Another thing of intrest is the sand bazooka used by the fireman, to selectivly clean tubes, while the loco is under fire. Our fire box has floor, <I’ve been in there.> and has a grate area of 108 sq feet. This dosent count the Syphons, or the 4 foot extension of the fire box in side the barrel of the boiler.
This is a shot into the fire box, it shows dark on my monitor, but if you run the brightness up you can see more detail.
This shot is a shot of the cab the firemans draft controlls are on the left side. http://www.railimages.com/gallery/kevinevans/acy?full=1
Right now we are working on the tender, hoping to have it reassembled this year, and to start boiler work next year.
Gunns
ps. a link to Booting a steam engine… http://www.sdrm.org/faqs/hostling.html
Egmurphy mentioned mentioned how hard on the equipment it was to cycle the equipment from a cold start to operating temperature and back again. I remember during my last visit to Steamtown in Scranton, PA that the steam engines(coal fired) were banked overnight to aviod this stress. Banking was simply leaving the hot coals in the firebox overnight when the engine was parked in the roundhouse. The fire was never doused unless the firbox or boiler required attention. Otherwise, it would take a full 24 hours or longer, to go from a stone cold start until operating conditions could be obtained. Since the only difference between a coal fired and oil fired locomotive is in the firebox, I suppose the oil-fired steam engines had to be banked overnight when they were parked.
On blowers and draft – UP’s 844 found herself in helper service (very briefly!) a few years back (don’t ask – embarassing!) at very low speed but wide open throttle and reverser and had quite a time keeping enough draft. But did.
A few things:
Dear Jamie,
Why is it embarassing that 844 was helping freight??? It’s one heck of a locomotive, and was doing something it was meant to do.
Dear Leon,
It takes us about 8 hours to steam the VC 2 up. If you really wanted to go slow with the heating, then sure, 24 hours.
You could fire a locomotive up in less time, but that would be pretty hard. 8 hours seems to be widely used, so it can’t be to rough, and it’s a lot better to steam down the boiler to wash and service it than it is to just leave it running without servicing.
At 1-2 psi per minute, it takes us about 2 hours to build up to operating pressure (175 psi). Of course, the first 10 pounds is the hardest. Once you get to 50 psi, you can start steaming up the locomotive with its own systems (and the injectors start working). We usually steam up the night before operating.
You can’t really bank an oil fire, per se, but what you can do is stack the cap, close the dampers, and when you come back the next morning, the firebox should be hot enough to spontaneously ignite oil (even on a cold night). It would be dangerous to burn the oil without monitoring the water level–tends to lead to big kabooms!
Dan – it was embarassing not to the 844 but to the train… the train ahead had lost a couple of diesels – SD40s, I think – and stalled, and the 844 was brought up behind and pushed the whole shooting match to the next siding so she could get on with her excursion (did I mention that she was towing her excursion train all the while?)
When I rode the 1880 Train in the Black Hills (S.D.) some years back, they mentioned that their steamer was fueled by waste oil from places like Jiffy Lube. How would that type of fuel alter the way you ran the locomotive?
If a given amount has more energy, then you burn less, or vice versa. With fuel oil, changes with the type and weight of fuel oil tend to cancel each other out, but once you move to different “types” of oil products (like lubricants or diesel), there is a noticeable change. Diesel burns cooler, as I hear, than Bunker C.
A thicker fluid like Bunker C is nicer to fire with–it’s less fluid, and therefore less subject to sudden changes. Diesel, like we have used recently, works but is a pain. I would imagine lubricating oil to be somewhere in between. Personally though, I can’t stand the smell of automotive oil (journal oil I’m cool with [:)]).
One question to ask is what will we do when petroleum becomes so rare as to be very costly per gallon (and eventually it will happen, just when is the question)? We could burn ethanol, I suppose. Cooking oil might work (stop in every town with a fast food restaurant [:)])!
Really, it shouldn’t need all that much filtering, as long as you clean out the firebox from any particles of metal that came in during the oil’s lubricant life.
I realize this is an old thread, but I found it very interesting and want to thank those who provided information.
I’m new to the forum. I’m a volunteer engineer at a local narrow gauge railway in Silicon Valley. Currently I’m only running diesels, but I’m hoping to start training on the Steam Locomotives soon. We have 3 diesel and 2 steam locomotives.
I believe our steam locomotive fireboxes have bottoms, but are not “sealed”. There’s no damper control. We do have a steam-powered “blower” and an “atomizer” control in addition to the fuel lever.
I know that it is possible if you run over rich to leave a trail of fire down the center of the ties (this was accidentally demonstrated by one of our engineers recently).
I’ve been trying to find any reference information on how these various controls work to manage the fire in the locomotive (blower, atomizer, fuel control) and how they interact and affect each other, but with little success. I find I learn better about operations when I have at least a half-way decent understanding of how the systems are put together and the theory of operation behind them.
If anyone is still reading this trhread and can point me to some useful reference material, instructional videos, etc., it would be much appreciated.
Probably the very first thing you should do is sign up over at www.rypn.com and ask questions on the “Interchange” forum there. A number of people with very good firsthand knowledge of oil firing using a variety of burners and fuels are ‘regulars’ there, and many others have connections only a phone call or e-mail away.
If you have what you think may be silly questions, you can always post them here before asking the ‘pros’ and we’ll give you answers.
This site use to have a link on what it took to boot their oil fired loco by one person but the link is dead so I will post the home page. It was quite a process. Maybe someone can find it or they do not run the steamer anymore. I remember they had to heat the oil in the tender.
I’ve also read of a Hostler keeping a “steam generator” going in the roundhouse to provide steam to locomotives that were being fired up from a cold state.