You don’t see very many American tank locomotives outside of the Canadian National 4-6-4T’s.
I really hope one day they can at least do a cosmetic restoration of CN #47. 
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I’m currently dreaming and scheming about adding on a family room with a fireplace. My grandparents had one and I loved it up until the day my grandpa had a wood stove insert put in. My mom and step-dad had one in a house for a number of years until they had a bit of a scary chimney fire one night. They had a gas insert installed immediately after that. A friend at work has one in his house and has the chimney cleaned twice a year and still recently found out he had a chimney fire this year as well and now the liner needs to be replaced. I want a traditional fireplace so badly, but if I can swing this family room addition, it will likely get a gas fireplace to avoid the potential for a chimney fire.
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And a gas fireplace is a lot less work. Don’t have to deal with a bunch of ash and a pile of wood.
And I’ve reached the age where I believe that the person who said that a person who cuts his own wood is twice warmed actually has someone else doing it for him.
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Yep, 30 years after I moved in here I am starting to appreciate the gas fireplace more and more. They are all on a thermostat and can be flicked on and off as required. We can run all three fireplaces cheaper than we can run our furnace and there is no fan running as there is with the furnace. The furnace fan uses a lot of power. The fireplaces have small fans but we leave them off. Having one fireplace on in the family room which is in the centre of the house keeps a large part of the house warm by itself. At 69 I think the firewood thing is not missed.
We put an addition onto our kitchen in 1997 and had a fireplace built on the rear wall. The stones are limestone and the whole thing has its own foundation in the basement.
It’s large and built so that my we can slide a simple grill device (not shown) into it so that my personal chef (Lady NKP) can cook steaks, chops and the like over the wood fire whenever she wants to; usually every couple of weeks. You can imagine how good the food tastes when it’s cooked there. We even have a large crane (not shown) that slips into the two brackets seen on the extreme left wall so that a pot or something similar can be held in place over the fire and then easily swung out; it turns out we’ve used that crane just two or three times in 25 years because it blackens up the pot or kettle something awful.
We have fires probably 3 times a week, sometimes more, sometimes less, during the season.
When you add up the cost of the wood plus the annual visit from the chimney sweep, it’s not cheap to use–but we absolutely love the effect. We entertain in this room with its kitchen table, fireplace and appliances. The 12-point deer head was taken about 1955 by her dad and looks much better here than in the living room of his Cape Cod-style bungalow, right?
The room also has four large skylights, making it the perfect place to be, day or night. I spend a lot of time here in my recliner.
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Same here. I don’t mind getting the wood and the labor involved. The smell and the crackling flames make it worth it to me.
I know that chimney fires happen. One big thing besides regular cleaning is to burn only seasoned hardwood. Burning wood before it’s completely seasoned can deposit junk on the chimney.
I have a large steel-tined brush with a set of fiberglass poles which screw together. Each year I climb up to the roof and clean the chimney. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to continue to do that.
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Good afternoon
They certainly weren’t a deal breaker Brent. Convenience with no maintenance is a plus, evan though your fire wood is right in your backyard.
Get one of those compact JBL speakers to hide behind something on the mantle, and Bluetooth the snap crackle pop of a fire from Google to it. Ya won’t even know the difference!
Hi Ed,… The Goats are back!
Images linked to Wikipedia
TF
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Evening Diners, Flo, please could I have a neat Orange juice and 2 Aspirin.
When I got back last Friday p.m., I went down with a stonking Head-cold which has knocked me on my back. Slowly recovering, but I’ve not been this ill in years.
Here’s something from years gone by.
In 1829, the ‘Stourbridge Lion’ was the first locomotive to be operated in the United States and one of the first locomotives to operate outside of Britain.
She takes her name from the Lion’s face painted on the Smokebox door and ‘Stourbridge’ in England - where she was manufactured by the firm, Foster, Rastrick and Company.
The locomotive, obtained by the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, shipped to New York in May 1829, where she was tested - raised-up on blocks.
She was then taken to Honesdale, Pennsylvania for testing on the company’s newly built track. The locomotive performed well in her first tests in August 1829, but was found to be too heavy for the track and she was never used for her intended purpose of hauling coal wagons.
During the next few decades, a number of parts were removed from the abandoned locomotive until only the boiler and a few other components remained.
These were acquired by the Smithsonian Institution in 1890 and are currently on display at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore.
American Rails has a good lot of info on its site ("Stourbridge Lion" Locomotive: Facts, History, Photos)
In this diagram, I noticed the ‘Fish-belly’ rail profile from the early days of rail transport and when I was a young UK modeller, up until my interest in USA Railroads (2016) I had always referred to ‘Rail-joiners’ as ‘Fishplates’, as per our prototype railways.
Paul.
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Would it have not been easier to build that fireplace if you had politely asked the animal to move?
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The Candy man can cuz he mixes it up with love and makes the world taste good
TF
The candy man makes everything he bakes so satisfying and delicious
Good Morning Diners. Zoe, coffee and a breakfast burrito please.
Did a quick bit of research last night and it appears companies now make what they call hybrid fireplaces. You can burn either natural gas or wood in them. You just have to install/remove the gas log sets, which one manufacturer said takes about an hour to convert each time. Interesting idea, but nobody had any prices listed. I’m sure they’re not cheap. Acquiring firewood isn’t a big concern for me. I live in an area with loads of federal forests. A person can get a permit to harvest wood from dead/downed trees for not much money. A friend of mine has done this for years.
@NKP_guy Love that fireplace.
The first locomotive of the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad (Galena and Chicago Union Railroad at the time). It arrived via schooner in Chicago in October 1848 and pulled the first westbound train out of Chicago on 10/25/1848. It was second-hand for the CNW as it was originally built for the Utica and Schenectady Railroad in 1837.
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Good morning
While doing some research it was noticed some of my bridges are plastered all over the internet. Wonder how that happened?
Wasn’t my doing? But somehow they’re. there. Huh.
TF
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Good morning, diners. It’s a foggy, dreary day on the plains.
The past several days have been ‘working on the railroad’ days, but not on the layout. My work area and storage closet in the layout room was a mess. I searched for a while trying to find something before I resolved to finally face the bad situation. I had to try to organize and clean out the closet. I’ve printed out labels for some storage boxes, and I’ve tried to get everything into the right containers. What a mess!
James Hill, the empire builder, poses in 1908 on the locomotive he rode when putting in tracks in Montana in the 1880s:
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They shouldn’t have ever got rid of those beautiful things!
TF
1 cord of wood - not much money
1 Dodge Ram 3500 Crew Cab 4X4 w/8 foot box to haul wood - $80,780
Inexpensive at twice the price.
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And some they say buy a $90,000 BMW station wagon to haul a bunch of crap all over town.
TF
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This is an adventure for you, impresive itinerary!
Just finished my share of today’s housework, so brain may not be in gear… I think I knew some of your journey, just not paying sufficient attention.
If your Canada leg brings you close to Pictou, Nova Scotia, PM me for a phone #
Enjoy the ride…
Good day all. I always seem to step into the dinner the morning after some great topic has rolled by. But i wanted to speak about the fireplace and wood/chimney fires. In the home we had for about 20 years in it we had a wood stove with a glass door it pumped out the heat really well we used it steady all winter long. I hooked up a fan to pull air out of a nearby heating vent. This essentially spread heat to the rest of the house. It worked great, and my job involved a lot of driving around in the bush so i was able to constantly bring home wood. And when i was in my younger years seemed to have no problem scurrying over brush in the forest to cut up some nice dry standing trees that i had fallen.
And as York says with dry seasoned wood and regular cleaning (I did it once a year in the summer as we really only used the wood stove for the cold half of the year because it worked to good to use in the summer.) we never had a problem with chimney fires.
When we were planning our house that we built i really wanted a big old style fireplace. It took about 8 years for us to get the house to the point that i could start building it. By then my wife had declared that there was no way it was going to be wood. As she was tired of the mess and it goes well beyond dealing with the ash i have to agree on that. So we got a gas unit and i had a contractor friend who knew a bit about rock work and he got me started on things. After he had shown me how to first build a sub structure of cinderblocks around the gas insert.
He came back and gsve me a couple trowels and other tools the showed me how you work your way around that and using tie in straps and only getting a row or two a day around the base and work your way up. Gradually building your way to the top. He then got a call and he was off to work in Ft Mac. And i was on my own. We had no shortage of rocks as my wife and i both love them. So we had been collecting them for years fortunately/Unfortunatly we live fairly close to a river so had lots of easy pickings for nice looking rocks. On holidays we would bring home rocks, once driving across the country we stopped in western Ontario and found a lot of Amethyst. And i would admit my wife is prone to stopping at rock and gem stores and she got some there too. The blue speckily rock in this first pick was from a friend who fought the fires in Kuwait oil fields after the gulf war. At the base of the wellhead on one well that had a flame blasting into the ground the day after he fire was out he found all this sand that had turned to glass from the heat.
Another friend gave us some petrified wood from New Mexico. The mantle was made from a piece of Douglas Fir we recovered from an Uncles homestead.
Were pretty happy with the way it turned out. It took months to build but was well worth it and a heart for the home. Gotta love that wood cooked steaks and burgers though but we do that on the firepit in season.
Have a great day all
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