Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

UnadvertisedAndroid t1_jdt3y60 wrote

Reply to comment by The_Safe_For_Work in Eli5: If we had steam powered trains back in the day, why didn’t steam become a common “clean” energy source? Why did it die out? by melatonin1212

Old steam trains burned a lot of coal to make steam, which is dirty, smells bad, weighs too much to make it an efficient energy source for a moving object, and requires a ton of labor to keep the boiler fueled because of the limited space in a train making automated hoppers, like they have in coal power plants, just not feasible.

Oh, and diesel was a much more efficient fuel source and internal combustion a more efficient way of utilizing it. So, because of all that, steam trains died off.

6

PerturbedHamster t1_jdtypzf wrote

I don't think it's the weight. Gas only has about 30% more energy per pound than coal. The big difference is that coal takes a long time to burn - you can't floor a coal-powered engine like you can a gasoline one.

Incidentally this is also one of many reasons while coal-fired electrical plants are going away. Power plants increase/decrease their output all the time to match demand. It's really easy to do this with natural gas, but really hard with coal.

2

melatonin1212 OP t1_jduewlz wrote

Does anyone know how the replica steam powered trains on the Disneyland Railroad work? Electricity heating up the water maybe? They claim they are actually powered by steam but obviously it’s a modified version. Nobody’s shoveling coal on that baby. And it’s a scaled down version of the real thing but seems fairly legit. They do a little announcement about how it’s actually steam powered when you get on

1

CyclopsRock t1_jdulonz wrote

They use biodiesel (which is, functionally, not dissimilar to regular diesel).

2