(first posted 6/26/2012) Germany’s definitive high-speed diesel locomotive, the V200, appeared in 1953, three years after the black-over-red VW Samba. Coincidence? It was a bit better powered than the VW bus, packing two high-speed turbocharged (1500 rpm) V12 diesels by either Daimler-Benz or Maybach, which gave it a top speed of 140 kmh (85 mph). That was in fourth gear. Yup; these were not diesel-electric locomotives, but sent their power through a torque converter and four mechanical gears, a system called “Mekhydro” for mechanical-hydraulic.
Contrary to popular belief, American diesel locomotives aren’t diesel-electric because it’s the most efficient way to transfer the engines’ power to the wheels, but because it’s simpler, more familiar, and requires less service, although the V200 did have an excellent reliability rep. And the diesel-electric drive allows better control of slippage, especially with modern electronic controls. That’s a critical function on take-off with today’s super-power locomotives.
Actually, there were two distinct versions of drive systems. Maybach supplied the Mekhydro, with a single torque converter and four mechanical gears, power-shifted automatically. Voith supplied a more complex (and smoother-shifting) “Turbo” transmission that incorporated three different torque converters in a rather complex arrangement.
The V200 wasn’t the first (or last) of this series of modern German diesel hydraulic-mechanical locomotives. But it was the most popular, perhaps in part to it’s VW bus styling. And the Voith transmission didn’t just stay in Germany either.
In 1960, the V200’s builder, Krauss-Maffai, built a larger 4000 hp locomotive using the Voith Turbo transmission and two Maybach V16 engines, targeting the US market specifically. The ML 4000 was much more powerful than the typical US diesel-electric locomotive, and stunned the industry. Southern Pacific and the Denver & Rio Grande Western were the first customers.
They didn’t do so well in the mountainous stretches, but served reliably on the flats, with only one recorded failure. ALCO also built a locomotive with the Voith transmission, the DH643. But EMD (GM) and GE got the message, and quickly turned out more powerful diesel-electric locomotives. The KM’s were soon phased out, as the railroads preferred to keep maintenance simple and around one (familiar) technology.
Oh, and the V200 had a little railroading brother too.
I suppose it depends on where one hails from, but to me, American design – appearance-wise at least, was the greatest. European design to me, has always come off as being odd-ball in every respect, but the circumstances are 180° apart. Where else but overseas did you see tank engines on mainline trains as normal?
For the record, I hate “Thomas the Tank Engine”…
Still, there is something beautiful about those old machines, foreign or domestic, that can’t, for some reason, be duplicated.
American engines look odd to me. Everything is on the outside, like they have had their skin removed.
There are a handful of exceptions, which were intended for use on prestige passenger trains, like the Southern Pacific GS-4 & NYC Dreyfuss Hudson. I suppose the reason for the “flayed” appearance of most others was shorter turnaround time in back-shops. You could say it was an expression of design Functionalism, if unintended. OTOH, 19th-century American locos were often highly decorated with brass-work etc.
The tank layout was probably a reflection of more limited space for English trains, lighter tonnages, and more available water.
It reminds me a bit of the GM Futurliner.
Why would you hate ‘thomas the tank engine’. The first decade was very good children’t television, the modelling on display was wonderful, too.
Besides, why is a grown man even watching????
BTW: that last picture of the VW Bus on the rails is cute and already on my wallpaper.
Because they replaced Ringo Starr!
@fastback:
No, I don’t watch “Thomas”, but I loved the “Teletubbies”…to understand this, just read Orwell’s “1984”, then it all makes perfect sense…
Some use pills
Some use booze
But when my world gets a little off-kilter, nothing settles me quite like an hour of Teletubbies or Thomas The Tank Engine
The books are great to read to your kids. Rev. Awdry was clearly a dedicated railfan.
Little bro has the brightest lights ever seen on a Kombi, Cool story
This is fascinating, I never knew the diesel-hydraulics ever made it to such high power. Lots of details on this drive system in general and V200 and ML 4000 in particular in the Wikipedia.
Surely somebody somewhere stuck a great big round VW on the nose of a V200. That’s too cool.
How about dynamic braking? Can the diesel-hydraulic handle massive engine braking, without cooking the fluid or the whole drive train? That’s another advantage of diesel-electric.
Good point about the engine braking. Germany’s mountainous railroads were electrified very early, so their diesels were used mainly in flat lands, and not an issue there.
But that may explain in part why the very mountainous DRG&W wasn’t happy with theirs, and why SoPac took them off their grades and used them only on flat routes.
I don’t know the proper answer, though, to what extent they used any engine braking.
Just in the interest of accuracy, it was the “Denver and Rio Grande Western”, D&RGW.
Thanks; fixed.
Thanks Paul, I owned an N scale V200 and it was my single piece of DB equipment. One of the coolest designs in railroading, right up there with Nigel Gresley’s steam designs and the wonder liners of America.
I forgot to mention that I had no less than two Marklin V200s; my Godfother sent them from Austria, and he must have lost track. I really wanted a Crocodile, but no, here comes another V200. But they were beautiful, in die cast metal; old school marklin.
Good stuff, I never got my hands on any Marklin stuff sadly.
A few years ago I went on the train from Queenstown to Strahan in Tasmania, which took copper ore from the mine to the harbour. Part of the track features a rack railway to climb a very steep grade, the topography and climate were quite challenging for the operation to say the least!
Back in the 1950’s they replaced a steam train with a diesel that was mechanical drive with a 5speed gearbox and clutch. It didn’t work, as it simply couldn’t haul as much weight as the steam train, and the diesel was relegated to the flatter section below the rack while the steam loco was brought back into service for the top section.
D&RGW tried using the Krauss-Maffei on their mountain grades–they were a total failure; the drag freights burned up the hydraulic transmissions.
So does this mean the start of Trackside Classics? If so, can we have my favorite DB locomotive next, the V160/216? They’re still running around here in Germany and I was able to snap some pictures of a 218 working in Lindau recently.
We’ve done a few before, and we’ll do more. I should probably stick more to American locomotives, but if you want to share your finds, you could post them to the CC Cohort page: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1648121@N23/pool/, or if you want to write up a text to go with the pictures, send them to me at the Contact form.
Thanks, Paul.
haha this cool train inspiration from vw bus
Wonder if they came with optional flip up windshields?
Looking at that diagram, it would be wise to have a lot of spare u-joints on hand….much like ballast resistors for 73-up Chrysler products.
“How about dynamic braking? Can the diesel-hydraulic handle massive engine braking, without cooking the fluid or the whole drive train? That’s another advantage of diesel-electric…”
The Southern Pacific/Denver & Rio Grande Western diesel hydraulics (D&RGW gave up on them and sold their three to SP) had a hydraulic brake, basically like “engine braking” on a car with an automatic transmission and torque converter. Yes, it would heat up the hydraullic fluid.
D&RGW gave up on their Krauss-Maffeis because they overheated in tunnels. Rio Grande has a lot of tunnels, including the six-mile Moffat Tunnel. The railroad went to great lengths to keep the engines cooler, including fabricating air ducts to the radiators, that would pick up air from down low, where it was cooler. Nothing worked. Other problems that the Krauss-Maffei had were altitude-related…improper combustion in the thin air being the worst.
SP also had combustion and overheating problems with theirs. To solve the cooling issues, on their second order, SP specified a water-spray mechanism to help cool the radiators. But ultimately the main advantage claimed for the diesel-hydraulic, a directly-coupled drivetrain that locked all the wheels in one truck together, theoretically preventing wheelslip, did not overcome the other problems of the engines in mountain service. Indeed, when a Krauss-Maffei did slip its wheels, it would do so violently, probably burning wheel-shaped depressions into the rail. Southern Pacific relegated them to flatland service, where their high power and torque could result in a reduction in the number of locomotives required on long, slow trains, and where all of the great outdoors supplied air to cool them. Most of their service wound up being on low-priority freight trains…but only until it was time for their first major service.
The Maybach engine, in contrast to the ElectroMotive (General Motors) two-stroke diesel that was the primary railroad diesel engine, was high-maintenance. In Europe, where railroads were highly subsidized, often seen as “make work” social programs (this is not the case today in Europe, though in the USA, Amtrak is often seen as being run this way). So it didn’t matter much that minor seal work on a Maybach required removal of the diesel engine from the locomotive. The Maybach also had problems with its valve train and fuel injectors. SP saw the steadily increasing cost of maintaining the engines and decided to retire all the Krauss-Maffei diesel-hydraulics save one (of which more further on). The three diesel-hydraulics they bought from the American Locomotive Company, powered by ALCo diesel engines with Voith hydraulic transmissions much like those on the Krauss-Maffeis, were retained until a nearly-normal retirement age.
That one Krauss-Maffei that SP saved was de-engined and one of its transmissions removed; it was scrapped. The frame and body were built into the System Camera Car, which mounted cameras to film (and later, videotape) scenes for their new locomotive simulator. It saw intermittent service, coupled on the front of regular freight trains and controlling them, since it retained its train control systems, while technicians ran the cameras mounted in the nose of the unit. When digital graphic simulations took over, the Camera Car was retired and donated to the California State Railroad Museum, which intended to restore it cosmetically but botched the job, and stopped work, storing the unit outside and unsecured where it was vandalized and copper items such as radiators were stolen by scrap metal thieves. The CSRM sold it to the Pacific Locomotive Association (PLA) which resumed restoration at its shop in Niles Canyon, CA. “New” trucks were discovered in France; they had been removed from a scrapped SP Krauss Maffei, and installed in work train equipment, which was being retired. Luckily the PLA bid on them, and won. Work has been completed that allows it to by pushed along the track, but further work is being done on its control systems so it can lead and operate a train, controlling a trailing locomotive. The locomotive is missing the forward Voith transmission, all the driveshafts, the reduction gears in the trucks, and the radiators. There is a possibility that the rear Maybach diesel could operate through the existing rear transmission to power the rear truck but driveshafts and gearboxes are needed (Cardan shafts were found in Germany and have been acquired), and many were special-order parts made by Voith specifically for the heavier, more powerful American operation, so finding them is uncertain. Those parts and a large amount of effort.could make it operable with one-half its original power.
A test run of the partially restored Krauss Maffei, ex-Southern Pacific 9010, being pushed by an ElectroMotive SD9. The nose of the 9010 forward of the cab is all-new; nothing remained of the original after Southern Pacific rebuilt it into the Camera Car, and the California State Railroad Museum tore all off what remained and lost it.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHtxG3ibwnw&w=560&h=315%5D
Thank you for that very detailed and interesting account of the K-M engines in the US. I was aware of them at the time, and my father and I saw them once in Colorado while on vacation. He knew about them (he was a rail buff), and pointed them out. It seemed a bit odd to think that locomotives from Germany were being used in the US.
I’m not surprised about all of the issues; the V200 and other K-M diesels in Germany were used almost exclusively on flat land. The Alpine regions had been electrified since the 1920s or so. And the loads and expectations were very different than on US freight service.
But it makes for a fascinating chapter of US rail history.
Nice video, and great to see this unique locomotive being restored.
You should be our Trackside Classic Editor! There’s so many fascinating locos to write up. I used to love to see (and hear) the UP turbine locomotives in Colorado and Nebraska; what a howl they had, working up the grades!
Dynamic brakes used to be a factory option. Generally they were procured by RRs with mountainous route profiles; otherwise, it was one more thing to maintain. I think they’re pretty universal now. Same goes for turbochargers.
Hybrid cars have dynamic brakes, except that they use the energy to recharge.
One German success in American railroading came earlier, according to Wm. Manchester: Krupp wheels. Look at their corporate logo.
I can confirm everything Mr. Poon said about the engines; we had them in the Saar class missile craft at the Israeli Navy when I was in the services. They were really the diesel equivalents of racing engines (before people raced diesel-engined cars seriously): DOHC, 6 valves per cylinder, dry sump lubrication with 4 oil pumps, ally construction and and… We had the V16 versions which on full chat (1950 RPM) delivered about 3300 hp from 88L (5370 ci), astronomical for the mid-60s when they were designed. They were reliable as long as you followed the maintenance schedules religiously, and were taken out at 7000 hours to be completely overhauled. Skip that, and things would start fly in the engine room (you never – never – sat between the engines less a connecting rod or a turbo decided to visit the outside world). In the Israeli Railways the German diesel-hydraulic Esslingen DMUs, using the down-rated 1200 hp V12 version did not shine – something which, in all due fairness, also had to do with the fact that IR was just changing from steam to diesel at that time and did not have the knowledge or resources for maintaining them. The problems on hilly routes ring a bell, and they did not do very well on the Tel-Aviv – Jerusalem route. Eventually the engines/boxes were taken out and the units had to suffer the fate of being towed as simple cars behind GM G12s, which were as reliable as anything and could take the abuse under our primitive conditions (IR is nowadays an Electromotive reserve). As a school kid I was fascinated by those exotic things and always managed to avoid the conductor to have a look at the gaping holes where the machinery used to be and the cab controls. Below is a pic (from the Harvard Uni Israel Archives) of one of the DMUs when it was new, somewhere near Beersheba in the Negev desert – hardly the kind of place the German engineers envisaged when they designed it!
American locomotive manufacturer Alco also had a go with a diesel-hydraulic, which I believe used a Voith transmission. A good idea, just not well-suited for U.S. railroads at the time. Hard to beat an EMD’s reliability and tolerance for abuse.
Thanks for this follow up, which I don’t recall from earlier.
Are these locos related to the diesel hydraulics use din parts of the UK in the 1950s and 1960s – I seem to recall they had some German hardware in them
Yes. And the styling of the Western Region ‘Warship’ class was clearly derived from them as well
Not often thought about, and not well-documented, was the best chance Americans had to ride in a train with a hydraulic transmission: the lightweight train sets that hit the tracks for some years, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The United Aircraft TurboTrain was one. It was powered by an adapted Pratt and Whitney turboprop engine…the turbine section, minus the reduction gears and propeller, through a hydraulic (torque converter) transmission. Unfortunately it was unreliable and tended to catch fire. It saw service in the USA on Amtrak and in Canada on Canadian National, later VIA Rail Canada. Amtrak was satisfied (foolish) enough to buy another, longer TurboTrain set, which was wrecked and burned in a collision while on a test run, before delivery. Lucky Amtrak, which wound up parking their other TurboTrains after a shorter time in operation than it took Southern Pacific to decide that the Krauss-Maffei hydraulic-transmission locomotives weren’t worth it. I remember the parked TurboTrains, derelict, their paint faded and windows broken out by vandals, in plain sight of train passengers just north of Washington Union Station. Then one day, they were all gone.
The other hydraulic-transmission passenger trainsets lasted longer. Amtrak continued its enchantment with turbine power and sought out lightweight, turbine-engined trains for use in the Midwest. ANF-Francego of France submitted a design based on a train in European service, powered by a turbine engine adapted from use in a helicopter, through a hydraulic transmission said to be a smaller version of the Voith used in the Krauss-Maffeis. Amtrak bought several and dubbed them “Turboliner.” They liked them, and wanted more for use in upstate New York; but wanted to buy American. Rohr in San Diego CA, an aerospace contractor whose prior rail experience had been with self-propelled electric trains for Bay Area Rapid Transit in the San Francisco area, and for Washington DC Area Mass Transit, submitted a design around ANF-Francego’s mechanicals, in a smoother-looking, less pug-nosed body. It incorporated a third-rail electric pickup and motor, which also drove the hydraulic transmission, for operation into Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
Both the ANF and Rohr trains were operationally successful but their operational inflexibility meant that trains could not be lengthened or shortened to meet passenger demand. In the Midwest, where loadings fluctuated more due to more diverse routes, this proved more of a handicap than in upstate New York, where loadings were more consistent on their one major trunk line. After more than a decade of service, Amtrak transferred the still-operational ANF-Francego sets from Midwest service to New York. Those that entered service received new noses that looked more like the Rohr trains and entered service alongside them. Electric drive was no longer required, as Amtrak had moved out of Grand Central Terminal.
After a few years the French trains’ age began to show. Two of them caught fire, one snarling the evening commute in New York’s Penn Station. Amtrak withdrew the remaining ANFs from service. All were sold for scrap, though one remains in an Indiana junkyard, not yet melted down.
The Rohrs continued in service, but as they aged they would need a major overhaul. New York State contracted with Super Steel Schenectady, an affliate of General Motors, to rebuild them. They made a strategic mistake, in that even though they would pay in more to rebuild the trains than they were worth, they allowed title to remain with Amtrak. When the first ones entered service, a new Amtrak administration, with a particularly headstrong president, David Gunn, didn’t like them…they were expensive to operate. Fuel consumption has been a problem with turbine-powered rail equipment, because of the variable power demands on a powerplant which best likes operating at constant full output. Besides that, the air conditioning wasn’t adequate (all the Turboliners had big windows). Amtrak withdrew them from service and shipped them off to storage in Delaware, leaving New York State holding the bag and the cost of the rebuild. New York sued Amtrak; Amtrak countersued New York. In the end, a settlement was reached; Amtrak would pay for upgrades to the rail infrastructure in upstate New York and the State would relinquish any claim against Amtrak for the rebuilt trains. Interestingly enough, the Commissioner of the New York Department of Transportation when the Turboliner project was undertaken, had by then become president of Amtrak, fueling suggestions of an under-the-table deal.
The Rohr Turboliners remain parked in a dead line in Delaware, and American rail passengers can no longer ride in mainline trains with hydraulic transmissions. Miniature trains in amusement parks and zoos are often powered through automatic transmissions of automotive design, however.
I think the Budd RDC cars had torque converter transmissions in them.
For all those who would like to see Deutsche Bundesbahn V200 002 in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByvbGw6xUjc
With a lot of 1950’s railway atmosphere. Even the V200 railcar cousin VT08 (got the same powertrain) can be seen.