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Spirit Of Progress - Australia's Wonder Train 1937

Thank you for posting this thread. I enjoyed watching it in its entirety, and (at least for me), the sound was OK. About the only undecipherable term was the grade of steel used in building the car. It sounded something like "Cortland" or "Portland" steel. Whether this was the name of the mill that produced the steel (presumably an Australian steel mill), or whether it referred to a type or better grade of steel would be interesting to find out.

Of interest to me was the use of electric arc welding to fabricate portions of the car frame and car body. In a number of sequences showing the arc welding, the welders appear to be using long lengths of bent bare steel wire rather than coated electrodes. The horizontal seams on the sides of the car bodies show a closeup of the welding, and it is not pretty. Still, for those welders to lay down a good weld with bare steel wire on thin-gauge sheet metal speaks of a lot of practice and skill. My reason for thinking bare steel wire was used as the electrodes is based on the pictures- the welders are running a weld in the flat position, but are holding the electrode holders with the handles vertical. In the jaws of the electrode holders are long pieces of steel wire with what looks like a hand- bent 90 degree turn so the tip of the electrode is approximately vertical. This is no case of bending a factory-made coated electrode, as the wire in the electrode holders looks to be 2 feet long or thereabouts. I imagine that given the bare wire electrodes, most, if not all of the electric welding was done in the flat position.

Apparently, the welding was deemed sound enough to use for putting together the box sections on some of the structural members of the bogies (what we would call a "truck" here in the USA). In the sequence in the blacksmith shop, they refer to an "angle smith"- apparently this was a specialized type of smith who could bend and form structural shapes like angle and channel without thinning or bulging or kinking. The narrator makes mention of that "Portland" or "Cortland" steel in reference to the smith work, saying something about care had to be taken not to damage that type of steel. Maybe that was a higher strength grade of steel and prone to cracking.

Unfortunately, the film did not get into specifics or details about the air conditioning of the cars, merely mentioning the cars being at a comfortable temperature, with clean air circulating through them. On US passenger coaches of that same time period, GM-Frigidair did a lot of the car air conditioning. Typically, a box containing a belt driven reefer compressor and motor was hung below the car floor, while the evaporator units with blowers were set up in the ceilings or at ends of the cars in machinery compartments with ducting run along the sides of the car body. Getting power to the air conditioning units was another matter. In steam days, there was minimal "head end power", just enough for some lighting, produced by small steam turbo generators (aka "dynamos"). We had a heavyweight Pullman steel car on our railroad property for a time (we since gave it away as it was too far gone for us to take it on as a project). That was a Pullman steel car from the late 20's or 30's. It had air conditioning in the form of the Frigidair compressor and condensing unit hung in the box under the car floor. The compressor was driven by a large direct current motor. A large direct current generator was driven off one axle of one of the trucks. What made it interesting was an enclosed set of hypoid gearing, running in oil, drove a driveshaft with U joints to drive the generator. The generator charged a bank of storage batteries, in a box at least as large as the air conditioning compressor/condensing unit. This set of batteries furnished lighting when the train was stopped, and likely could also run the A/C compressor for short times. We got the coach off the property, and the people getting it did not want the generator unit. Seeing the hypoid gear drive and driveshaft setup truck me as quite a modern thing for the times and application.

We also have some P-72 coaches (ex Long Island Railroad), which we do run in regular service. These all have the old Frigidair A/C systems intact on them (not working). Power for the A/C was furnished by a diesel genset slung in a box under the car floor- the genset being powered by something like a 4-53 Detroit diesel and producing 220 volt 3 phase power for A/C, lights and heat. Batteries were provided for emergency lighting and working some of the control circuits. We use temporary head end power when we run "Polar Express" in winter, but are likely going to be repowering with Kubota gensets, and going to modern A/C systems for summer use.

In seeing the passenger coaches in "Spirit of Progress", it left me thinking about how the cars were supplied with electric power, and how the A/C systems were fitted. Interesting youtube, for sure.
 
The dreaded S Class? .........according to my late Mother, the bane of her fathers life :(

Do you recall why the S Class was the bane of your grandfather's life?

According to this, the S Class was a pretty good engine:

Victorian Railways S class - Wikipedia

Some of the bright ideas tried here in the US would make a trial test run
and then be parked to be reworked into another configuration, or just parked and left to quietly rust.

I'm just a train nut with no expertise other than looking at and reading about anything that runs on rails.

I do understand that 3 cylinder locomotives were hard to service and maintain as the third cylinder was buried under the engine. Further the "streamlined" engines were also harder to work on because of the difficulty of getting to moving parts.

Paul
 
Do you recall why the S Class was the bane of your grandfather's life?

According to this, the S Class was a pretty good engine:

Victorian Railways S class - Wikipedia



Paul

Hi Paul,

My maternal grandfather was Percival Cocks, District Rolling Stock Superintendent - DRS for the state of Victoria Railways, a railway engineer all his working life, he'd started as an apprentice fitter and worked his way up to DRS, a very responsible job.

I never met him, a veteran of Gallipoli, the after effects of his wounds plagued him until he died in 1957 - 2 years after I was born here in the UK, hence this is only what I was told by mum and what I have since read up

I was told by my mum, the DRS 's were only answerable to the Chief Mechanical Engineer, Chief Permanent Way Engineer - or what ever the guy who was responsible the actual rails etc etc etc title was, ....and the board of directors.

Grandpa was involved with the S class from not long after it's original inception on the drawing board at Newport Shops......and come it's initial trials the problems started to surface.

Reliability was the main bugbear, and as ''the pride of the fleet'' on express duties, every breakdown or late running caused major ructions, with Grandpa in the firing line,.......if an Express or Limited train was late, it made the news papers and the Directors wanted to know why??

Grandpa had many nights sleep broken by small hours phone calls, and no matter what the problem was, if it was an S class on his patch, he HAD to turn out, .......though he wasn't alone as the other DRS's suffered the same fate.

Only 4 were built, and while I believe they got most of the problems sorted, the S class's life was relatively short lived, and not generally considered a howling success.

I can just imagine an S class being clad in all that streamlining junk - which I didn't know about , so a big thank you, ...........only adding to Grandpas basket of woes.
 
tdmidget:

Thanks for the heads-up as to what the steel was. Cor-Ten sounds a bit unlikely for use on the passenger coaches. Cor-Ten, at least in my lifetime and in the USA, has been known as a "weathering steel". It is a steel which is used for outdoor steel structures exposed to the elements. It is installed without any preservative coatings, rusts for about the first year, and supposedly builds a "protective layer" of iron oxide (or whatever the specific product of that corrosion is with Cor Ten steels). After this, there is supposedly no appreciable further corrosion or loss of material. Cor-Ten is another story for another time as it is not always what it's cracked up to be. If in fact the Cor-Ten in this youtube was one in the same with the Cor Ten I am familiar with, it seems like not the best application for it on the passenger coaches.

The other thing that caught my attention was the use of "aluminium" sheet metal for the "skin" under the flooring system. This skin is exposed to whatever is kicked up off the roadbed, moisture, oils, ballast rock, "do not flush while train is in station" (which gets splattered on the underside of the floor and carframe when the train is at speed), etc. Aluminum, aside from being soft, will reach galvanically with the steel car frame members. No mention was made of any kind of electrical isolation between the aluminum under-floor skin and the steel carframe.

The P-72 coaches (ex Long Island RR) have a similar system of flooring. It consists of what the film refers to as "Keystone" steel panels- a corrugated sheet steel floor pan system, laid on the carframe members that come out on either side of the "keel". A kind of light weight concrete with some rubberized admixture was poured on top of these corrugated sheetmetal panels, and then mastic and some kind of vinyl floor tile was laid for the finished floor. Under the corrugated sheetmetal, a layer of insulating material was installed. This was sheathed at the bottom with thin-gauge sheet steel. Over time, road damage and resulting corrosion breached large holes in the under-skin. Once that happened, the insulation held moisture, and the corrugated pans rusted through in places. As we discovered, the floors in some of the P-72 coaches was hardly worthy of the name. The light layer of rubberized concrete and the vinyl floor covering was about all that was spanning some of those holes.

Seeing the aluminum skin used on the underside of the car flooring system had me thinking that maybe this was a way to address corrosion. The downside to it would be the potential (sorry about the pun) for electrolytic action with the steel fasteners and carframe members.
 
Thank you for posting this thread. I enjoyed watching it in its entirety, and (at least for me), the sound was OK. About the only undecipherable term was the grade of steel used in building the car. It sounded something like "Cortland" or "Portland" steel. Whether this was the name of the mill that produced the steel (presumably an Australian steel mill), or whether it referred to a type or better grade of steel would be interesting to find out.

Of interest to me was the use of electric arc welding to fabricate portions of the car frame and car body. In a number of sequences showing the arc welding, the welders appear to be using long lengths of bent bare steel wire rather than coated electrodes. The horizontal seams on the sides of the car bodies show a closeup of the welding, and it is not pretty. Still, for those welders to lay down a good weld with bare steel wire on thin-gauge sheet metal speaks of a lot of practice and skill. My reason for thinking bare steel wire was used as the electrodes is based on the pictures- the welders are running a weld in the flat position, but are holding the electrode holders with the handles vertical. In the jaws of the electrode holders are long pieces of steel wire with what looks like a hand- bent 90 degree turn so the tip of the electrode is approximately vertical. This is no case of bending a factory-made coated electrode, as the wire in the electrode holders looks to be 2 feet long or thereabouts. I imagine that given the bare wire electrodes, most, if not all of the electric welding was done in the flat position.


I was impressed by both the widespread use of Cor-Ten steel for the structural members, but also the use of wire feed welding sets (Not bent electrodes, you can actually see that the nozzles are different from the semi-circular feed tubes). Both technologies were pretty new at the time.

This was cutting edge technology and it's a pity that they had to get a Brit to narrate it, instead of an Antipodean!

Earlier on in the film, there were some pretty awful arc welds shown. that makes me feel a bit better about my own work, even if I've got far better electrodes to play with than they had.
 
Joe, the steel was "Cor-Ten". . The accent on "Cor" made it difficult as did the "Met"allic insulation.


They did not have an accent in that video. :D


This was cutting edge technology and it's a pity that they had to get a Brit to narrate it

I think that was how radio presenters spoke in this country back then. An "educated" accent.
 
Corten is good,I have an old shipping container made of it,its never disintegrated from rust like the plain steel ones they make today.In fact its in remarkable condition with no surface staining despite not being painted since Ive owned it,about 1980.I have 10 year old 40ft ers that are just about scrap.Incidentally,the VGR was broad gauge,5'3",the NSW GR was std ,4'8 1/2",so the Spirit couldnt go past the border.
 
.Incidentally,the VGR was broad gauge,5'3",the NSW GR was std ,4'8 1/2",so the Spirit couldnt go past the border.

Yup, and IIRC Mum told me it was ''all change at Albury'' - on the border of Victoria & NSW, ..........Mum seldom went to Sydney, but had to go to Canberra at least 6 times a year with her boss during the war, ..............he was a big noise in the Australian Aircraft Production Commission Ref Aircraft Production Commission. Commonwealth of Australia. (194-1942) - People and organisations - Trove

He could have flown the 400 odd miles, but liked to catch the early train around 1am if memory serves, as he could arrive relaxed and fresh ........... and ready to ''do battle'' with the government tossers :D ...........Mum would say with a wistful look in her eye - it was 1st class all the way, ......luxury beyond her wildest dreams. :)

Albury Ref - Google Maps
 
OT,but some 40 years ago,I bought some machinery from the QGR workshop at Ipswich,and enquired about the books.The clerk checking off the list said for me to go up to the main office,as some stuff was set aside.It was an ornate Victorian brick building,and I was shown into the CMEs office,no less.He was very polite,asked what I was doing with the machines,etc.Anyhoo,I must have said it was a rare honor to be in the CMEs office.He said,would you like to sit at the CMEs desk?So I did.Long time pre mobile phones,but would have made a great selfie.Of course QGR was no GNR or LNWR.
 
I was impressed by both the widespread use of Cor-Ten steel for the structural members, but also the use of wire feed welding sets (Not bent electrodes, you can actually see that the nozzles are different from the semi-circular feed tubes). Both technologies were pretty new at the time.

This was cutting edge technology and it's a pity that they had to get a Brit to narrate it, instead of an Antipodean!

Earlier on in the film, there were some pretty awful arc welds shown. that makes me feel a bit better about my own work, even if I've got far better electrodes to play with than they had.


See here, 1922 wire feed welding, bare wire, no gas or flux:
 

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