The Ultimate Steam Page

Other Recent Steam Developers

updated January 1, 2003

This page provides brief information on several steam designers, not covered in detail elsewhere on these pages, who have recently worked to improve steam locomotives and steam locomotive design. See the other sections of the Ultimate Steam Page for more information on these gentlemen.

Shaun McMahon: Technical Manager of the FCAF, Shaun has steam experience in the UK, South Africa, and Argentina and has worked closely with L. D. Porta for the last several years. See the FCAF pages for details of Shaun's work in Argentina.

Nigel Day: A regular driver on the Snowdon Mountain Railway in Wales, Nigel has made numerous technical improvements to his regular locomotive, No. 5, including oil firing and a Lempor exhaust. Additionally, he has installed Lempor exhaust systems on the steam locomotives of several other UK tourist railways. See the News Archive page for photos of Nigel's work, and the Last 30 page for information on several steam locomotives he has worked on.

Roger Waller: Roger is the head of the steam locomotive design department at Dampflokomotiv und Maschinenfabrik AG - DLM. Roger assisted David Wardale with testing of the Red Devil No. 3450 in South Africa. Later, he was instrumental in the construction of new, modern rack steam locomotives at the Swiss Locomotive and Machine Works (SLM). When SLM decided to get out of the new steam business, Roger and his team in the steam department convinced Hug Engineering to take them on and DLM was formed. Several steam projects are presently in the works at DLM.

William Petitjean: Bill Petitjean is a professional mechanical engineer and steam enthusiast. Bill wrote a series of articles analyzing the technical reasons for steam's demise in the U.S. for the magazine Locomotive & Railway Preservation in the 1980's. Bill has devoted a lot of thought to how new, durable, mechanically simple steam locomotives could be built for tourist railway and "third world" service. His ideas are based on maximizing steam's inherent advantages of simplicity and durability, rather than emphasizing thermodynamic improvements. Bill recently published a book titled The End of Steam which is available from Little River Locomotive Company .

Jos Koopmans: Jos is an engineer in the Netherlands who has recently been doing theoretical research and field testing with advanced steam locomotive exhaust systems. Jos recently completed the "Unified Exhaust Theory for Steam Locomotives", which advances the earlier work of Chapelon, Geisl, and Porta and explains aspects of the function of the exhaust system previously not explained.

Jos is married and has four children, (1 graduated, 2 students and the youngest still in high school). Jos studied naval architecture at Delft University and became a model engineer at the time. The Delft library was a "gold mine" for a lot of technical information which he still has in the form of a stack of photocopies. At present Jos is employed as a logistics consutant for the largest tranport and logistics supplier of the Netherlands. During 1987 he wrote a concept for a doctor's thesis about the history of exhaust research. This was based on the notion that research had stopped with the original problem unsolved! The work progressed slowly, but early 1993 he became one of the originators of the project to build a replica of one of the Arnhem streetcars of which the originals were destroyed during the battle of Arnhem in 1944. One thing led to the other and now Jos is president of the Tramway Society of the Netherlands, an umbrella organisation for a number of societies owning well over 150 tramcars and locomotives. One of the locomotive-owning societies was so kind to be interested in testing also, so that Jos was in a position to really test a number of vague notions that he had about multi-nozzle exhaust systems. The tests proved his concepts after which he formulated the condition for maintaining equal vacuum while changing to more orifices and the Unified momentum flux equation defining the equilibrium between draft and smokebox vacuum for exhaust systems with 1 to n orifices. As Jos puts it: "I think I have advanced exhaust theory and the computational possibilities for some years and I really hope that others will pick it up as a starter for additional work. Contrary to others like Giesl-Gieslingen I firmly belief that we do not know all there is to know about exhaust systems."

Copies of Jos' technical papers on steam locomotive exhaust system performance are available on the Exhaust Systems page. You can contact Jos at t.koopmans@hccnet.nl

(information on the following steam researchers will be added as time allows)

Patick Barry

Ted Pritchard

Harry Valentine

Ted Blasingame