains.’

  Cantlie went on to explain the particular way in which the Giesl ejector helped to improve locomotive performance: ‘The increase in power of locomotives fitted with Giesl ejectors comes not from additional steam production, though this is possible, but from better utilization of the steam produced. By reducing exhaust pressure by 50 to 75 per cent considerably greater cylinder mean effective pressure is obtained; on the locomotives I tested in Africa the extra power averaged about 20 per cent. For hauling the same trains, therefore, less steam and thus less coal and water is required. On the other hand the extra power can be utilized in hauling heavier trains or running at higher speed.’ And Cantlie concluded: ‘Roughly, the cost of 100 Giesl ejectors, when fitted, is the same as one diesel locomotive and the annual average return on capital varies from 100 to 300 per cent . . . as a result I was convinced that the Giesl ejector was the finest draughting system in the world.’

  No matter how effective some of these latest developments were, railway management the world over had become convinced that steam had to make way for diesel and, where possible or expedient, electric traction. The main-line steam locomotives that were built in the three decades following Cantlie’s paean to the Giesl ejector were rugged, simple machines designed to provide, as Riddles and his team had done for British Railways, the maximum tractive effort, and perhaps power, for the minimum cost. Doubtless a great deal of money could have been saved on many railways in the short term if existing steam locomotives had been modified along the lines of Fighter Command, the East African class 59 Garratts, and the Gresley A3 and A4 Pacifics and V2 2-6-2s fitted with double Kylchap exhausts. Indeed, the enhanced performance of the last was such that British Railways Eastern Region motive power engineers called for more Kylchap-fitted V2s and fewer new, less powerful, and far less reliable, diesels.

  Such calls were to go unheeded; what mattered most to management was modernization, that blinkered and invariably illusory rush towards a brighter, cleaner, and super-efficient new world. Even so, and very much against the odds, a number of spirited and highly intelligent engineers continued to believe that there was a future for steam on the world’s railways. And what they called for was not a revolutionary form of steam locomotive, but a Stephensonian machine that would use the steam it generated far more effectively.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE FUTURE

  Keeping the Faith

  If the steam railway locomotive has a future, the origins of its renaissance will date back to the years immediately following the Second World War. This was not primarily in Europe, where André Chapelon continued to put forward proposals for advanced compound and triple-expansion locomotive types until the 1970s, and much less so in the United States, where the diesel-electric was about to trounce its characterful predecessor. No. Perhaps unexpectedly, today’s putative steam renaissance was nurtured largely in Argentina, and the year of its inception can be pinpointed accurately. It was 1948, the year that the Argentine steam engineer Livio Dante Porta, a disciple of Chapelon, began converting the metre-gauge Córdoba Central Railway B22 class Pacific No. 2011 into a streamlined, four-cylinder compound 4-8-0. It was named Argentina and it was one of the most efficient steam railway locomotives yet built, with the equal highest power-to-weight ratio ever, sharing this particular honour with Chapelon’s mighty SNCF 240P.

  What was all the more remarkable is that this was the 27-year-old engineer’s very first locomotive. Born in Paraná and educated at the Salesian missionary school in Rosario, Porta trained as a civil engineer at the National University of the Littoral, going on to become a brilliant and provocative theoretician as well as an exceptionally fine hands-on locomotive engineer. Typically, he trained as a fireman and engine driver before designing Argentina. He became fluent in French, Italian, English, and German, and somehow managed to raise a close and loving family of five children with his cherished wife, Ana Maria Bosco; they married in 1950.

  The energetic young engineer, who had by now set up his own workshop, the Livio Dante Porta Locomotive Factory, in La Plata, went to see Argentina’s charismatic populist President Juan Perón personally in order to gain funding for the project. Keen on technological development, Perón ensured that funds were released from the Argentine National Bank to Po
rta’s engineering company. The result was a 68 ton locomotive capable of developing 2,100 dbhp, an astonishing feat made possible by Porta’s thorough reappraisal, in the light of Chapelon’s work in France (the two corresponded regularly until the Frenchman’s death), of how steam flowed through a locomotive and how this flow could be optimized. No contemporary – or even much later – diesel locomotive could match this pugnacious performance on a power-to-weight basis. It was like a bantamweight boxer packing the punch of Mike Tyson.

  Argentina was equipped with steam passages that were bigger in cross-section than even Chapelon’s, had a high boiler pressure (285 psi), and featured compounding and a substantial degree of superheating and re-superheating. Exhaust was through a Kylchap nozzle, although Porta was soon to develop his own system which he claimed was even more efficient than Chapelon’s. The real secret to Argentina’s astonishing power, however, was Porta’s first attempt at what was to be his gas-producer combustion system (GPCS). This transformed the fire-box into a sophisticated gas producer, with air drawn across the fire not just through the ash-pan and holes in the fire-door, but also through apertures at various levels in the fire-box sides above the grate. The result was a fire-box where coal burned very effectively at a more even temperature, with combustion gases passing through the boiler’s fire-tubes, carrying very little in the way of unburnt particles. A GPCS-fitted locomotive was not only considerably more powerful than one fitted with a conventional fire-box, it was also unlikely to cause line-side fires or to hurl smuts through the dining-car windows on to the luncheon plates, or into the eyes of passengers looking out of the carriage windows.

  As Porta continued his researches into improving the GPCS system, he found that virtually any solid fuel could be burned cleanly and effectively, including wood, charcoal mixed with oil, waste from sawmills, and even bagasse, the waste from crushed sugar cane. What Porta was beginning to prove with Argentina is that a new-generation steam locomotive would not only be very much more efficient than its predecessors, it would also be a very much cleaner machine. Indeed, with its white and blue livery – the colours of the Argentine flag – Argentina would have shown dirt more easily than the vast majority of steam locomotives. As one of the main arguments against the steam is that it is dirty and polluting, Porta was learning to pull the carpet from under the anti-steam lobby’s feet.

  Mounted on 1.27 m (4 ft 2 in) driving wheels, smaller than most standard-gauge freight locomotives, Argentina was nevertheless designed to run at a maximum speed of 120 kph (74.5 mph). In the event, the state of Argentine metre-gauge tracks meant that she never ran at more than about 105 kph (65 mph), although at this speed she rode as steadily as a Pullman car. With her bullet-shaped flanks emblazoned with two favourite sayings of President Perón – ‘Mejor que decir es hacer’ (‘Better to do than to say’) and ‘Mejor que prometer es realizar’ (‘Better to carry out than to promise’) – in 1949 Argentina made extensive trials, at which Chapelon himself was present. The locomotive pulled a 1,200 ton unfitted freight train at 105 kph (65 mph) with almost casual ease, and had no problem restarting a 2,000 ton train up a steep gradient and cruising at 80 kph (50 mph) on the level. An axle loading of just 13.5 tons meant that Argentina could run over most local lines. Meanwhile, coal and water consumption was half that of much larger, standard-gauge locomotives of the same power. Thermal efficiency was measured at 11.9 per cent – about twice that of contemporary US steam locomotives – and 13 per cent appeared to be possible. Argentina was, quite simply, a phenomenon, although Porta saw her as simply a starting point for a new breed of steam locomotives.

  The all-conquering 4-8-0, renamed Presidente Perón for the occasion, was put on display in central Buenos Aires; either delightfully or tellingly, she was towed into place by horses. Argentina returned to the rails and worked the Mira Pampa to Olavarría line, south-west of Buenos Aires, until 1961, when she was withdrawn and laid aside at La Plata depot. She was meant to have been a prototype for a production series of locomotives, but this never happened. Despite being a brilliant success, clearly nothing could persuade railway management in Argentina, as elsewhere, that steam could possibly be better than diesel power. Porta attempted to return the locomotive to steam in 2000, hoping to use it as a test bed for all that he had learned over the intervening forty years. Sadly, this never happened, and the great locomotive was to be found some years later abandoned, stripped of most of its components, rusting, and vandalized, at the wrecked Mate de Luna depot in a suburb of San Miguel de Tucumán in the northwest of the country.

  After Argentina, Porta modernized a fleet of broad-gauge 8C class two-cylinder 2-6-2T and 8E class three-cylinder 2-6-4T tank engines which ran suburban passenger services in and around Buenos Aires. He fitted these with his latest invention, the Lempor (Lemaître-Porta) ejector, a highly modified version of the Lemaître exhaust in which hot gases from the boiler tubes were mixed with used steam from the cylinders and expelled with considerably less friction than in earlier exhausts. Like Chapelon, Porta was not simply a gifted thermodynamicist, he also saw the internal workings of the steam locomotive as an organic whole, rather than a collection of components: the organism might be fashioned from steel, but it needed to breathe well to work at new levels of efficiency.

  The power of the Argentine Railways 8Es was increased from a maximum of 900 ihp to 1,200 dbhp, while the fully modernized 8C 2-6-2T No. 3477 produced a maximum of 1,400 dbhp, enough to tackle trains normally hauled by locomotives twice its size, such as the three-cylinder PS11 class Pacifics, while burning up to 40 per cent less coal. Management remained indifferent, and even if these powerful tank engines had produced three or four times the power they did when first built and used 100 per cent less fuel, and even if they had proved themselves 200 per cent superior to any new diesel locomotive on the market, they would still have been sent for scrap. Porta’s logic was not shared by a management drooling over the latest glossy catalogues from General Motors.

  In 1957, Porta was appointed general manager of the Río Turbio railway and Río Gallegos coal port and here, in Patagonia, he demonstrated beyond doubt how the operation of an entire railway could be revolutionized by major advances in the design of the steam locomotive. The 750 mm gauge Ramal Ferro Industrial de Río Turbio (RFIRT) itself was new. Completed in 1951, the railway stretched 255 kilometres between the south Atlantic port of Río Gallegos to the coal mines at Río Turbio, close to the Chilean border. Savagely cold winds blowing for days at 100 kph (62 mph), with gusts of over 200 kph, sweep across this bleak, undulating, and often all but featureless country. In winter, temperatures fall to −20 ºC as snow falls and the rails are coated in frost. It is no wonder that few people had settled here before the opening up of the coal mines in the 1950s. An abundance of coal, however, spelt a steam railway.

  When Porta arrived in this almost lunar landscape, trains were worked by ten Mitsubishi-built, two-cylinder 2-10-2s, weighing 48 tons and generating up to 925 dbhp on test, although continuous output in service was rated at 700 dbhp. Fitted with GPCS and Kylpor (Kylala-Porta) exhausts, the engines were soon developing a sustained 1,200 dbhp. As this would be like increasing the continuous power output of a Stanier Coronation Pacific from 2,500 to more than 4,000 dbhp, or the maximum output of a Union Pacific Big Boy from 7,500 ihp to 12,000 ihp, at a stroke, it is easy to see why Porta’s work was sometimes likened to sorcery.

  A second batch of ten 2-10-2s ordered by Porta from Mitsubishi in 1963, incorporating further advances in design, saw sustained power increased to 1,340 dbhp. The twenty-strong class worked 1,700 ton coal trains, day in, day out, at the line’s maximum of 50 kph (30 mph) from the Patagonian mines to the Atlantic coast. I was lucky enough to see this operation for myself in the early 1990s, as part of an extended trip to Buenos Aires. Like other visitors to the railway – a very rare species – I was treated with great civility and travelled the length of the line in a caboose fitted out with a stove and benches. It did seem hard to believe that tr
ains a kilometre long could be worked so effectively and quietly by such small locomotives. Riding the footplate of one of the 1963 batch of 2-10-2s back towards the coast was my introduction to the work of Livio Dante Porta. Once on the move, the train could be worked under easy steam and, despite the ferocious weather, the crew were full of praise for their locomotive. It was impossible not to be enthralled by the efficacy of this relatively small machine and in awe of the brilliance of its designer.

  In 1961, Porta headed back north to the sophistication and warmth of Buenos Aires, to work, at first, for the recently created Centre for Industrial Power and Fuel Efficiency and then to head up the department of thermodynamics at the National Institute of Industrial Technology, a role he held until his retirement in 1982. He kept in regular touch with the RFIRT and in the mid-1960s one of the 2-10-2s was rebuilt with his latest cyclonic GPCS fire-box. In this new design, air ducts and steam jets produced a swirling flow of fire-box gases, and coal particles caught up in this ‘cyclone’ were burnt completely. The result was greater heat and power from a given amount of fuel than ever before, and a clean exhaust. On test No. 118 worked a train of 3,190 tons on level track at 30–35 kph (around 20 mph) at full regulator and 35 per cent cut-off – on a 2 ft 6 in gauge track with a maximum axle load of 7.6 tons. Perhaps Porta really was a wizard.

  In the early 1970s, Porta proposed a replacement for the hardworking and extremely reliable 2-10-2s. This was due not to any fault in these superb machines, but to the fact that the Río Turbio mines were expected to increase production by over 300 per cent. To work heavier trains, the track was to be upgraded throughout, permitting an axle load of 14 tons. Rather remarkably, a ministry of transport committee found that steam working would be twice as economical as replacement diesel traction and three times cheaper than installing and running electric trains in this remote, wind-blasted, and coal-rich region.