Finally, things were settled after Mr. Sutter's little stunt, and they had only themselves to blame for not going beyond as he did. There were surprisingly little ill-held grudges over this as your employees understood just what Mr. Sutter accomplished. The same could even be said towards the latest design phase as they debated the primary fuel to be designed around.
Mr. Sutter advocated for Cordwood citing that trees were in abundance everywhere in the Federal Steel Republic's lands and while there would need to be preparative work done to any wood taken by felled trees to make them suitable to fit into the firebox the low costs more than made up for it.
Surprisingly and more than a mite suspiciously Ms. Silvers and Mr. Lane had declared a truce and advocated for the use of Lignite, they primarily focused on the costs of the material much like Mr. Sutter along with the additional heat it would provide compared to cordwood. The downside was during the first batch of tests of a small batch to determine the burn rate of the coal, the local fire brigade had mustered at your factory due to all the smoke thinking it was from a building fire.
That was rather embarrassing to resolve, especially as the head fireman gave you a piercing glare as you attempted to explain what you were doing before he understood. You were issued a formal warning to inform the local brigade of any future tests before he left muttering about upstart Elves and their foolish ideas. Uppity little Goblin and his lackeys harrumph.
Your second batch of tests with the Lignite proved far more promising as once you had managed to get the coal up to a suitable temperature in the test boiler, it had burned far more cleanly than you had expected. It was by no means clean of course but certainly, it wasn't what you had feared from the previous test.
And finally, Mr. Baker advocated the use of Coke as the primary fuel to design around despite the rather hefty costs he believed he would be able to secure a cheaper source provided none asked any questions of legality. Questionable legalities aside for that endeavor the batch you tested burned quite well and cleanly. But it required quite a bit of time to attain a high enough temperature for the boiler to be happy.
Following a few more rounds of testing with the various fuels, and even a few mixtures of fuels, you came upon the use of lignite with a cordwood starter to be most effective to work around, necessitating the holder of the fuel to be one for holding the black, sooty stuff.
That led to your next problem. Where were you going to put the holder for the fuel? The obvious location would be on the engine itself on a footplate. That would allow the operator to have immediate access to the fuel to feed the boilers, but there would only be so much space available for the coal and for that matter, the fireman needed to shovel the fuel in. Surprisingly only Mr. Baker was a proponent of this option.
The rest of them opted for a different approach: Having a cart towed behind the engine to hold the fuel for it. This had the benefits of giving much more fuel capacity, more room for the mechanics and firemen, and looked good from a distance. The main downside was that this was an extra wagon and extra weight, but this was deemed an acceptable price by the advocates of this approach.
It was all well and good you had thought like the inexperienced fool that you were until Mr. Sutter asked where the water would be stored bringing any thoughts of setting down the ink-stained plans for the night to a screeching halt.
It was far too late now to try and reconfigure the design to incorporate water into the fuel tender with some form of a mix without also spending a sleepless night figuring out the ratio needed for storage.
So it was decided that the water storage would have to go in tanks on the engine itself. Immediate side tanks were out due to the mechanical elements being in the way, but there was a good few other ways to give the engine a tank.
You had two readily available options now, a well tank where the tank would sit underneath the chassis above the rails. Such an arrangement would provide more adhesive weight at the cost of space taken up by the tank as well as having to design the tank to have clearance no matter the rail.
The other option was a design that feels ahead of its time that being the inverted saddle tank. Essentially a water tank positioned still on the underside of the engine but instead of being sunken into the floor it would be underneath the boiler in the form of a horseshoe or the letter U forming past the frame.
[]Enclosed cab
- Advantages: Driver and fireman protected from the elements
- Disadvantages: Additional weight
[]Semi-enclosed cab
- Advantages - Driver and fireman protected from some elements
- Disadvantages - Additional weight
[]Cabless
- Advantages: No additional weight
- Disadvantages: Driver and fireman unprotected from the elements
AN: Jupiter: Well it's been a long while and that's partly my fault I was not prepared to write this section the way I wanted before I burnt out and then I got busy doing other things, for that I apologize. As recompense have a chapter and the final design choices vote. Before I go though Voting will be open until 5:00 PM CST on July 24 now for Hori's train facts.
Hori: In 1886, there was a period of 2 days where the entire network of 5' gauge track in the Southern United States, a network of about 11,500 miles, was shifted over to 4'9", a close enough standard to allow 4'8.5" train of the north to run with limited complications over the newly adjusted network.
Jupi: Thank you Hori dear now I hope everyone enjoyed it because despite how long it took I did have fun writing this.
