Wow. This is something I have never heard of before but it conceptually makes sense albeit I am a have no idea how long a tank would run a train for. Would love to learn more too, so please link is to whatever it is your are creating. Hoping a video on the topic.
Thanks! So far that site seems to be the best source of information I’ve been able to find (the Wikipedia article seems to mostly be a restated, trimmed down version of it) but there are a few other articles online I’m trying to vet for accuracy.
I’m especially interested in this quote:
“A fireless soda engine, together with evaporating apparatus, has been at work on the Aix la Chapelle-Burtscheid tramway for the last half year. In order to test the working capacity of this locomotive engine, and the consumption of fuel on a certain day, the Honigmann locomotive engine was put to work this day from 8:45 o’clock am till 8 o’clock pm, with a pause of three-quarters of an hour for the second quantity of soda lye. The engine was, therefore, at work for fully 10� hours, viz, 5� hours with the first quantity, and five with the second. The distance between Heinrichsalle and Wilhelmstrasse, where the engine performed the regular service, is 1 km, […] This distance was traversed sixty-four times, the total distance, including the journeys to the station, being 66 km.”
So it sounds like it ran for about five hours and traveled 33km on its load of caustic soda (I’m not sure at a glance which flavor chemical) and only took 45 minutes to refuel and come back up to temp.
And these were early designs, basically prototypes (though granted, the folks in that time making them probably knew a ton about steam locomotives). I imagine they could have been improved with time to study and refine the designs.
I’m not sure how well the boilers stood up to containing hot caustic stuff, but perhaps materials science has developed enough to help protect against that.
I’m writing and making visual art in the solarpunk genre, which tends to heavily emphasize trains and other public transit. But I want to broaden our options a bit beyond just electric trains. When I first heard about these, I felt like they’d mix super well with another invention of that time period, the mirrored solar concentrators used to run steam generators (some of the earliest solar power).
After all, one of the biggest disadvantages of the caustic soda locomotives was that it took more coal to dry the soda than to produce an equivalent amount steam directly with coal. But you don’t have to use coal. These 1800s mirrored dishes only require mirrors or polished metal and math to make (plus some simple motors and electronics to get them to follow the sun) and they could dry the soda for free. A lot of my focus is on less utopian, rebuilding societies, so trains and solar concentrators built with 1800s technology seems like a good place to start.
I’m going to start with a picture of a stop along the tracks for replenishing the soda in this style
plus a description. And I’m hoping to work them into a fiction story and a tabletop campaign.
As for the technical side, I’m not sure on whether they’ll be draining the diluted caustic soda and pouring in fresh, whether they’ll be drying it inside the locomotive’s boiler using superheated steam generated with a solar boiler besides the tracks, perhaps swapping locomotives to avoid delays, or even swapping boilers as someone on reddit suggested. If I go with swapping the soda, probably the boiler tank won’t actually be inside the dish, but nearby, with the steam from the dish heating it.
I hope that helps, I’m very new to this technology and am already trying to mix it with other stuff so we’ll see how it goes.
Considering that most of the descriptions I’ve seen of drying the caustic soda mention pumping superheated steam through it, and that almost any of these systems, or something like these modern ones could produce that, there’s probably lots of ways to match these trains to analog solar power.
Oh wow. What a great reply and a super cool project you are working on. You have inspired me too as one of the attractions in my VR Theme Park I am Imagineering is about trains and I would love to add a foot note about these. Thanks so much.
I have that and also MC:LA for the PS3. I recently learned that Rockstar never officially ported MC:LA to the PC so the only official ways to play it are on the PS3 and 360. And sadly RPCS3 still needs more optimization before it’s playable. I get about 15-30 fps whenever I try it.
I am currently playing through midnight club Los Angeles on RPCS3 on Ubuntu 22.04.
I would say it is about 70 to 90% stable. There are certain areas of the map that load it lower frame rates. Certain updates of RPCS3 have seem to affect this. Perhaps I should be more actively communicating in their community.
I am right now running a particular build of RPCS3 for midnight club LA.
0.0.31-16277 (from 4-1-24)
I’d say it’s about 85-90% stable. Totally playable ehat promoted this whole thread.
I’ll take your word for it, but no arcade racing game will ever be as fun as the old Burnout games (mainly 3 and Revenge). Certainly not 100% hits though…
Slice and dice on android is pretty good. It’s turn based fighting hame with a group of 5 different members that you can level 3 times through the missions into a ton of different classes. It’s pretty tough but super fun and addictive and bound to piss you off sometimes due to heavy rng when you die on a boss
You can play the demo for free and the full game is a few dollars, well worth the hours I’ve put in at least.
Paper Mario for the N64 and Super Mario World for the SNES. I think it’s because I found them both at the perfect point in my childhood where they were the first games in their genres I managed to beat.
I had a blast finding every single exit and bonus stage in SMW, and Paper Mario was the first RPG that didn’t make my eyes glaze over (including Super Mario RPG). Plus the characters and aesthetics are still so charming, the whole game gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.
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