In the 19th Century, the railroads revolutionized U.S. industry. In the 20th Century, the diesel locomotive revolutionized the railroads--and the revolution continues.
"The diesel locomotive came onto the scene as a new tool at the very time when our railway system was badly in need of just what such a tool had to offer," wrote H. L. Hamilton, founder of Electro-Motive Co., in the September 1956 Centennial edition of Railway Age. "The effect this new tool had is now very apparent."
The dieselization of the U.S. railroad industry cannot be traced to a single event, a single type of locomotive, or a single supplier. Many railroads resisted dieselization until their steam fleets became quite long in the tooth, but economics and market conditions, according to William L. Withuhn, curator of transportation at the Smithsonian Institute, forced them to eventually dieselize. Thus, dieselization can be viewed as market-driven, rather than railroad-driven. The actual transformation from steam to diesel (specifically, diesel-electric) took place over the greater part of three decades spanning the mid-1920s to the late 1950s.
* Early efforts. Central Railroad of New Jersey No. 1000, a 60-ton, 300-hp boxcab diesel-electric switcher developed by American Locomotive Co. (ALCO), General Electric (GE), and Ingersoll-Rand (IR), which entered revenue service in 1925, is regarded as the first commercially successful diesel locomotive. It served CNJ's Bronx Terminal for 32 years. Shortly after CNJ's purchase, the Baltimore & Ohio acquired a similar unit, which was placed in service at the 26th St. yard in Manhattan. No. 1000 now resides at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore.
No. 1000, while uncomplicated and unglamorous compared to the superpower steam locomotives being built at the time, was a harbinger of things to come. Oliver Jensen, in The American Heritage-History of Railroads in America, wrote about the advantages of No. 1000 and the diesels that have followed it: "At first, this power was used entirely in switching operations, for which the diesel was ideally suited; it developed maximum power in starting and at low speeds, and it did not have to waste time in taking on huge amounts of water. When new, it spent less time than its steam counterpart undergoing repairs. One did not start a little fire and build it into a big one; one pushed a self-starter."
The development of the "tin horse," as Jensen termed the diesel locomotive, goes back much further than No. 1000. The heart of the diesel locomotive, the diesel powerplant itself, got its name from Dr. Rudolph Diesel, a German scientist and inventor who devised an internal-combustion engine based upon the concept of compression ignition of fuel.
Dr. Diesel was not alone in the development of this type )f powerplant. Charles Ackroyd Stuart obtained an English patent on a compression-ignition engine in 1888, four years before Dr. Diesel. The English firm Hornsby and Company began manufacture of a compression-ignition engine in the 1880s; the design was acquired by the DeLaVergne Refrigerating Machine Co. in 1891, which used the technology to power compressors for a growing refrigeration industry.
Dr. Diesel, meanwhile, began licensing his technology to several German, English, and U.S. firms, which took his basic concept and tried to improve upon it. Many met with failure, but among the successful firms was the Diesel Motor Co. of America, New York, N.Y., founded in 1898 by Adolphus Busch (of Anheuser-Busch Brewing Co., St. Louis, Mo.).
In 1911, Busch, along with Dr. Diesel and the Swiss firm Sulzer Brothers, formed the Busch-Sulzer Brothers Diesel Engine Co., St. Louis, which became one of the largest manufacturers of stationary and marine powerplants in the U.S. The company, however, did not produce a diesel locomotive powerplant until 1935, when it provided a 10-cylinder unit for an Illinois Central locomotive built by GE.
No comments:
Post a Comment