German logistics, purchase programs and war booty, reality and alternatives 1935-43

South African 1950s condensing tender. Narrow gauge rail 3' 6" apart.
Granted it is for engine making around 4000hp.
There are a number of fans in the center of the tender so it draws air through the vents/screens on the sides and exhausts the cooling air out the top.
The steam engine itself uses a fan to draw the air though the firebox and boiler to replace the draft provided by the steam exhaust but I don't think most steam road vehicles did that anyway? They used natural draft and not forced draft?

Comparisons between river boats and/or railroads vs road vehicle gets a little tough. You don't need a lot of power to move a boat/small ship very fast. Railroads have very shallow grades, a 3% grade is considered the practical limit and at 3% the load the locomotive can pull is fraction of what it can pull on level ground.

I just happened to run across a description of a 1930 2-8-0 German locomotive built for burning pulverized Lignite by AEG. I have no idea if they built more than one. Most of the details pertain to the tender and feed arrangements. Like a picture of the single cylinder engine used for powering the conveyer screws (max capacity 4360lb per hour) and the 7hp steam turbine powered fan for primary air. It does not give the locomotive's size or power except to say it was rated for train of 1415tons. Grade not given so assume level. The pulverized coal bunker size (a cylinder) was 6.5ft diameter and 13 feet long.
British fooled around with a few 'coal dust' powered locomotives as early as 1917(?) but that was to use up bituminous (black) coal dust that had fallen through the screens of the collieries.
Germans built 6(?) 2-10-0s in 1930/early 30s much like the 2-8-0 but from a different maker. I don't know how many other experiments were made. The East Germans did try again in the early 1950s.

It seems you can have simple/cheap with lower efficiency or complicated/expensive and decent efficiency.

Shortround6 said:

Comparisons between river boats and/or railroads vs road vehicle gets a little tough. You don't need a lot of power to move a boat/small ship very fast. Railroads have very shallow grades, a 3% grade is considered the practical limit and at 3% the load the locomotive can pull is fraction of what it can pull on level ground.

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You don't need a lot of power to move a boat (barge) slowly; increase speed and the power curve goes up really fast.

Reluctant Poster said:

Wood is easier to procure than lignite so why not just burn wood

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Most of Europe had cut down many trees for Ship building and Charcoal production, so abundant 'Free' Wood hadn't been a thing for Centuries.

Notice my post stopped at 1870 for the Southern RRs?
The easily accessible wood had long since been cut near the depots and stations, away from the where the RR lines passed. So cutting parties had to travel farther away, which took more time and was more costly. Wood wasn't really 'Free' any more

Old Growth forests were disappearing.

1880s, they started converting to coal burning, as mining had picked up after the Civil War, coal price was dropping, availability rising. The US Coal fields in use were for the higher grade, large scale Lignite mining wasn't a thing, yet.

Reluctant Poster said:

Railways move far greater tonnage than even a fleet of steam lorries justifying the expenditure. You're not going to put these up one every road the lorries could possibly take. Basically as SR noted you are restricted to an out and back operation. See attached document:

"The steam waggon paid best on long journeys of say 20 miles out and 20 miles back home with
loads both ways. The waggon could work a 40 or 50 mile day and be ready for a repeat journey the next
day. Horses could not stand this. In rush hours waggons could cope with the extra work whereas horses
would be working near their limit and could not do more. In terms of ton-miles, the waggon working rate
was reckoned to be 1 1/4 old pence per ton-mile as against 2 3/4 old pence per ton-mile for horses. This latter
figure is considered to be very low, horse costs were often 4 to 6 old pence per ton-mile (ref. 1). However,
reference 14 (a Brewer's working with three to four Sentinel waggons) quotes a figure of 2.6 old pence per
ton-mile and average annual running cost of a waggon at £400 to £430.

Note that is from 1912. The S version of the Sentinel waggon introduced in 1934 was much more sophisticated and would have a greater range for the same expenditure of coal. I was surprised to find that it was a water tube boiler with a superheated and a feedwater heater!
The Sentinel in its final form is an amazing tribute to the perseverance of the British in wringing the last drop of performance out of a technology that was obviously on the way out. Sentinel's main rival Foden saw the writing on the wall and abandoned steam in favor of Gardner diesels in 1931 prodding Britain first commercial successful lorry.

https://blog.japanesecartrade.com/663-foden/

I can't imagine any other country devoting the effort although.

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As has been pointed out by others the Germans did experiment with steam vehicles prewar. Henschel in particular as a major steam locomotive manufacturer. Here is a list of prewar vehicles:
Of particular note is the Sentinel S6 which they equipped with a mechanical stoker. I would like to the particulars of that installation. Here are some images of Henschel steam powered vehicles

Interesting post on German logistics

The US bombing survey report dealing with the German fuel everything says this:
By August, 1944, gas generators had been put on about 100,000 vehicles and were consuming about 155,000,000 cu ft of wood, and quantities of other fuel equivalent to 78,000,000 cu ft of wood, per year. About 500,000 tons of gasoline were saved this way in 1944.

(military saved about 130,000 tons, rest was civilian saving; 1000 cu ft = ~28.3 m^3)

For the comparison, German military consumed about 100,000 tons of motor gasoline per month in the 5 most intense months of combat in 1940 (May, June, August, September, October). They used a lot of aviation gasoline and diesel as separate categories, though*.

The report also says this before the previous quote:
When the Caucasus offensive failed, the government required most classes of civilians to use gas generators, many of which burned wood, although some burned anthracite coal and other fuels.

So basically the era of 1935-42 was a prime time for the gas-generation to be introduced en masse, and save hefty amount of fuel for the Germans. Even if the start is in 1939, by 1942/43 huge amounts of fuel could've been saved.

* military consumption also included another ~90,000 tons of AvGas and ~30,000 tons of diesel per month average for these 5 months

marathag said:

Most of Europe had cut down many trees for Ship building and Charcoal production, so abundant 'Free' Wood hadn't been a thing for Centuries.

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The fact Germany had been reforesting for a long time. The extent of Germany's forests at the end of WWII was almost as much as it is today and that's after (as posted by Tomo Pauk):
"By August, 1944, gas generators had been put on about 100,000 vehicles and were consuming about 155,000,000 cu ft of wood, and quantities of other fuel equivalent to 78,000,000 cu ft of wood, per year. About 500,000 tons of gasoline were saved this way in 1944."

"Forests cover 32 percent (11.4 million hectares) of Germany's territory, making it one of Europe's most forested countries. Since World War II, the forest area has been expanded by more than 1.5 million hectares, and home to some 90 billion trees, which translates to 1,000 trees per capita."

Reluctant Poster said:

The extent of Germany's forests at the end of WWII was almost as much as it is today and that's after
....
"Forests cover 32 percent (11.4 million hectares) of Germany's territory, making it one of Europe's most forested countries. Since World War II, the forest area has been expanded by more than 1.5 million hectares, and home to some 90 billion trees, which translates to 1,000 trees per capita."

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For the expansionist Nazi Germany, casting the sight on the forests in the neighboring countries would've not be out of ordinary.
Ardennes, Czech & Austrian forests, these in Poland, in the Baltic states - a lot of material to burn even before Norwegian and the forests of the Soviet Union and in the Balkans are considered.

tomo pauk said:

For the expansionist Nazi Germany, casting the sight on the forests in the neighboring countries would've not be out of ordinary.
Ardennes, Czech & Austrian forests, these in Poland, in the Baltic states - a lot of material to burn even before Norwegian and the forests of the Soviet Union and in the Balkans are considered.

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Problem might not be as much the existence of forests, but the availability of manpower to harvest and transport it. Logging at the time was back-breaking work, and with able-bodied men either at the front or tied up in other necessary jobs, who's going to do it? Mountainous terrain and lack of roads, like in much of Norway for instance, make it even more difficult.

Not saying wood gas generators weren't useful, but a massive increase in usage compared to the historical might be difficult to achieve in practice.

z42 said:

Logging at the time was back-breaking work, and with able-bodied men either at the front or tied up in other necessary jobs, who's going to do it?

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Germans found a way for the loggers to help them save the equivalent of 500 thousands of tons of gasoline in 1943. Possibly/probably, finding these people in, say, 1939 would've been even easier. Once foreign territories are captured, people there will far more likely do the logging there, than serve in the German-aligned military.
Granted, not putting the Jews and others in the concentration camps with the desire of extermination was an option, but that will never happen with Nazis at the helm.

z42 said:

Mountainous terrain and lack of roads, like in much of Norway for instance, make it even more difficult.

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See Northern Poland, Baltic countries, Belarus and North Ukraine - pretty much flat and wooded.
Producer gas trucks can help out in the wooded areas, especially in these that are not flat.

z42 said:

Not saying wood gas generators weren't useful, but a massive increase in usage compared to the historical might be difficult to achieve in practice.

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As-is, it was pretty massive with the 100 thousand of cars converted. Perhaps it is not needed that even more is converted, but that the conversions are undertaken earlier, so the cumulative effect on the oil supply is greater over time.

tomo pauk said:

The US bombing survey report dealing with the German fuel everything says this:
By August, 1944, gas generators had been put on about 100,000 vehicles and were consuming about 155,000,000 cu ft of wood, and quantities of other fuel equivalent to 78,000,000 cu ft of wood, per year. About 500,000 tons of gasoline were saved this way in 1944.

(military saved about 130,000 tons, rest was civilian saving; 1000 cu ft = ~28.3 m^3)

For the comparison, German military consumed about 100,000 tons of motor gasoline per month in the 5 most intense months of combat in 1940 (May, June, August, September, October). They used a lot of aviation gasoline and diesel as separate categories, though*.

The report also says this before the previous quote:
When the Caucasus offensive failed, the government required most classes of civilians to use gas generators, many of which burned wood, although some burned anthracite coal and other fuels.

So basically the era of 1935-42 was a prime time for the gas-generation to be introduced en masse, and save hefty amount of fuel for the Germans. Even if the start is in 1939, by 1942/43 huge amounts of fuel could've been saved.

* military consumption also included another ~90,000 tons of AvGas and ~30,000 tons of diesel per month average for these 5 months

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With the caveat of comparing 1940 and 1944 numbers, those 500k tons per years means about 42k per month. So out of a total military liquid fuel consumption of 100k+90k+30k = 220k tons, that's about a 20% increase on top. Compared to the cost and manpower of building 100k wood gas generators, and the wood harvesting and transport to feed them, how does the cost and manpower of an additional 42kton per month synthetic fuel production, and the brown coal extraction and transport to feed them, look? Preferably dispersed, and even better, dispersed in underground locations.

tomo pauk said:

For the expansionist Nazi Germany, casting the sight on the forests in the neighboring countries would've not be out of ordinary.
Ardennes, Czech & Austrian forests, these in Poland, in the Baltic states - a lot of material to burn even before Norwegian and the forests of the Soviet Union and in the Balkans are considered.

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Let germany found oil fields of matzen in Austria at the Moment of anschluss, and some oil could be gained.. without the sintetic oil,a lot of coal could be exported to Italy for example

z42 said:

With the caveat of comparing 1940 and 1944 numbers, those 500k tons per years means about 42k per month. So out of a total military liquid fuel consumption of 100k+90k+30k = 220k tons, that's about a 20% increase on top. Compared to the cost and manpower of building 100k wood gas generators, and the wood harvesting and transport to feed them, how does the cost and manpower of an additional 42kton per month synthetic fuel production, and the brown coal extraction and transport to feed them, look? Preferably dispersed, and even better, dispersed in underground locations.

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Similar idea crossed my mind when I was championing the steam trucks - ie. how does the wide-scale steam-ification compares with making the additional synthetic fuel facilities.
The doc referred above (the USBSS Oil division final report) offers some cues about the historical syn fuel facilities. Namely, that they were very expensive, required high grade steel in huge quantities*, and that the allocation of both required materials and manpower was almost always behind the schedule. Shortcoming was also that 8-10 tons of brown coal yielded just one ton of gasoline (granted, that was a high-quality grade).

*quotes:
The oil industry's requirements, moreover, were especially burdensome on the steel industry because alloy steels and special forgings constituted a substantial part of the tonnage needed. Making the large high-pressure vessels required for the hydrogenation plants was a job comparable to manufacturing naval guns. Steel deliveries began to lag as early as 1938 and were 130,000 tons short of allocations when the war begun.
...
Even before Germany went to war, the expansion program was far behind schedule. Several plants (Wanne Eickel, Schwarzheide, Welheim, and the Scholven extension) were completed as planned in 1938, but others (including Luetzkendorf Fischer, Hoesch, and Essener Verein) missed the deadline by from three to six months. Bythe next year, every project except the Gelsenberg plant and the iso-octane plant at Oppau had been delayed from one to nine months. The Luetzkendorf hydrogenation plant was thirteen months behind. Boehlen III and Zeitz I and II, scheduled for completion in December, 1939, and May, 1940, respectively, lagged from 11 to 16 months.
...
Diversion of steel and labor to the production of tanks, submarines, and other materiel curtailed and delayed the oil program, but actual deliveries of steel for the oil projects, between 1 July 1937 and 1 April 1944, were about 4,380,000 tons. This amount of steel would have sufficed to build a battle fleet four times as big as the U. S. Navy was in January, 1940.

tl;dr - The gas producer mods were far less taxing on the supply of the high quality steel than the syn oil factories, and these factories were consuming brown coal as crazy.

tomo pauk said:

Shortcoming was also that 8-10 tons of brown coal yielded just one ton of gasoline (granted, that was a high-quality grade).

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That sounds like a lot, but looking at the energy balance, it might not be that bad. Taking 9 tons as the middle of the road figure, with an energy density of lignite at about 18 MJ/kg and gasoline at 46 MJ/kg, we get 9*18/46 = 3.5. So for 3.5 units of energy in brown coal we get 1 unit of, for the time at least, pretty good gasoline.

Now comparing to wood gas generation using your figures above, 155+78=233 million cu ft = 6.6 million m^3. Assuming a wood density of about 600 kg/m^3 (assuming the input is birch, pine, spruce, a bit on the high side maybe), that works out to 4 billion kg. So this should be the equivalent of about 500ktons of gasoline, or 7.9 units of energy in wood to get one unit of gasoline equivalent out.

So the energy balance of wood gasification is worse than from coal hydrogenation. Further, add in some steam powered bucket excavators and, hoo boy, you have more lignite than you know what to do with.

Diversion of steel and labor to the production of tanks, submarines, and other materiel curtailed and delayed the oil program, but actual deliveries of steel for the oil projects, between 1 July 1937 and 1 April 1944, were about 4,380,000 tons. This amount of steel would have sufficed to build a battle fleet four times as big as the U. S. Navy was in January, 1940.

tl;dr - The gas producer mods were far less taxing on the supply of the high quality steel than the syn oil factories, and these factories were consuming brown coal as crazy.

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Oof. Yeah, 4 million tons of steel is, uh, quite a lot. How much does a wood gasifier + gas purifier for a lorry weigh? Even at 500kg(???), for 100k gasifiers that's still only 50k tons which is nothing compared to 4M tons. And probably basic mild construction steel is good enough for that purpose.

z42 said:

So the energy balance of wood gasification is worse than from coal hydrogenation. Further, add in some steam powered bucket excavators and, hoo boy, you have more lignite than you know what to do with.

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There is no doubt that wood is the least efficient source among the burnable fuels. Advantage is that everyone can supply the wood for themselves, and locally. You can literary chop some wood, put in in the 'cooker' and off you go. The waste wood is a fair game, too.
If you have more lignite than you can use, cook the lignite in the producer gas device.

tomo pauk said:

There is no doubt that wood is the least efficient source among the burnable fuels. Advantage is that everyone can supply the wood for themselves, and locally. You can literary chop some wood, put in in the 'cooker' and off you go. The waste wood is a fair game, too.

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Sure, it can be an excellent choice for sort-of rural areas with easy access to firewood, which also avoids long distance transport of wood with its poor energy density (compared to fossil fuels).

Assuming you can find the idle manpower to gather and chop the wood, that is..

If you have more lignite than you can use, cook the lignite in the producer gas device.

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Yes, but is it feasible? Going by your previous post in this same thread German logistics, purchase programs and war booty, reality and alternatives 1935-43 it seems the gasifiers wanted either wood or anthracite. That 'other fuels' in that quote is pulling an awful lot of weight if it includes stuff like lignite as well. My understanding is that gasifiers are pretty picky about having relatively 'pure' fuel; if there's too much gunk the engine won't like it.

don4331 said:

You don't need a lot of power to move a boat (barge) slowly; increase speed and the power curve goes up really fast.

Of course, rivers have several challenges....they often aren't straight, they freeze over in winter, they often don't start and end exactly where you want. But it you can more good, over water is ideal.​

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BTW, any idea what kinds of power plants ~1930 era central European canal barges had? Presumably something fairly simplistic, say a fire-tube boiler with a triple expansion engine? What kind of power levels are we generally talking about? Few hundred hp?

Could such things be powered with powdered lignite similar to the locomotive experiments described here in this thread, if one wanted to save higher quality coal for, say, steel production?

z42 said:

BTW, any idea what kinds of power plants ~1930 era central European canal barges had? Presumably something fairly simplistic, say a fire-tube boiler with a triple expansion engine? What kind of power levels are we generally talking about? Few hundred hp?

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I think it would be more a double acting single piston, locomotive style, than a more complex uniflow or triple expansion unit.
These barges didn't need the efficiency or extra power of those, but is possible might have a compound high and low pressure pistone setup, that was common on tugboats that needed more power than efficiency

A lot depends on the boiler pressure. Compounding started in 1860s (aside from a few experiments) but you needed about 60psi to make it worthwhile. Triple expansion started in the late 1870s but that called for a large change in boiler pressure. For triple expansion to really work you needed the exhaust steam from the high pressure cylinder to be close to 60lbs.
Large steam ships also used condensers. This had the advantage (unlike RR and road engines) of having the exhaust of low pressure going into a slightly lower than full atmospheric pressure. Even a few PSI makes a difference at the low pressures they were operating at.
Steamships, especially river craft, had different priorities than RR engines. RR did a lot of work in the late 1880s and 1890s with compound locomotives but they did not like the complication (most of them used 4 cylinders, there were some 3 cylinder, one high pressure exhausting into two low pressure, one high pressure on one side and low pressure on the other caused too many problems with unequal power on each side of the locomotive). The RRs went to superheaters for better efficiency. The RRs were using the exhaust for forced draft.
Depending on simple, the river boat men wanted things uncomplicated. They seemed to use either one cylinder simple, one cylinder double acting or two cylinder compound. They weren't going to go fast no matter what so high power wasn't needed. Triple expansion might have been used on fast passenger craft. And I mean fast, which were rare.
In the US the State of Maine had a sizable steam boat fleet over about 100 years and one line had two sister ships, except one had a single engine and the other had two engines (double the power) for greater thrills for the summer visitors to Bar Harbor (Arcadia National park). Full power meant speeds in the high teens
This power came in handy one time when other steamer managed to run herself aground.

low tide for more drama.
At high tide and with engines full astern and with a salvage tug she still wasn't moving.
They got the steamer Moosehead with her 2400hp engines back up near the stranded steamer and full power on the Norumbega in reverse, the salvage tug straining on the tow rope the Moosehead used full throttle forward and the resulting prop wash was enough to lift the Norumbega free and after minor repairs returned to service for another 18 years.
Point of this is that the Moosehead had double the power of her Sister and was known to be, by far, the most powerful boat for her size on the 200 mile Maine coast.
Average, everyday steam boats used much simpler powerplants.

A couple of semi-(un?)related lectures by a Dr Robert Citino.

Wehrmacht in 1942:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNDhswF1GKk
Wehrmacht in 1943:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SdO-btKuds
It makes the interesting point that rather than "blitzkrieg" being anything new, the "German way of war" had been based on maneuver warfare since the time of Frederick the Great. At that time Prussia was a small state sandwiched between the superpowers of the day (France and Russia), and a short war leading to a decisive victory was key to survival then, just as it would have been in WWII. They never had the resources to fight a long drawn-out war of attrition, not in the Napoleonic era, not in WWI, and not in WWII.

Thus we have a combination of technological factors leading to the trench stalemate of WWI, and the development of armored warfare in the interwar years, not as something fundamentally new, but rather allowing the old maneuver warfare to be practiced again (this sentence being my own interpretation of events, nothing Citino says in the lectures).

Much of the Wehrmacht higher officer corps were educated in this Prussian tradition, and in maneuver warfare at the operational level they were very, very good. Logistics, intel, and the grand strategic goals, much less so. It's also mentioned that already by 1942 they had partially 'demotorized' the army, but it's not specified whether this is due to a lack of vehicles or fuel. In 1942 they launched a number of large-scale operations in the East as well as Northern Africa, trying to finish the jobs that had not been achieved in the previous year. Ultimately, being spread too thin probably resulted in a shortening of the war vs. if they had concentrated their resources on one such large-scale operation.

The second lecture is mostly about the higher officer corps largely realizing the war was lost, but some combination of dedication to duty, fear/admiration of mustache man, and just not thinking ahead, led to them fighting on until the bitter end.