Ross Winans.
Ross
Winans was a locomotive builder who gained notoriety
for his work on coal-fired locomotives for the Reading
Railroad. He was a sometimes controversial figure
and gained a reputation as someone who would steal
other peopleŐs ideas, patent them, and charge licensing
fees or sue others who employed similar devices.
(Read John
WhiteŐs history on steam engine development
and see Thomas EvanŐs comments on Winans
visit to the Hazleton shops.) George Whistler, WinanŐs draftsman
and son-in-law wrote an oft-cited
article on the development of anthracite-fired locomotives
in which the achievements of Hopkin Thomas at the
Beaver Meadow R. R. are, for the most part, spurned.
Nonetheless, Winans was an important figure who
had interactions with Hopkin. Below are two biographies.
JMcV
Ross Winans
Source: Wikipedia
Ross
Winans (1796–1877) came from a New Jersey family of horse breeders, but
successfully made the transition to other forms of motive power. In 1841, he
opened his own shop adjacent to the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Mount Clare
Shops, with that railroad as his primary customer. He was a pioneer in the
development of coal-burning locomotives. He was eccentric, and his locomotive
business made him independently wealthy. His customer relations were simple—he
built engines his way, and you bought them. Bored with the business, and having
a design disagreement with the B&O, he closed his shops, which were later
leased to Hayward & Bartlett. He went on to do significant work for the
CzarŐs railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow in Russia. All of the listed engines
are type 0-8-0, Camel. They were all acquired from predecessor roads. Engine
sales to C&P were recorded in 1863. James Millholland, the C&P Master
Mechanic, was familiar with keeping these Camel engines running, and making
improvements to them.
Winans
set trends in locomotive and car design rather than followed them. His Crabs,
Muddiggers, and Camels were used all over the fledging rail network of the
eastern United States, from the 1840s until after the turn of the 20th century.
The B&O was Winans' largest locomotive customer, with one hundred and forty
locomotive deliveries going to that road. Winans had a disagreement with Mr.
Hayes of the B&O, which delayed delivery of some engines into 1863. Winans'
second best customer was the Philadelphia & Reading. These two customers
represented 70 percent of his sales. Winans typically offered a thirty day
trial period at the customer site.
About
two hundred and sixty-seven engine deliveries to twenty-six American railroads
by Winans are documented during the period 1843-1863. The Winans engine designs
impressed a Russian delegation, and he was asked by the Czar to build the
Imperial railroad from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Winans sent his two sons, as
well as engineer George W. Whistler to Russia for several years for that
project. Winans may have sold as much or more equipment in Russia as he did in
the United States. Winans' son returned to build a Russian style estate in
Baltimore, named Alexandrofsky. The contents of the estate were sold at auction
in 1925, and the grounds are a City park in Baltimore. Luckily, twenty-three
boxes of Winans papers and journals were donated to the Maryland Historical
Society in Baltimore for safekeeping. The City Park hosts a large outside model
train club layout.
In
1828 he developed a friction wheel with outside bearings which established a
distinctive pattern for railroad wheels for the next one hundred years or so.
In the late 1820s also he became associated with the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad, eventually entering their service as an engineer. One of his first
and more important tasks was to help Peter Cooper build the Tom Thumb
locomotive. By 1831 he was appointed assistant engineer of machinery on the
B&O. He invented and patented an improvement in the construction of axles,
or bearings on July 20. Also in this productive year he built the
"Columbus", his first double-truck car, which he immediately
patented, even though he was not the first individual to build one.
In
1835 Winans went into partnership with George Gillingham and in 1836 they
succeeded to the 1834 lease of Phineas Davis and Israel Gardner of the
B&O's company shops at Mt. Clare and continued the manufacture of
locomotives and railroad machinery. "As far back perhaps as the year 1836,
the firm of Gillingham and Winans, and, after the dissolution of that firm, I
myself, down to 1841 or 1842, manufactured a Rail Road Wheel..." (letter
#322).
Winans'
next important development in locomotive design was an 8-wheel connected
freight locomotive in the early 1840s. In 1843 Gillingham and Winans built
their own shop to maximize their profits. The company's most notable product
was the camelback locomotive. Winans quit the locomotive business in 1857 after
a dispute with Henry Tyson, then head of motive power for the B&O, over the
use of leading bogies on his locomotives. Winans generated a great many patents
and was heavily engaged in litigation over ideas he claimed as his own.
The
majority of the Winans engines were burden (freight) as opposed to passenger
type. Engines delivered after June 1848 are almost all of the Camel 0-8-0 type,
favored by Winans. The early models are sometimes referred to as the Baltimore
engines. The Camel name derives from the first of class of that name, delivered
to the B&O in 1848. All Camel engines were of the 0-8-0 wheel arrangement.
Winans did not believe in the use of leading (pony) trucks.
The
Camel engines were all low-speed, heavy haul units. The speed was limited to
10–15 miles per hour by the steam capacity of the boiler, and the lack of
a pilot truck. However, at that speed, a single Camel could haul a 110 car
train of loaded coal hoppers on the level. The most distinctive feature of the
Camel was the cab atop the boiler. They had a large steam dome, slide valves,
and used staybolts in the boiler. More than 100 iron tubes, each over 14 feet
(4.3 m) long, were installed in the boiler.
A
Camel was about 25 feet (7.6 m) long, with an 11-foot (3.4 m) wheel base. There
were three major variations: the short, medium, and long furnace models. The
small units had 17" x 22" cylinders, and the others had 19" x
22" cylinders. The medium unit had about 23 square feet (2.1 m2) of grate
area, expanded to more than 28 square feet (2.6 m2) in the large furnace model.
The long furnace model had a firebox more than 8 feet (2.4 m) long, requiring
lever-operated chutes for the fireman to feed the front of the fire. The
fireman worked in the tender, as the firebox was behind the drivers. This
design required that the drawbar passed beneath the firebox, and it typically
heated to a cherry red color. Even after rebuilds with a more conventional cab
design, the fireman worked in the tender. The standard Camel engine had
43" wheels, and was painted green.
Camel
tenders were 8-wheeled, generally with brakes on the rear truck only. They held
5 tons of coal, and 8 1/2 tons (more than 2000 gallons) of water. Fully loaded,
the tenders weighted 23 tons, only 4 tons less than the locomotive.
Ten
Camels were delivered to the Baltimore & Susquehanna, including one Ňengine
sold them from Maryland Mining Co., $8000 cash.Ó Ten sales are recorded to the
Northern Central, in addition to the engines they acquired from the Baltimore
& Susquehanna. Two units went to the Elmira & Canandaguia in New York,
and were subsequently sold to the Cumberland & Pennsylvania. The P&R
engine Susquehanna is described in detail in White's book (ref. 71). Two Winans
engines went to the Huntingdon & Broad Top Mountain (H&BTM) Railroad in
southwestern Pennsylvania in 1863. One unit blew up in 1868, with the loss of
four lives. The H&BTM ran along the west side of Broad Top Mountain, best
known for the narrow gauge line on its east side, the East Broad Top RR. The
C&P interchanged with the H&BTM at State Line, Pennsylvania.
Most
of the Winans Camel engines sold for around $10,000. Engine sales were
expedited by syndicates of what we would now call investment bankers, such as
Mr. Enoch Pratt. Banks did not yet have the accumulated capital to make loans
for commercial purposes.
The
records of the Philadelphia & Reading contain detailed information on Camel
engine mileageŐs and rebuildings. This line received a series of forty-eight
deliveries from 1846 to 1855. By 1858, the P&R had racked up in excess of
3.5 million miles on its 44 engines, with the Camel fleet representing 20
percent of the P&R motive power roster. In 1865, 28 of 48 engines had not
yet been rebuilt. By 1870, only 4 of the 48 were not yet rebuilt, but these
four had accumulated almost one million miles of road service. The average
service life before a rebuild was about thirteen and one-half years. Similar
data for the B&O gives an average service life of 8.5 years before
rebuilding. A total of 15 Camel rebuilds are recorded at the C&P shops in
Mount Savage, from 1866 through 1875.
There
are only three documented catastrophic failures in Camel engines.
Non-catastrophic failures were more prevalent, but fewer were documented.
Roberts (reference 48) gives the performance of a Winans Camel on the B&OŐs
17-mile (27 km) grade, circa 1855, as 144 trailing tons. Dilts (reference 17)
gives the performance of B&O engine 71 as 117 trailing tons up a 2.2 percent
grade at 18 mph (29 km/h). Engine 71 was a Winans Camel, built in April 1851.
The Winans engine could haul 40 empty coal hoppers up the Eckhart Branch, based
on a tare weight of 3 tons for the Winans designed 6-wheel hoppers in use in
1854.
Ross Winans.
BY E. J. RAUCH.
Railway and Locomotive
Engineering, July 1903
The
name of Ross Winans is certainly deserving of a place among the names of the
locomotive builders of America. He was in the business early in the advent of
railroads in this country; and invented and built many locomotives that were
equal to the best, and superior to many, of those built by others of the same
day.
He
early turned his attention to the construction of locomotive engines to use
bituminous coal as a fuel, and for years held the "palm" for such
engines. Somewhere about 1844 or '45, the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad
began experimenting with anthracite coal as a fuel for their engines. It was
not a success and Winans was called on to build an engine for that company. He
would not contract for one engine, but agreed to build four-which he did. The
first one of thefour was named "Baltimore," an 8-wheel connected engine - horizontal
cylinders - 18x20 inches, 4 6-inch solid cast-iron wheels, weight about 22-1/2
gross tons. She was fitted with a variable exhaust controlled by the engineer;
and considering the limited knowledge of the engineers and firemen of those
days, was a grand success.
Right
here trouble came in for Mr. Winans. The Philadelphia & Reading people had
commenced the construction of a coal-burning engine, and not being able to get
it built before the advent of the Winans engine, numerous objections were
raised against her, in order to keep her back until the Philadelphia &
Reading engine was in service. First she was found to be too wide across the
cylinders by an inch. Winans came to Reading and brought with him a couple of
machinists who took off an inch and a half of the flanges of cylinders, and so
reduced the width.
Next
objection was that the weight on back axles was much too great. Again Mr.
Winans came to Reading bringing his draughtsman, Mr. Whistler, and took some
measurements. In about two weeks Winans again appeared with some mechanics, and
a lot of appliances that he placed against the fire-box behind the axle and
under the foot-board that took, at first, too much weight off the hind wheels.
A small strong pad was put on fire-box near the grate line and just behind the
wheels on both sides. A steam cylinder was attached to each side of the
fire-box, below the foot-board; a pair of 14-inch wheels was placed on track
close behind the fire-box; a spring, half elliptic, ran from the pads at one
end, to the axle box on the wheels at other end. On top of this spring nearest
the back end was a boss with a countersunk socket. From the piston, in the
steam cylinder, the rod ran down and rested in this socket. When steam was on
the boiler the same pressure was in these cylinders, and, of course, lightened
up the rear end of engine. The device worked nicely until by any chance those
carrier wheels dropped off the track. Then the spring fell away from the piston
rod, there was no head to lower end of the cylinder, and no check between the
cylinder and boiler; and, of course, the water was all blown out.
When
James Miliholland became master mechanic of the Philadelphia & Reading in
1847, and demonstrated to that company that their effort to use anthracite coal
with the "Novelty"
was a failure, these carrier wheels were discarded on the "Baltimore" and the three other engines that
meanwhile had been delivered. Owing to the construction of the rear end of the
fire-box of these engines, the pulling bar was attached by one end to the ash
pan, and other end to a bolster of front truck of tender, passing under a pit
in front of tender from which the fireman fed fuel to the fire-box.
The
back end of the fire-box was open from grate to crown sheet. This space was
filled in with the fire doors. The lower door was an open grate reaching across
the fire-box. Above this door were two solid doors for firing through. The
grate bars extended out beyond the lower fire door, and by means of a lever
could be raked, thus breaking any clinker that might have formed, and shaking
it, with the ashes, into the ash pan. The arrangement was a good one; giving
clear access to the fire, also allowing it to be drawn quickly in an emergency,
by opening the fire doors.
Winans
adhered to this plan of grates and fire doors in nearly, if not quite, all the
engines he subsequently built.
About
1850 or '51, Mr. Winans began to send some "camel back" locomotives
to the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad. He seemed to have recognized the
necessity for the engineer having a better chance to see where he was going, as
the cab on these engines was on top of the boiler and engineers stood close
behind the smokestack. About 1854 or '55 Winans built and sent to the
Philadelphia & Reading a unique passenger locomotive. Boiler was of the
long fire-box, 7 foot grates - "camel back" type. To show the
excellence of his boiler makers' skill, there was no jacket or covering of any
kind on the boiler. It was hammer hand riveted, but not a hammer mark was
visible on the sheets. The engine weighed about 22-1/2 tons, was 4-wheel
connected, with a 6-foot spread truck. Driving wheels five feet diameter-cast
with tire entire. Cylinders 19 x 22 inches. The peculiar feature of this engine
was the cab location, which was on the platform of front end.
Being
fitted with the Winans' hook and cam motion valve gear, the reverse lever,
starting bars, hand levers; and gauge cocks were all in the cab within easy
reach of the engineer.
This
engine, "The Celeste,"
was run on passenger trains for several months, but owing to the cast-iron
driving wheels being thought unsafe was changed to other service. At first
there was some trouble with the spread truck boxes running hot, but the master
mechanic of the Philadelphia & Reading found a remedy. After about three
yearŐs service, one of the driving wheels did break but did no damage.
The
Philadelphia & Reading Company not being able to build locomotives fast
enough to keep up with the demands of the fast increasing coal trade, Winans
placed a large number of his engines on that railroad. They were different from
the original "camel back" in the length of the fire-box, which
sloped, with flat surface, from line of top of boiler to about a center line
through the same. On this slope there were two chutes opening into fire-box,
one near flue sheet and the other about center of fire box. These chutes had
doors top and bottom, and were filled with coal and the coal was dumped into
fire-box without the admission of cold air. With poor fuel, these chutes very
materially helped the steaming of the boiler. These engines all had a "cam
motion" cut-off, which was operated by the same lever that controlled the
hooks of eccentrics. It was simply thrown one notch ahead of forward hook
motion to put cam in gear. All the hooks were controlled by segments of discs
on a shaft running across from frame to frame under them. If the engine ran
over any obstruction that knocked out this shaft, all the hooks dropped in gear
in the rocker shaft, and disconnecting of valve motion was complete.
Ross
Winans had no belief in a combustion chamber in a locomotive boiler. His
theory, as carried out by him, was, as much grate and flue surface as you can
get, and as few parts as will do the work. The side rods of his engines were
fitted with bushings for the pins, and his main rods had only gib and key to
hold on the straps at front and sack ends. The writer was among Winans' engines
and ran many of them during a term of 15 or 16 years, and never knew of a main
rod disconnecting.
On
one of the earlier Camelbacks sent by Winans to the Philadelphia & Reading
Railroad was a steam gauge, probably the first one on any locomotive. Ft was a
double. diaphragm, about 24 riches in diameter, attached to lower part of the
boiler, near the front end. A pipe ran from this diaphragm up to about the
center line of the boiler, to keep out the mud. From a stud on this diaphragm
across the center a compound lever ran to near the right-hand frame, and was there
attached to a rod running up to a guide in cab close to engineer. The change in
pressure caused this rod to rise or fall through the guide and thus indicate
the boiler pressure. It worked well.
Another
feature of the Winans' locomotive was his "variable exhaust." It was
certainly among the best, if not the very best, appliance of the kind ever in use.
The
Winans Shops at Mt. Clare, Maryland, were a model of economy and system. The
erecting shop was one long, straight track from boiler shop to a connecting
siding of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. The finished boiler was rolled on small trucks from
boiler shop to the near end of the
erecting shop. All the various parts of the machinery for engines were placed
in the erecting shop on both
sides, and were taken up as attached
in place to the virgin boiler in the order they were needed, the boiler being
moved along as required until the finished engine was pushed out the doors to
the street. In a busy season half a dozen boilers, in all stages of progress,
would be on this line at same time.
The
breaking out of the war in 1861 in some way interfered with Mr. Winans'
business, and he dropped out of notice.
New
York, May 25, 1903.
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