Electric Steam!

[John Ashworth]

In a thread on the uk.railway newsgroup there's a conversation about steam locomotives fitted with pantographs.

One poster recalls "a pic of some Swiss locomotive that had a pantograph on the roof and was effectively dual-fuelled. A wartime modification I think, to power a conventional steam locomotive when there was no coal to be had", and another adds, "Two shunting locos had pantographs fitted and electric heating elements in the boilers. Locos were E3/3 8521-8522 converted in 1941 and 1942. they were converted back to conventional firing in 1951. The locos were originally built around 1913 by SLM".

The picture is from http://home.att.net/~iii3/rrpix/el-steam.jpg

[M. Hardy-Randall]

The board of the Swiss Federal Railways in 1913 decided to carry out a trial on the Gotthard line using electric power. This decision was taken because the railway company did not want to find itself in a situation where the supply of coal for its locomotives would be too expensive or even impossible to obtain. This plan started the conversion of the entire system to electric power that today covers 98% of the track-work.
After the outbreak of the second world war the price of coal increased on almost a daily basis as more and more of the supply areas fell into the area of conflict. To try to alleviate this problem some locomotives burnt wood - which had a low calorific value and was a limited resource - and nobody could forsee the end of the war that at that time was spreading rapidly. So it was decided to carry out an experiment on two steam locomotives used for shunting purposes to convert them to electrically powered steam generation to compliment the coal fired system. By this time the price of coal, when it was possible to obtain supplies, had increased in price by over 400%.
The Federal Railway workshops at Yverdon and the Brown Boveri company in Baden were, in 1942, given the task of designing and building the equipment required for the conversion of two locomotives type E3/3 numbered 8521 and 8522. The cost of this work was of the order of SFr100,000 on each locomotive, originally built in 1913 at a cost of just over SFr42,000 by SLM Winterthur. If the trial was successful further conversions were planned.
[See photo section for diagrams.] The conversion allowed the locomotives to be brought to steam in just one hour from cold. To carry this out, power at 15 kV 16.66 Hz AC was collected via a cab-roof mounted pantograph of standard BBC design, and fed to two transformers - mounted alongside the boiler- supplying two coil heating elements mounted in the boiler. The switching control was carried out by 36 volt battery powered control system. The 36 volt supply came from a standard battery bank rated at 100 Ah that was charged through a rectifier circuit supplied by the transformer. The immersion heater elements operated at 20 volts at a maximum level of 12,000 Amps.
Water was taken from the bottom of the boiler and fed by two 36 volt powered force feed pumps through the two heater assemblies at the rate of 5 litres per second. This produced steam at the rate of 300 Kgs per hour fed via injectors into the boiler which itself operated at a pressure of 12 bars.
A small coal fire was maintained in the firebox to facilitate running on lines - not fitted with catenary supply - for periods of up to 20 minutes. This would give the locomotive access to lines in factory or marshalling yards that for safety reasons could not be fitted with overhead catenary.
The total weight of this extra electrical equipment amounted to just on 7 tonnes which increased the locomotive service weight to 42 tonnes. To cater for this extra weight the locomotive springs were strengthened.
The amount of coal that was saved amounted to between 700 - 1200 kgs per working day which came to approximately 300 tonnes per year. At war-time prices the saving was SFr36,000 in the first year of operation, and with coal becoming scarcer and therefore more expensive the saving in the second and third year was at the time not possible to quantify but would be considerably higher. In fact the amount saved over the test period was just over SFr100,000. Locomotive number 8521 was sent to work in the Zollikofen area and number 8522 worked in the Brig area. The trial was considered to be too expensive when balanced against the savings and was abandoned with both locomotives being converted back to normal coal firing. Almost as soon as the trial got underway it was calculated that electric powered locomotives could be produced for prices that were comparable to the cost of the conversion of these small locomotives, and much less than the cost of converting a main-line locomotive such as an A 3/5 [4-6-0] or C 4/5 [2-8-0]. Hence the birth of the Re 4/4 I locomotive with all electrical copper parts replaced by aluminium. But that is another story.
Diagrams reproduced from the supplement to ‘Der Dampfbetrieb der Schweizerischen Eisenbahn’ by Alfred Moser in 1946 and ‘Dampf - elektrische Lokomotiven’ by Dipl Ing Roman Liechty in 1943.
Many years ago there was a conversion kit to be used with the ROCO “HO” scale model of this locomotive, but I have no idea if that kit is still available or indeed who produced it.

[John Ashworth]

Malcolm, thanks very much for this.

Apologies about the diagrams - we'll get it sorted out as soon as possible.

[Steve Appleton]

E 3-3 Electric diagram.png (107.95 KiB) Viewed 10796 times

E 3-3 Electric power.png (103.26 KiB) Viewed 10798 times

[Steve Appleton]

The problem with viewing the diagrams has something to do with the fact that browsers do not 'natively' support TIF format images. They need a 'helper' application to do so. I have changed the images to PNG (portable network graphics) format with zero compression and all seems well.

[Pierre-Noel Rietsch]

One of these 2 engines still exists (If I don't mistake, it's one of the E 3/3s of the Sursee-Triengen railway), but has been reconverted as coal-burner and has no particular differences to a "normal" E 3/3

Many years ago there was a conversion kit to be used with the ROCO “HO” scale model of this locomotive, but I have no idea if that kit is still available or indeed who produced it.

The model was not from Roco but from Liliput, and the conversion kit was from Merker + Fischer. The Liliput engine has been produced for very long time, and is still produced in a actualised version, so it's really not a rarity. The conversion kit instead... Never seen by myself!

[Pierre-Noel Rietsch]

One of these 2 engines still exists (If I don't mistake, it's one of the E 3/3s of the Sursee-Triengen railway), but has been reconverted as coal-burner and has no particular differences to a "normal" E 3/3

Confirmation: in 1964, Nr 8522 has been sold to the Sursee-Triengen Railway ST as E 3/3 8522. In 1972, she then went to the preservation society DBB (Dampfbahn Bern), and back to the ST in 1987. She is in working order, and is used with historic steam trains.

Also see here (Sorry, it's in german): http://www.dampfzug.ch/index.php?idcatside=15

[Philip Martin]

That looks like the photo I saw years ago. I thought of using the electricity to make steam, as you would on your electric range at home, but only for humor.