gr@uvacs.UUCP (12/19/83)
The ACE 3000 seems to be on somewhat of back burner at the present time unfortunately. The design people were supposed to visit Virginia and the Alleghany Central Railroad where I part-time to get some measurements and data, but alas, they never showed. I found out later that the big bottleneck now in the project is indeed that the people involved do not have even a rudimentary background in railroad steam! Even more recently I found out that some of the other stumbling blocks are the same as those that nixed the steam-turbines of the late fifties: Cinder/Dust contamination of electrical equipment, uncontrollable coal quality, refractory problems and the like. The really good news though is that the backing is still there and I understand that research in other areas is being done and that specialized experiments involving Ross Rowland's 614 are on the drawing board!