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From: johne@haddock.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.railroad
Subject: Re: Orphaned Response - (nf)
Message-ID: <28@haddock.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 7-Jan-84 23:38:43 EST
Article-I.D.: haddock.28
Posted: Sat Jan  7 23:38:43 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Jan-84 07:31:26 EST
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#R:ihuxu:-22500:haddock:15300003:000:2214
haddock!johne    Jan  6 20:03:00 1984

    The American Coal Enterprises ACE-3000, at least as described heretofore
in public, will not be a coal-electric like the uniformly unsuccessful
experimentals built in the past by UP, C&O, and N&W.
    It will instead be a "conventional" reciprocating machine, with the
refinement (developed, apparently, by Withuhn) that it will have four
cylinders, arranged in opposing pairs, at the four "corners" of the set
of driving axles.  The pistons on each side will be phase displaced
180 degrees from each other; presumably each piston will in turn be
90 degrees from its neighbor on the other side of the locomotive (as is
the case in a conventional locomotive where the right hand piston
customarily leads the other by 90 degrees, a state of affairs called
quartering).  This has two big advantages.  First, the fore-and-aft
acceleration of each piston will be counterbalanced by that of its neighbor
on the same side of the locomotive, thus the tendency of those accelerations
to cause the engine to "nose" will be eliminated.  Second, the elimination
of the need to attempt to counterbalance those accelerations by making
the driving wheel counterweights larger than ideal means that the rotating
masses of connecting rods and so forth can be counterbalanced much more
precisely.  This means that the engine will run much more smoothly on the
track at higher speeds, rather than "pounding" it as a conventionally
(not-quite-)counterbalanced locomotive can.
     I believe the prototype envisioned is a four-coupled machine (i.e.
four driving axles).  Each cylinder will drive the second driving wheel
from it, which will in turn drive the adjacent end axle by a connecting
rod.  The two center axles will be tied together by a Stephensonian
crank arrangement between the frames.
    Other innovations will, I believe, include high-tech boiler design,
the use of an on-board condenser (?), and probably MU.
    One of the designers was quoted somewhere as saying that this engine
has been designed within the weight-power-adhesion-tractive effort-etc
envelope of the contemporary GP40-2 (not a direct quote).
    It will be interesting to see the prototype in operation.

						   John Ewing
						   Boston, MA