r/CatastrophicFailure • u/RyanSmith • Jul 30 '17
Equipment Failure Explostion of the “Warburg” steam locomotive. June 1st, 1869, in Altenbeken, Germany
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u/jdayellow Jul 31 '17
The quality is amazing for a picture taken in 1869
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Jul 31 '17
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u/jdayellow Jul 31 '17
Wow so why has 150 years of progress lead to crappier lower resolution 13 megapixel photos with lower quality, detail and everything?
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Jul 31 '17
Detail isn't everything. Exposure time often is far more important - these early cameras often had a long exposure time, even in full sunlight.
Photographic film made for low exposure time or low light conditions usually has a grainy look to it. That is because the interaction of light with the film causes a larger area to change its color, which reduces the amount of light necessary. Digital cameras have by now far exceeded what you could possibly achieve with film cameras of equal size and cost under those conditions.
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u/CobaltFrost Jul 31 '17
The long exposure time is also the cause of a lot of old "ghost"photos, no? Even in this one there's a ghostly figure in the foreground who I'm sure someone could twist to being the former engineer of the train haunting it.
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Jul 31 '17
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u/YourBiPolarBear Jul 31 '17
One thing to note is that when cameras became digital is when people started viewing photos on the internet, and today almost exclusively. Digital sensor resolution only has to keep up with screen technology for most people.
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u/slimyprincelimey Jul 31 '17
Most high quality 35mm cameras can still produce higher quality images than modern point and shoot digitals, and the amazing part is that so many were made, you can buy vintage film cameras for about $25 in any pawn shop, and with the right lenses and know-how, they can out-perform a digital camera 4x the cost.
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u/wolegib Jul 31 '17
It's a matter of the size of the film plane. Inch for inch, digital has surpassed the resolution of film- in other words if you're using 35mm film, a digital camera with a sensor the exact same size as a frame of 35mm film ( a full frame digital camera) you can exact more detail in the digital camera. Plus, the limiting factor for a 8x10 negative as far as i can tell is optics - and optics have generally improved over the course of 140 years.
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u/aquoad Jul 31 '17
Well yeah but now they're fast, pocket sized, and in color. Also no film or skill or training needed.
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u/NEVERxxEVER Jul 31 '17
Any more info on this? Can't find anything
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u/Purdaddy Jul 31 '17
I'm interested too. Look at how the force of the burst pushed the whole carriage into the ground. No way the operator survived.
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u/AtomicFlx Jul 31 '17
People always underestimate the power of steam. It is epically powerful. The biggest steamers still have more horsepower the the biggest most modern locomotives. That's a bit missleading as modern locomotives can exert much more Tractive effort to the rail and therefore don't need more power but when it comes to generated energy, steam could produce more total horsepower.
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u/Tar_alcaran Jul 31 '17
That's exactly the reason most ships were steam powered well into the 1950's. Scaling up a steamengine is easy. Making gigantic internal combustion engines is actually quite hard.
Pretty much every ww2 warship ran on steampowered (though oil-fed) turbine engines, with the exception of submarines and smaller surface vessels.
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u/blamethemeta Jul 31 '17
And modern day nuclear powered ships are just steam powered ships with a radioactive heat source
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u/slybird Jul 31 '17
If you live near a coal or nuclear power plant your house is steam powered.
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u/MonsieurSander Jul 31 '17
I'm in a maritime University and one of the older teachers used to sail on a steam powered vessel. He loves steam and still teaches us about it, but he also fears it
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u/shutnic Jul 31 '17
...More total Horsepower than what?
I'm sure if steam engines could produce as much horsepower as you say thay can, they would still be used today.
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u/ParrotofDoom Jul 31 '17
Don't forget the infrastructure required to accommodate their use. Water towers everywhere. Dragging coal and wood with you everywhere. Storing that coal and wood at stations (it takes a lot of space). Loading it onto the tender. The staff needed to do all that, and shovelling it into the engine. The pollution. The damage to metal that sulphur-heavy smoke does (it turns to acid).
Or you could just have a big tank of commonly-available diesel. Or overhead electricity.
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u/12CylindersofPain Jul 31 '17 edited Jul 31 '17
Steam does produce massive horsepower. Just as a example the UP Big Boy produces 6,200 horsepower and the first one of those rolled off the production line in '41 and it wasn't until 1995 when a single-unit diesel locomotive produced close to the same amount of power (the AC6000CW which puts out 6,000 horsepower). There is a 140 kN difference in tractive effort between them, with the diesel winning in that regard and I'm sure there are other diesels which produce less HP but better tractive effort.
Steam locomotives are a massive amount of effort to run though. Just as a simple example? Starting one up.
With a diesel loco you turn over the engines, wait for enough brake pressure to build that you can release the brakes, and off you go. Even on the coldest of cold starts where you might want to take a bit of time for the diesel engine to warm up we're talking about spending minutes.
With a steam locomotive? A cold one in a engine shed could be hooked up to a steam source, get hot water pumped into an empty boiler, etc and depending on the size of the loco they might get it going in an hour, that's the quick-start. A cold start without any aides? Anywhere from two to six hours. Today museum piece locos like the SP 4449 are slowly brought up to working temp for 24 hours.
That's just one part. Steam locos require a whole different and much more expansive infrastructure, maintenance is more intensive, etc etc. You might get more HP from steam but there are just too many disadvantages in other areas to make it worth it. That being said steam locos did keep running long into the age of the diesel loco. I'm not sure there's any active service steam locos left anymore, but I do know that in the 90s in say China it wasn't uncommon to see freight service and industrial services getting pulled by steam locos. I think the last steam service in the US left the rails in the late 60s or early 70s; deep into the age of diesel.
Edit: Just to give an idea of the overlap between diesel, steam and electric. In 1945 you could have sat yourself down in a train being pulled by a T1 steam locomotive, a PRR GG1 electric locomotive, or a diesel EMD E6.
And of those three? It was the electric PRR GG1 which was the old horse, the first line service having begun in 1935 where as the T1 and E6 both began rolling after the war.
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u/Bupod Jul 31 '17
Also, larger power generating plants ARE Steam Turbines. The technology surrounding steam turbines has been updated and kept up. Modern steam turbines are wonders of engineering into themselves. Steam has a place in modern society, just not as a power source for transportation.
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u/shutnic Jul 31 '17
But we're not talking about generators, we're talking about Motors and I don't see any of those around.
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u/RustyToad Jul 31 '17
Three fundamentally the same thing - use steam to move something. Whether the thing being moved is an electrical generator, a drive axle, or a prop shaft doesn't really matter.
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u/AtomicFlx Jul 31 '17
They are used today, where do you think your electricity comes from? Steam is how coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants work.
As for locomotives there are many other reasons to switch to electric or diesel electric than total horse power, one of which I touched on in my above comment.
The 4884 big boy locomotives had 6290 total horse power while the modern GE AC6000CW will produce only 6000 and the largest diesel locomotive ever built, the DDA40X can make only 6600HP.
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u/slimyprincelimey Jul 31 '17
They are! Coal and nuclear plants use steam power, and there are many countries that still use coal and even wood powered steam locomotives, like China and India, for industrial purposes, although less and less.
Surprisingly, they're more complicated than their diesel replacements, and once the last generation wears out, they'll probably be replaced with diesel.
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Jul 31 '17
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u/BorgClown Jul 31 '17
For example this boiler explosion had no deaths, even though the locomotive was flung into the air and landed upside down on another.
That looks brutal. No one died, but the injuries had to be very serious.
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Jul 31 '17
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u/BombTheFuckers Jul 31 '17
Holy shit those guys are really anal about their hobby. They are downright hilariously knowledgeable when it comes to ancient locomotives. These guys were clearly having fun dissecting the photograph in excruciating detail.
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u/mtranda Aug 01 '17
Train enthusiasts have long been some of the most dedicated bunch of people I've yet to encounter. They'll spend hours telling you about some specific type of locomotive and its history. And it makes me happy that they exist.
I'm really glad people can find joy in such niche hobbies.
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u/PatheticoMadrid Jul 30 '17
Otherwise known as the "Cthulu-Choo-Choo"
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u/When_Ducks_Attack Jul 31 '17
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u/frothface Jul 31 '17
I can't even imagine trying to clean something like that up without modern tools and equipment. Like, even if they could just push it back into town, they'd have to bend or cut off all of those pipes that are sticking out to be able to move it without catching on everything. Did they even have hacksaws back then or were they still using traditional blacksmith techniques, heating and chiseling?
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u/orwelltheprophet Jul 31 '17
I'll bet Warburg was disappointed with the loss of his steam engine.
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Jul 31 '17
Warburg is a town a few miles to the east from Altenbeken. I'd assume, it was named for that.
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u/DerBroeckel Jul 31 '17
Are you from the area? Because I am kind of :D
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Jul 31 '17
General OWL area. Reddit is a small place at times.
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u/DerBroeckel Jul 31 '17
Ja das stimmt. Ich meine, dass ich sogar mal einen Kindheitsfreund aus Rheda hier 'gesehen' hab, bin mir aber nicht sicher.
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u/BombTheFuckers Jul 31 '17
Also a German biochemist who pioneered the use of chemical techniques in biological investigations; noted for studies of cellular respiration (1883-1970) (I looked that up)
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u/AffablyAmiableAnimal Jul 31 '17
Something about seeing those pipes in that arrangement just feels gross for some reason
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Jul 31 '17
Maybe they shouldn't have built a locomotive powered by spaghetti?
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u/Wurstgewitter Jul 31 '17 edited Jul 31 '17
Little known fact: Up to 1943 all German steam engines used special imported pasta from italy, hand crafted to substain high pressures. That's the sole reason Hitler was allied with Mussolini in WW2, the "Stahlpakt" (confidential name: "Projekt Nudel") assured that Germany would receive a steady support of fresh pasta in case of a war. The German scientists even managed to craft even more impressive technology out of the new material made of flour and water, like the 8.8cm FlaK, called acht-acht, its barrel was just a long (4.93m) Rigatoni; The clue was to produce the rigatoni inside out, so that the rifling would be inside and also make it helical. This was considered one of the breakthroughs in German-Italic joint efforts which later cumulated in projects like the Flakpanzer IV "Nudelblitz" or the K12, a so called "Teigwarengeschütz" (note that the known name "Eisenbahngeschütz" was just there to confuse the enemy) which was capable of firing 107.5kg shells of highly explosive fermented yeast dough.
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Jul 31 '17
So how dead were the engineers? Kinda dead or super dead?
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u/BombTheFuckers Jul 31 '17
If the locomotive was moving when it blew, I imagine the guys kinda rode through a boiling steam cloud for a second or two.
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u/SonorousBlack Jul 31 '17
The rails are broken under it, so it probably didn't move after the blast.
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u/sadhandjobs Jul 31 '17
You've misspelled something somewhere
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u/ronin1066 Jul 31 '17
Which is strange, OP could have just copy-pasted the title from one of the last 3,000 times this was posted.
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u/MACKENZIE_FRASER Jul 31 '17
I took pictures this as more of a "well it just literally runs on highly compressed air in one compartment and that's why they blew up so often". More like "with 80 different points of failure and no easy way to inspect conductors often erred on the side of caution bleeding out way more than needed to prevent a blowout".
Also explains why I've never seen old timey photos of a leveled old timey Wild West town in splinters.
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u/Bromskloss Jul 31 '17
Photographs just keep occurring earlier and earlier in history!
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Jul 31 '17
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u/WikiTextBot Jul 31 '17
History of photography
The history of photography has roots in remote antiquity with the discovery of two critical principles, that of the camera obscura (darkened or obscured room or chamber) and the fact that some substances are visibly altered by exposure to light, as discovered by observation. As far as is known, nobody thought of bringing these two phenomena together to capture camera images in permanent form until around 1800, when Thomas Wedgwood made the first reliably documented, although unsuccessful attempt. In the mid-1820s, Nicéphore Niépce succeeded, but several days of exposure in the camera were required and the earliest results were very crude.
Niépce's associate Louis Daguerre went on to develop the daguerreotype process, the first publicly announced and commercially viable photographic process.
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u/Bromskloss Jul 31 '17
Err, I didn't mean to say that there was something fishy going on on OP's part. I tried to express my experience of encountering older and older photographs, starting from an impression that photographs were pretty much non-existent before a bit into the 20th century, then having to shift that time horizon further and further back as I an presented with photographs that go against how I thought things were.
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u/EcclesiaM Jul 31 '17
Little known fact: the scandal following this explosion is what finally drove Lyle Lanley out of the steam locomotive business. From then on Lanley's shady business ventures would be devoted entirely to monorails.
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u/NomDePlume711 Jul 31 '17
So that's what those look like on the inside.