Was there ever any serious effort to use water-tube boilers in a steam locomotive? Perhaps for industrial or switching engines?

B&O had the 4-6-4 Lord Baltimore,4-4-4 Lady Baltimore and the 4-4-4-4 George H. Emerson all with water tube fireboxes as did Baldwin 4-10-2 #60000,see pics

Two more pics

Delaware & Hudson 1401:


NYC had a similar experimental, and there were similar one-offs in Britain and Germany.

A couple more came to mind,Mr. Mitchell already covered the D&H. The Canadian Pacific played with WTB boilers too.


*edit: Removed offending photo and apologise to group for not being more observant

Wait... is that first picture a gag? CPR 8000 was only a 2-10-4. (and they are both pictures of CPR 8000)

North Pacific Coast 21 (built Sausalito CA 1901, scrapped 1905) had a water-tube boiler. It was also one of the first cab-forward steam locomotives.

Hmm, Joe's onto something. Same engine, two different wheel arrangements? Maybe someone decided the engine needed an extra set of drivers. ;)

Here's some footage of #8000: http://images.nfb.ca/images/pages/en/search.html?clipIndex=0&nbpage=15&pageStr=1&newSearch=true&limitSearch=501&keyword=canada%27s+new+giant&termsList=&geo=&year_from=&year_until=&collection=&duration_from=&duration_until=&number=&__son=&highDef=&clipAvailable=true&aspectRatio=&resolution=&sourceFormat=&uvcount=&avcount=&parentTopic=&searchTopic=

Once it's been pointed out, it's easy to see the splice job in the 2-12-4 shot. (The two right hand drivers are one and the same.) it's not a very good photoshop job, can't tell if was a gag or an honest error in splicing two shots.

Fixed it

Here's a few more that I know of. All B&0. P7 class pacific #5310 had its standard firebox boiler converted to a watertube boiler and reclassed P9b then back again in later years.
Locomotive #5320 was built as a P9 by the B&O with a watertube boiler, and must have enjoyed some success because it remained a watertube boilered locomotive for many years until 1947 when it was converted to the standard firebox.
Several of the P7 class pacifics recieved "semi watertube" fireboxes.
The greatest locomotive never built, IMHO, was the Watertubed B&O Class W. It was designed with Besler geared steam motors and a boiler that could produce 5000 horsepower.

Read about the class W here:

http://www.american-rails.com/class-w1-besler-type.html

I think the B&O was confident about the watertube boilers performance, but several factors came together to squash the idea, one of them being the diesel engine.

Brian

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There was one in Great Britian as well; it suffered a water tube failure that killed the crew; I believe it was converted to a conventional firebox afterwards. It looked like one of the streamlined A-4 Pacifics; but I think it was a 4-8-0; number 5000?

The railroads found out that what worked great in a stationary, steady state environment (i.e. stationary or marine use) did not hold up in the banging, anything-but-steady-state world of the steam locomotive. Tube leaks were a constant problem; and most of them spent most of their lifetime in the back of the shop waiting for attention when the shop crew had time to work on the oddball locomotive.

They were all tried around 1930; when the stationary steam and marine world was switching to high pressure water tube boilers; and seeing great gains in efficiency in the process. The railroad world tried to do the same; but found out that the boilers would not hold up in regular service; and stuck with conventional firetube boilers instead.

NYNH&H class R-2a (7 locomotives, 2-cylinder, Alco 1926) & R-3 (13 locomotives, all 3-cylinder, Alco, 1927) 4-8-2s were built with McLellan (sp?) water-tube fireboxes. These engines were used in heavy fast freight service. They were all converted to conventional radial-stay fireboxes within 1~3 years.

This was a large-scale test (although probably the motive power dept thought they were buying a "sure thing" advanced design), but the results were not acceptable. Nothing else would justify the huge expense of completely replacing the fireboxes on 20 nearly-new locomotives.

More info at:
http://www.steamlocomotive.com/mountain/?page=nynhh
http://thenhrhtanewhavenrailroadforum.yuku.com/topic/6147#.URqcCmd7d1w

- Doug Debs

In the U.K., Sentinel built very small shunting locomotives ("switchers", in American parlance) with a vertical coiled-water-tube boiler, which was a bit like Okadee steam generators used on North American diesels.

From http://homepage.ntlworld.com/foxfield/sentinel.htm
"A characteristic chain-driven Sentinel shunting locomotive powered from a high pressure vertical boiler, the technology developed for this machine by Sentinel at their Shrewsbury works owes as much to steam road lorries as it does to railways. The Sentinel was a radical attempt to modernise the steam shunting locomotive, and many were sold to this design, which at first glance could be mistaken for a contemporary diesel. "

"The high pressure boilers of Sentinel products did not typically have a long life and some locomotives were later converted to diesel traction..."

Also see: http://www.lner.info/locos/Y/y1y3.shtml and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_Sentinel_7164.

- Doug Debs

They were also exported to South America, India, and Sri Lanka; where some did remain steam powered to the very end. Their boilers are more like flash boilers than drum type water tube boilers used in marine and stationary service.

Here is the locomotive I was thinking of; it was the LNER W1 class, of which a single example, number 10000 was built. It was a 4-6-4 (an A-4 class with an extra trailing wheel added to help carry the weight of the water tube firebox); when it did not peform up to expectations, it was converted to a conventional fire tube boiler and later scrapped.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_W1