it's hard to put into words just what a game changer steam locomotives were for thousands of years the fastest any human being could travel was on the back of a horse maybe a cheetah if you were brave enough what that means is that traveling outside your local area wasn't really a thing to Simply travel to the next town was a multi-day Excursion that required a team of people through Bandit infested Forest paths but then humans figured out that if you could harness the energy of turning water into steam you could move Pistons that could move
wheels that could roll over steel tracks really fast faster than any human at traveled and for hundreds of miles suddenly humans were traveling outside their local Villages and seeing new places hearing new ideas this didn't always go over well but it was a really big deal the steam engines had one fatal flaw and that was the extremely high pressures and temperatures that they needed to make it work which that means if things went bad they went very bad so bad that they were eventually replaced but like all technological dead ends it took one spectacular disaster
to really Force things to change and today we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about the one disaster that finally ended the steam engine the Hindenburg of the rails on May 13th 1948 in the town of chilicothe Ohio a farmer by the name of Dick Vincent was sitting on his porch when he heard an incredible explosion an explosion That Shook the windows of his house and knocked his wife's sewing machine to the floor un hearing this he knew two things one it came from the train track so it was probably a train
and two another another train was due to come by any minute so he rushed off to the train tracks to find something from a lovecraftian nightmare that had completely disabled the tracks and threatened to derail the next train coming through so thinking quickly he grabbed some signal flares and he ran a mile up the road to warn the oncoming train and yeah he succeeded the train came to a stop before it reached the explosion which probably saved dozens of lives dick Vincent hero it was only when he got back to the side of the explosion
that dick realized the true scale of the disaster the locomotive had been blown to Kingdom Come replaced by a mess of twisted metal pipes just splade out like steaming hot tentacles as he arrived he saw helpful towns people swarming the wreckage a few of them pulling the engineer out of the cab and laying his lifeless body beside the fireman on the side of the tracks himself bloody and lifeless in a nearby yard a doctor attended to the front Breakman who was blinded by the accident and cover with second degree burns his skin bubbling and peeling
all over he would later die at the hospital the event became known as the boiler explosion of CN T1 number 3020 which isn't that catchy of a name but it was fairly consequential because it happened at a time when steam train technology was kind of waning as the engine of choice and it stands as a bit of a dividing line between the Steam age and the Diesel age what happened that fateful day in 1948 was unfortunately a far too common experience um I wouldn't say explosions happened all the time but they were pretty common understand
why it kind of helps to know exactly how these steam locomotives work so I'll give this quick and dirty explainer Steam locomotive works by boiling water and then using the increased steam pressure to power Pistons simple enough so to see how this works in a locomotive you can divide it into three parts the Firebox the boiler and the Smoke Box the fire box is where they burn the fuel for the heat often being coal sometimes wood later on oil the boiler is basically a large cylindrical water tank turned on its side and filled with water
and the Smoke Box is wor the exhaust when the fire is collected and vented out now you may be wondering why the exhaust is on the other side of the water tank well that's because there's a series of dozens of pipes that pass through the boiler from the Firebox to the Smoke Box and they carry all that heat from the Firebox with it that of course heats the pipes which heats the water and causes it to boil the steam in the top of the boiler builds up pressure and then it collects in the steam Dome
where it gets piped down to the Pistons now that's a very simplified version they were able to get more energy out of the boiler by including super heaters which direct the steam back through the boiler with dozens even hundreds of smaller pipes that help heat the water even more and get even more pressure so in a steam engine you're constantly monitoring the water level in the boiler and just the right amount when needed you have to monitor the fuel to keep the heat at an even temperature and of course accelerating and decelerating are done by
manipulating those inputs so these boilers had to be at extremely high pressures to work up to 300 PSI which by the way also pressurized the water and the higher the water pressure the higher the boiling point so the water in the boiler could get over 400° fhe before it even boiled so yeah when things went wrong on Steam Engines they went very very wrong the explosion in chilicothe likely happened because the water in the boiler fell too low during a hill clim climb chicoi sat in a bit of a plateau so the train had a
slight uphill climb as it approached Town enough to make the water and the boiler slush back leaving the pipes exposed oh I should point out that some uh train Crews would actually run the boilers kind of low because that would create more steam faster um kind of like if you're running an electric tea kettle like it it boils a lot faster if you only have one cup in it than if you have four and yeah they think that the crew may have been doing that on the 3020 that day and then when the water slashed
backwards the pipes overheated and then the crew added too much water too quickly which superheated the bare pipes and then it just explosively flashed into steam by the way that metal was already weak from being superheated so the extra pressure when it hit it just yeah it it didn't have a chance so yeah when the boiler exploded all those hundreds of tubes in the boiler just splayed out creating this crazy cthulu effect so the chili Cy accident was horrible but it wasn't all that rare Wikipedia records 53 boiler explosions and locomotives claiming a total of
155 lives the earliest recorded incident happened in 1815 when people were killed the last incident was in the 1995 explosion of a Gettysburg tourist train which thankfully didn't kill anyone but it badly burnt the engineer 1995 is a bit of an outlier really um 1977 really was the last borderer explosion from a commercial steam train so we should probably stop counting there so 53 explosions between 1815 and 1977 comes out to about one every 3 years with an average death total of three people which makes sense cuz it takes three people to run it although
the highest death toll was 26 people it happened in 1912 in the San Antonio Rail Yard um there was a strike going on at the time and it's thought that maybe a railway employee may have sabotaged the locomotive by messing with the safety valves which caused to build up a pressure yeah this explosion was a monster and it happened in a densely populated area so the damage was extra bad all the buildings and Equipment within 100 ft were demolished and among the 26 killed were several people who were trapped inside nearby buildings in fact one
of the victims was a woman named BS Gillis and she died when the locomotive's front end fell through her roof and crushed her she was seven blocks away so was that it is that what killed the steam engine it was too deadly well I mean clearly things can go very wrong but 155 deaths is just a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands who died from derailments and collisions and other locomotive disasters and if you want to keep going with it those thousands are nothing compared to the 83,000 plus deaths on airplanes since 1970
and we consider that to be the safest form of transportation of course like proportionately it is by the way Maritime deaths make both trains and planes sound reasonable and of course all other forms of transportation just pale in comparison to the 1.9 million people who die in car accidents every year seriously I'm surprised anybody ever leaves home so it wasn't like an unnecessarily high body count the Doom steam engine and it wasn't performance that did it in because actually steam engines were more powerful than the diesel engines that replaced it I mean it's kind of
like how beta actually had a better video quality than VHS but it still lost the video format War um there are other things at play here so to start with by the 1950s steam engine technology was about as good as it was ever going to get and um look to be fair when you really dig into how these engines work they were kind of marvels of mechanical engineering but the internal combustion engine was still on the rise and they had taken over all the roads and the Automobiles and trucks and the petroleum industry was big
and powerful and Everywhere by that point also diesel was cheap and it only took one driver instead of three which also saved money and it was easier to transport yeah I didn't even talk about this earlier but um part of the locomotive design was the tender cab that was pulled behind the locomotive which carried both water and coal uh to fuel it along the way whereas a diesel locomotive just needed a fuel car filled with diesel it was also cleaner believe it or not it didn't billow out giant clouds of steam and smoke from burning
coal and there were no giant Ash pans to clean out so it was mostly the economics of it and the Simplicity of it but also I think it's fair to point out um no de engine explosions look like this so is it fair to call the chilo explosion the Hindenburg of rail like no the chilik explosion wasn't the most consequential boiler explosion in history but the Hindenburg wasn't the deadliest Airship disaster either it was just the most seen the Hindenberg disaster was caught on film and played in news reels all around the country causing a
wave of nopes as far as the eye could see and this photo has some big nope energy and it wasn't the only one there's actually a lot of boiler explosion photos out there and they all kind of make me not want to get near one so I mean in the same way that the Hindenberg footage was the final nail in the coffin for airships this photo was at least one of the final nails for steam trains still steam hasn't gone away completely tourist trains are still in operation though under strictor guidelines in a 1995 internationally
some farms and factories still make use of Steam Trains as of 2011 at least sugar plantations in Java were making use of steam trains to transport their product from the field and they also charge tourists to ride along some enthusiasts are even looking to build Next Generation steam technology for modern use one early effort was the 5at advanced technology steam locomotive it was proposed in 1998 studies were conducted all the way up to 2012 but they were never able to really secure any real Financial backing for it so it just kind of never went anywhere
concepts for a solar powered steam engine also exist uh one was proposed for testing in Sacramento but as far as I could find nothing really came of it but I did manage to locate a paper out of 2022 from the University of Michigan discussing the viability of a 1/8 scale solar steam train both of the Sacramento and the U Michigan designs were meant to be fireless meaning they'd either use storage steam or generate steam with fireless heat according to the U Michigan paper a solar steam engine would have all the environmental advantages of conventional solar
meaning no CO2 or nitrous oxide emmissions which sounds cool but you know considering the solar electric trains are already a thing it doesn't really seem like we'll be adding steam to the mix anytime soon uh not at full scale anyway so steam trains that was a a fun little rabbit hole maybe some of you had seen this image and thought yikes what's that all about uh well I thought the same thing so I looked into it now if you're anything like me uh which is to say a lay person at best I was actually really
surprised to find out that steam engines are actually more powerful than diesel engines cuz I mean it's older technology you just you just assume it's not as powerful but it is steam energy is is is crazy powerful and it's really cool once you learn about it which I did learn about while researching this by taking the scientific thinking course on brilliant this course covers all kinds of topics from basic science Rules and principles to gears and pulleys to how light works but there's a specific section on heat transfer that explains how a steam engine works
pretty well or at least better than I ever understood it which by the way is part for the course for brilliant because it explains these concepts with interactive visuals and puzzles that causes you to make connections that you might not have made otherwise um it's also just so much better than memorizing crap which is how I was taught in school and I I think I struggled a lot because of that what's even better about the brilliant model is that this scientific thinking course starts at the very Basics like they make sure you totally understand everything
before you move on to the next thing and then then you move on to the next thing and the next thing and that's how you get from this is how refrigerators work to orbital mechanics and quantum entanglement if you're more in the computer tech side of things you can learn about neural networks and llms um it's basically super villain training assuming you want to be a super villain who doesn't want to be a super villain so it's easy to start a daily learning habit with Brilliance so you can get just a little bit smarter each
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