Trains and steam in twilight

[Mohoender]

Found entirely by chance

Here is a site which is interesting and entirely in english.

http://www.steam.dial.pipex.com/internat.htm

I don't have a particular interest for steam trains outside of T2K but so many people around the word do that it remains among the most documented field on Internet.

[chico20854]

A few images from my archive....

I believe these are improvised armored trains from the Yugoslav wars of the 90s.
I'll dig around and see if I can find some of my pictures of the Soviet ones...

Oops, these are from Chechnya.
I might still have some other Soviet ones (in addition to the ones Mo' already posted), the curse of 17,000 images in my archive...

[WallShadow]

Pennsylvania steam railways

Scranton has "Steamtown, USA", a collection of restored steam locomotives. Scranton also has an artillery shell production factory (right downtown, IIRC). Also nearby is the Tobyhanna Army Depot, and lots and lots of coal mines (hearly all defunct, however).

Strasburg, PA, near Lancaster, has 8 _operational_ steam locomotives currently and about a dozen more stored (meaning non-operational)

The East Broadtop Railway is operating 2 steam locomotives out of Orbisonia (central PA west of the Blue Ridge.

Heck, I just discovered that Dillsburg (15 miles south of Harrisburg on the way to Gettysburg) has been host to the Williams Grove Steam RailRoad (one operational steam and 2 diesels) for over 50 years! They've also been hosting a steam meet a couple of times a year--steam tractors and other goodies like "donkey engines" to provide portable power to sawmills and other industries. These steam enthusiasts will become rare treasures come the apocalypse.

Another meeting place for steam enthusiasts has been the Lawrence County Steam Fair in Portersville, PA.

[Trooper]

Russian railway troops in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watchv=dsp6vEDrHZU

[WallShadow]

found another one, in Tennessee

http://www.tvrail.com/pages/our-collection-of-equipment

Tennessee Valley Railway has operated several engines, 3 of them steam-fired, for many years, including the period covered by the Twilight War.

[Silent Hunter UK]

Of course the UK is filled with a large number of preserved steam locomotives and also an increasing number of preserved diesels, a number of these engaging in RL mainline railtours.

Although you'd have a problem with lines cut as a result of the nukes in any T2K game.

[kato13]

Swaghauler's mentioning of improvised "rail service" make me look for pics.

Here are some i found.






I expect a lot of these rail runners would pop up in areas where the military did not destroy the rail lines.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

The bonus with these lightweights is that they are a lot more forgiving and don't need to have the heavy duty steel rails in use today. They can reliably function on rails made from timber such as those used for mining carts in the 16th & 17th century and even for rail into the 19th century as witnessed in the photo below from New Zealand.

Source of image: http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/schol...6Rail029a.html

For more info, there's a decent report of early rail lines at the following wiki link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_way_(history)

[LT. Ox]

Steam Power

The start of this thread is about Rail traffic.
During the self-imposed oil shortage (my belief) of the early 70s some serious research was given to reintroducing steam power using coal fuels. Both the Southern Pacific and the (then) Denver and Rio Grande had serious need of heavy hauling power due to the mountain grades.
Both also had a very few old steam engines available, the engines had mostly been converted to oil burners but the change back to coal did not present a problem either mechanically or financially.

The best fuel source, using coal) had been injected coal slurry. Once a hot enough fire had been achieved in the firebox by solid coal then a mix of powdered coal and water was injected over the fire.

My understanding is that the project had not met any obstacles that would have derailed it (pun intended) until the fact that sufficient mechanics to maintain the equipment were going to have to be trained and there were no longer any engineers to run the things.

In our game however petro fuels and the ability to resume production of them in sufficient quantities is trump. Another way to get bulk and quantity transport of goods is steam power.
Starting with the rail fan stuff and the railroad museum restorable engines and some bright boys with machine shops, well a game idea or at least a thought.
I have lived in both California and have seen the Sacramento Rail museum and the SP engines that still run for excursion as well as Colorado and the many restored and operable engines here. I presume that the east and south have much the same or even more.
Have fun telling me your thoughts

[Adm.Lee]

As a railfan, I applaud any such topic. I think we've dealt with this before EDIT: now I see the early thread on this very page!

Something to keep in mind is that steam power requires a lot of maintenance-- locomotives incur significant downtime between runs. You will need a skilled staff of "rounders" (roundhouse/engeinhouse workers) at each end of the line.

Clean water, coal (wood), and a clear track are also important. Clean sand, if the line is hilly.

Bulk cargoes are rail's most efficient, so a coal mine is probably the first thing that would want to open a line, in T2k's setting, a track to a city's power station is probably the first thing to open.

[LT. Ox]

Super Mod Work

Woot!!! Thanks for doing my research! Great info and thank you one more time.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Something else to consider is that steam engines can run on liquid biofuels (e.g. ethanol) with far fewer problems than internal combustion engines running on the same fuel.
Now this won't help you much when you're trying to keep your truck or MICV running but for something like a large boat, stationary engines, bulldozers, farm tractors and the like, installing a steam engine and running it on ethanol may be a viable solution for the long term. The principles for this have been known and in use for some time with such things as miniature & model steam engines that burn white spirit/turpentine, kerosene and such like to heat their boilers.

There are also steam locomotives that use liquid fuels but they typically used heavy oils to fire the boiler, as I understand it (and my understanding is pretty limited), these steam locos could run on ethanol but it would require a complete remodelling of the combustion chamber. In the original design, the oil fuel was atomized and the resultant mist was then ignited to heat the boiler. Conversion to a liquid fuel like ethanol would require the oil pan be replaced with burners or such like.
As mentioned, I actually know very little about this in regards to steam locos so any of the steam enthusiast here, please feel free to jump in and fix up anything I got wrong!

[Raellus]

Looks like an M18 Hellcat turret on this one (from the Yugoslav Wars). Edit: Actually, it looks like the whole Hellcat (or hull too, at least).

[Raellus]

Looks like a 40mm Bofors clone on this one () and what appear to be two AT-3 Sagger launchers on the roof of the car furthest from the cameraperson.

[Raellus]

Krajina Express

A little more research led me to the name of the armored train featured in the last couple of photos I posted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krajina_Express

And another pic for good measure.

From the various photos I've found- all of which appear to be of the same armored train- it looks like this bad-boy was armed with at least:

A 76mm AT gun (in an M-18 Hellcat turret)
Dual aerial rocket launchers
A Bofors-type 40mm AA gun
An Browning M2HB HMG
A quad-mounted HMG of some sort (possibly a ZPU-4)
Two AT-3 Sagger ATGMs