VGN Heat Dissipation at Narrows Power Plant

[NW Mailing List]

Quoting from the "American Society of Civil Engineers - Paper No. 1708" - The Virginian Railway Electrification by George Gibbs, M. Am. Soc. C. E.", published in 1929,:
 
    "Should there, however, be current returned in excess of the amount required by other trains, this excess must be absorbed in some manner to prevent overspeeding the generators at the power house. For this purpose, water rheostats are provided. These are single-pole electrodes placed in the water at the mouth of the discharge tunnel. They cut in automatically and quietly absorb the surplus energy. It is found in practice that these rheostats seldom come into action, because over a long railway line generally a train is in motion to make use of all regenerated energy."
 
Jeff Sanders
 

________________________________
 From: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org>
To: NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 7:30 AM
Subject: Re: VGN Heat Dissipation at Narrows Power Plant
  


 
According to Felix Price, Assistant Power Director at Narrows, and one  of the "Takin' Twenty" Brethren, the New River was used with  electrodes being placed directly into the water. Felix said the river  would sort of "bubble up" and afterwards dead fish would be  seen...Also Russell R. McDaniel spoke of the same.  
Skip Salmon
---- NW Mailing List <nw-mailing-list at nwhs.org> wrote:

=============
 
Is there any information on how the VGN's  Narrows Power plant handled  the problem of power generated by regenerative braking which was not  needed to move another train moving upgrade?

Obviously there 
        were large water-cooled resistor banks.  Were the resistor banks in 
        the river, or in a cooling pond to which cool river water was pumped 
        and from which heated water was discharged?

Is there any 
        surviving information on how all this was handled?

-- abram 
        burnett
 
--
SKIP SALMON
  
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