I am researching and planning for a model of the Trillium Ferry that runs between Toronto and the Toronto Islands. It has a double compound engine which will be operational in the model running on compressed air.
One question I need to answer is " Can a compound engine run with one cylinder in forward and the other in reverse"? To do this the crank would have to be split with one cylinder driving each side and the paddle wheel attached to each side. The drawings and photos I have of the engine and engine control levers give the impression this might be how it was configured but I am not sure how the engine itself would handle having one cylinder running in forward and the other in reverse.
Any thoughts or ideas will be much appreciated.
With compound engines (piston plumbing in series rather than in parallel), the steam lines matter a lot.
In the Woolf configuration, the two cylinders are 180 degree apart so the exhaust from the HP cylinder feeds the LP cylinder directly. If you have it 90 degrees apart, you need to have a "receiver" that acts as a buffer.