21 OCTOBER 2026 WorldWide Drilling Resource® The 1.2 Million-Pound Mistake by Britt Storkson Owner, P2FlowLLC On YouTube, there’s a video titled “The 1.2-Million-Pound Mistake.” The “mistake” here details the problems of a 1.2 million-pound (600-ton) locomotive developed shortly after World War II when the rail industry was transitioning from steam to diesel electric locomotives. For background, I’ll give a short history of locomotive energy sources used to produce steam to move the locomotive. The first energy source was wood, which was replaced by coal because coal delivers more energy per unit volume. Then coal was replaced by bunker fuel, which is a very thick, minimally refined crude oil. It was easier to store and could be pumped into the locomotive. It was also cheap and contained a lot of heat energy (British Thermal Units or Btus). One of the disadvantages of using bunker fuel was it needed to be heated to flow easily through the piping. A public school I worked at some years ago used bunker fuel for heating their classrooms. It contained more Btus than diesel fuel which this school used temporarily when the pipe feeding the fuel to the boiler failed. A lot of ships at sea still use bunker fuel even today. Around the 1950s, most locomotives switched to diesel engines as a motive force and continues to the present time. Also a part of this equation was the fact that steam locomotives not only needed fuel to operate, they needed a lot of water as well. So water stops had to be strategically placed along the route to refill. Refilling with water was a very expensive part of the steam locomotive operation, but it had to be done. So eliminating the water requirements greatly reduced operational costs. The 1.2 million-pound mistake video details how some wealthy individuals who happened to be coal barons wanted to continue using steam and coal for locomotives because they owned the coal mines and could get it very cheap. They wanted to “upgrade” to steam turbines that would generate power to run the motors which moved the train. Big mistake. They were heavy, costly, complicated, and unreliable. They didn’t even fully go into service and were eventually scrapped. This is how product development in general terms works. One experiments with various solutions to the problems to find out what does and doesn’t work. Thomas Edison was quoted as saying: “I have not failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” The moral of this story is that in order to find out what works, one needs to identify what doesn’t work as well. Oftentimes, a solution works, but it turns out to be more costly than it is worth and, as a result, never gets into production. One of the reasons electronics/semiconductors have been so successful and are used everywhere is because of what they deliver relative to their cost. Microprocessors (micros), the brain of a computer, were very expensive when they first came out, but are now dirt cheap. I mean literally “dirt” because the major component of micros is silicon which is nothing more than beach sand. Same goes for computer memory which is also composed of similar materials. One can buy a small micro nowadays for less than 50 cents in quantity. Not only are they cheap, but properly applied, they can be durable and reliable. A microprocessorbased temperature control (think: mechanical thermostat) for example, uses a small fraction of the parts and costs less than a conventional mechanical temperature control. The mechanical control consists of a bimetal strip coiled to increase its surface area, which physically expands or contracts in response to temperature. This movement can be harnessed to move a switch to turn something (like heating or cooling) on or off. The mechanical thermostat has many times the mass, much more cost of materials, and limited flexibility. The electronic component can combine quite a number of functions on one chip and can be modified or programmed using switches or other inputs to execute a wide variety of functions. Like everything, electronics has its limitations. Most electronics are very low power, meaning using less than 0.1 amp or 100 milliamps. When one starts running more amperage (current) through them, they dissipate heat, which must be removed. This is a somewhat complicated addition which greatly increases the cost, so higher power applications are generally not suited for electronics. So what one normally does is use the low power electronics for the computing, then output to a mechanical part to handle the power. Nothing in this world is perfect, but we can make products that serve us adequately, reliably, and inexpensively by respecting these principles. Britt Britt Storkson may be contacted via e-mail to michele@worldwidedrillingresource.com Join us for: Educational Courses Raffles Door Prizes Exhibits Buck Lively Scholarship Auction Golf Tournament February 10th! For more information, call 480-609-3993 info@mountainstatesgroundwater.com mountainstatesgroundwater.com Looking for Events? Click on this box in our online issue worldwidedrillingresource.com
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