Derailed Locomotive Powers City Hall

[Mike]

Canadian mayor solved power outage problem during winter storm. This must have been some high-dollar power after all expenses were taken into account.

Over the week spanning Jan. 4-10, 1998, a trio of massive ice storms wracked the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. Knocking over transmission towers, the storms deprived up to 1.35 million people of electricity, in some cases for weeks (sound familiar?). Rather than leave town, though, one Canadian mayor stepped up to bring in the biggest mobile power generators they could get their hands on: Diesel-electric freight train locomotives.

[snip]

Boucherville's Mayor Francine Gadbois asked the Canadian National Railway to lend the city a couple of units. CN obliged, sending over two Montreal Locomotive Works M-420s per the 1998 issue of Trains, as recounted by members of its forum.

[snip]

According to yet another account from a train forum, officials craned M-240 number 3502 off the line down the street from city hall before moving it some 1,000 feet down the street, carving deep ruts in the asphalt. Once at its destination and hooked in, its V12 had to be run at a specific, constant rpm' to generate AC current at 60 hertz, the frequency used by most North American utilities.[/url]

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[CactusCurt]

That’s cool. I like when stuff gets adapted.

My personal favorite was an early deuce and 1/2 that had been put up on blocks with a looooong belt driving an enormous buzz saw. It was way back on a uranium mining property and was used to make timbers.

[Truckman]

My personal favorite was an early deuce and 1/2 that had been put up on blocks with a looooong belt driving an enormous buzz saw. It was way back on a uranium mining property and was used to make timbers.

That's not without its inherent dangers, depending on who's around......Ben

[Dave Grubb]

I bought the remains of a 1921 Packard that had been running a genset in Alberta, on a flat belt.

I got the engine, radiator, front axle, transmission, and the rear axle with the wheels. At one time that was fairly common, and they were called jitneys (or skippers)---which seemed to apply to most any repurposed vehicles around the farm.

At home we had a tractor set up to run the milking machines when the power was out. Milking machines run on vacuum and the tractor had a "petcock" tapped into the side of the intake manifold. We would simply hook it up to the vacuum lines in the barn and off we went---although I don't think we could run as many milkers as we ran with the electric vacuum pump.

[Kevin]

I wonder how that generator makes pure sine wave power that circuit boards need so they won't be damaged. Lots of generators can make 60 hz power. The trick is to make pure sine wave stuff that doesn't blow delicate electronics.

[Kevin]

Did you see the cool train truck story at the bottom of that article, Dave? Russians love anything huge. Twelve wheel steering. And they named it Mashka. I've got a cousin named Marja, we call her Mashka. I'm going to love teasing her about this.

[Dave Grubb]

Those old generators weren't running anything with circuit boards.

In the Army, in both Korea and Vietnam, on land we ran on gensets. All of our electronics were vacuum tube ---and 600 cycle since it was all adapted from airborne applications. The gensets put out 60 cycle and could hold that within a few cycles, that output then drove a motor gen set that converted the 60 cycle to 600 cycle. Pure sine waves are not critical, inverters generate square waves,. A "dirty" wave is more of an issue with electronics.

The 60 cycle gensets had excellent speed controls that used the generator output to increase or decrease throttle settings.

Did you see the cool train truck story at the bottom of that article, Dave?

I did now

They had something similar in size that they took to Antarctica--I'll have to try to find it.

[UTAH]

O.K. - best thread I've seen today.

Hunter

[Dave Grubb]

Here you go. The first is a US made vehicle followed by a Russian version.