the common saddle tanks i’m thinking of are the B&O 0-4-0 and Rdg 0-6-0 which i assume are intended to be used only within a terminal having convenient access to coal and water, avoiding the need for a tender.
it looks like a decent amount of water is stored in the tank built around the top of the boiler. But what about coal?
would they run the loco over to the coal tower or just a pile of loose coal every 20 mins(?), and the fireman jumps out and fills a few buckets of coal that he throws into the firebox as needed?
That is a good question and I have often wanted to see cab interior shots to see if there was just a bunch of coal scattered on the cab deck or not. Clearly however most such engines saw service around roundhouses and other areas where fuel and water were plentiful. I have seen a few which had both saddletank and small tender.
Some of them had coal bunkers that were actually pretty extensive including a chute that reached up to the cab roof and beyond. It is possible a pretty considerable amount of coal could have been held.
Others had what looked like a simple box on the cab deck.
Nice classic shot. That one’s got an open back cab.
I think the guys were maybe talking about a more closed cab. The coal bunker can be built into the cab and filled on the roof, so not really too visible depending on how the windows, etc are located.
The Europeans do this sort of thing, but the bunker part tends to be emphasized on their tank engines.
The RDG only had one saddle tank engine after about WW1, that was #1251, which was rebuilt from an I-2 2-8-0. RDG 1251 was assigned as the shop switcher in the Reading shops, so it never left the engine facilities.
It had a coal bunker behind the cab. Since switch engines don’t use as much steam they don’t need as much fuel and water. They probably had enough coal for 12 hours of operation. A small RDG 0-4-0 or 0-6-0 with a tender only carried 2 to 2.5 tons of coal. If you figure the bunker in the back of the 1251 is about 3 ft deep, 9 ft wide and 5 ft high, that would be 135 cu ft of space. Coal weighs about 50 lb/cu ft. so they could get about 3 tons of coal in the 1251’s bunker. That’s more coal than a typical 1880’s era switch engine had. The tender of the I-2 consolidation the 1251 was built from, which for its day was a heavy road engine, only carried 8 tons of coal, and that was to haul heavy coal trains out of the mountains.
You can figure the saddle tank fuel bunkers probably had enough fuel to keep them going for at least a full shift, 8-12 hours.
Remember too that a steam engine uses several times more water than coal. Plus on a tank engine, all the weight of the fuel and water is on the drivers, meaning a small engine can pull more cars than it could if it had to drag it’s fuel and water behind it in a tender.
Lets not forget that the 2-6-2T was relatively popular on logging railroads, with the tracking ability in both directions seen as an advantage. These weren’t just used around the mill, but were used for hauling log trains on “the main line”. Dehusman’s calculations on the amount of coal that can be carried in a relatively small space is worth re-reading, and the firebox isn’t that big so it doesn’t take that much fuel to keep these things simmering. A shift of work would seem to be a likely standard for operational time on fuel, which is very far removed from the assumption of “20 mins”.
Gidday, while having never fired a loco, I was a member of a society that had five ex New Zealand Rail , tender engines and two tank engines in storage for future preservation, and would make the comment, and I don’t expect that the design philosophies would have been that different around the world, that the cabs were far more cramped, and that there was far less room to swing a shovel on the tank locos. I wouldn’t have been so much as "ham fisted"as "broken knuckled.
I also have heard of occasions when on branchline duties extra coal was piled up on the footplate.
SP had 0-6-0’s that carried both water and oil in saddletanks atop the boiler, assigned as roundhouse switchers, they on occasion strayed from these confined duties, lack of a bunker permitted unrestricted rear visibilty and they proved very capable. The last true saddletank on the SP was leased to the Pacific Fruit Express and assigned to their Roseville, Ca repair yard, replaced by a 44 ton switcher in 1952, SP reassigned it to transfer table duties at the Sacramento Shops until final retirement in 1955.
Gidday Ismbard, Looks very British and A.H.Peppercorn was the last Chief Mechanical Engineer for the"London and Norh Eastern Railway,"’ LNER, famous for the "Peppercorn A1 and A2 Pacific’s but found this information regarding the model…
The original builder and owner of the A.H. Peppercorn was a British aircraft design engineer, who obviously had a sense of humour in naming this little engine after one of Britain’s famous steam locomotive designers.
I believe Ken Kidder’s Mogul and 0-4-0 series (including tanks) were loosely based on Porter engines that were sold to Japan (3ft 6in gauge IIRC). I’m not sure whether they were built to the Japanese HO (1/80) or "normal HO (1/87). I suspect the former. Both models and variants were built in HO and HOn3 gauge.
