i can only sometimes control the rivets

It kinda does. It's someone trying for the look but just ending up with something awkward. Someone copying without understanding. The proportions are just wrong.

 

Streamlined steam locomotives are either aesthetic masterpieces or complete duds, stylistically. Of course nobody agrees completely on which go on which side of that line ...

Most people seem to think the LNER A4 Pacifics, which include world speed record holder Mallard, were successes aesthetically:



The LMS's streamlined Princess Coronation class was more bulbous and not quite as popular, but I think it's quite attractive:

 

So many of them end up looking like rail Zeppelins of one sort or another.

 

And then there's this oddball, LNER № 10000, which was an experimental locomotive with a high-pressure water-tube boiler following marine practice.

It proved unsuccessful as well as just plain odd-looking and was nicknamed the "Galloping Sausage" by railwaymen.

Later on its chassis was used to make what was essentially a slightly longer A4 with similar streamlined casing, which proved fairly successful, but it didn't survive.

 

Thaaaat one just looks like a dildo to me, honestly.

Also camo green is just not a good color for gothic.

 

I'd buy it.

 

It's pretty horrid, though I like its rebuild as a conventional locomotive. One remaining feature was that the two sets of trailing wheels weren't in a trailing truck but were independent. The first pair were mounted on the typical Cartazzi axle used by the LNER, which permits limited, self-centering lateral motion within a rigid frame, while the rearmost pair were a two-wheel Bissel truck.

It was basically a longer A4 with a significantly bigger firebox and more power, as well as a very spacious cab.

 

Design snobbery is nowhere near a bad thing, dude. Even when you're wrong.

:D

 

Norfolk and Western #2300 "Jawn Henry", the last steam-turbine locomotive tested on American railroads. Built by Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton with electrical equipment by Westinghouse in 1954.

As you can see, it was ridiculously huge, 111 ft long without water tender (coal was carried in the hopper in front of the cab). It used a Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boiler, as seen on e.g. ships, running at a pressure of 600 psi, double the general maximum for a regular steam locomotive boiler. This fed a turbine which turned a generator, much like the diesel engine in a modern locomotive does; the whole think ran on four C trucks, so a total of twelve traction motors and driven axles. Unfortunately it wasn't a success. Coal and water don't agree with generators and motors, and caused short circuits. The feedwater pumps were under-specified and broke down all the time. It was too long to turn on most N&W turntables, and while it proved efficient at low speeds, it was a different story above 15 mph. It spent 3 years working mostly helper service on steep grades, for which its low speed, high tractive effort optimal conditions were well-suited. After that, it was scrapped, and the N&W started buying diesels for freight service.

 

With modern technology you could probably do it, but whether it would be any better than alternatives is doubtful I'd have thought. The only truly successful steam turbine locomotives were in Sweden, three very conventional looking direct-drive locomotives for a mineral-hauling railway. All three survive and at least one has run in preservation.



A similar design on a slightly larger, faster locomotive was the LMS Turbomotive, which had a reasonably successful career but in the end proved not sufficiently better than conventional piston-driven locomotives to be worthwhile.



and the final one like this was the Pennsylvania Railroad's mighty S2, a 6-8-6 monstrosity. It worked great at speed but was hugely inefficient at slower speeds. Note the quad stack, the only locomotive I can think of with more than two.



Similar locomotives to the Swedish one were also built in Germany and Switzerland to modest success.

 

That's because freight generally earns way more than passenger traffic. Even in the golden age of train travel, let alone having to compete with airline fares today.

 

Here's another strange one from the age of steam:



A Kitson-Meyer, one of the rarer types of articulated steam locomotives, a British development of the German-invented Meyer type. Separation of the two powered trucks underneath allowed the locomotive's firebox to fit between them, resulting in an easier-fired, better-steaming boiler, and being tank engines they were equally good at running in both directions. In fact, crews generally preferred treating the cab end as "front" because of a better view. This one is a rack-and-adhesion locomotive; note the separate, smaller cylinders above the main ones on the smokebox end, driving a gear stack between the first and second axle?

Almost all of these were sold to British-controlled interests in South America, and Kitson went bankrupt in 1929 and no more were built after that. For a 1909 locomotive this is pretty sophisticated. The locomotive is air-braked and probably supports train air-brakes too, it has a fully covered cab, and in this case appears to be a wood-burner.

A small number survive. Here's one:


This one appears very similar to the old photograph except the lack of rack cylinders, and may simply have had the rack cylinders removed later, as they proved unnecessary.

Some larger examples were created, like these: