A question that has puzzled me for years…
I once interviewed an oldtimer who lived in North Vernon, Indiana. He said that as a boy, the kids would gather up coke bottles and get on an overpass over the rail lines. When the steam engines came along, they would try to drop the bottles in the smoke stacks and quite often succeeded.
The question: Wouldn’t this really mess up the boiler over time?
…This is an area where my knowledge is limited, but I’ll try an opinion. The smoke stack is attached to the top of the “smoke box chamber”, and in that chamber is where the horizonal boiler tubes end. This chamber is an “open” volume space" so to speak. Included in it would be a piping arrangement that brings in “spent” low pressure steam from the cylinders, and that feeds a nozzle under the smoke stack opening and forces steam {at each partial rotation of the drive wheels}, up and out thru that stack. This draws a draft back to the firebox and hence, inhances a hotter fire.
I suppose it is my thought, this “open” smoke box chamber could “hold” coke bottles without doing any or much damage. But we’ll have to see what an experienced RR steam person tells us.
My initial reaction was to call bullsh!t. My reasoning was that a coke bottle would be far to light and the draft from the blower alone would blow the bottle up and away without getting near the stack. Then I remembered that coke bottles haven’t always been made out of plastic, and a glass bottle would probably be heavy enough to drop through the stack. Could it damage the loco, no. Could the broken shards of glass everywhere be a royal pain, yes. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a cross section diagram of a boiler on the internet, so this picture will have to suffice.
As the previous poster noted, the stack leads into the smokebox, which is in front of the boiler. The picture shows ex-CPR Royal Hudson 2860 looking into the front of the smokebox.
If the engine were drifting or stopped, and the bottle broke on the blast nozzle, and shards of broken glass went down the nozzle, would that be a problem? It would be interesting to hear about foreign objects found in smokeboxes. I’ll bet there has been a spike or two found there.
for those of us that are old enough to remember , coke bottles were made of glass and had a
$0.10 deposit . we could make a lot of candy money picking up bottles.
the cross section of a smokebox could tolerate a few bottles droped in to them without affecting draft but pitty the mechanic who had to clean out the smokebox he probaly cleaned out the frist aid box or wraped his hand in “t-paper” to keep the cuts in check
not the best use of bottles
Methinks the kids were exaggerating, too! With the pressure coming out of the stack, I suspect that their “success” would have the bottles coming back up at them, even if they were heavier and made of glass. Unless the locomotive was moving very slowly. Remember that most of the stack stuff is steam being exhausted from the cylinders at four times per revolution–and the steam comes up to the smokebox in a forked pipe that ends somewhere short of the stack. That wasn’t seen in the photo.
Somebody call Adam and Jamie
Our game was to drop small rocks down the stack as the engineer tried to blow us off the bridge with his throttle and whistle, I think he succeeded more times than we ever got a rock in the stack.
I’m with you, that $0.05 cents [ I am probably older than you!] for the return of glass bottles made them too valuable to dink around with…except maybe as a launch pad for bottle rockets![:-^]
Slugs out of electrical boxes to mash on the tracks were more atainable…IF you coud find them after the train went by.[:-,]
To answer your question no it wouldn’t cause any problem. You could drop a bowling ball in there and as long as it would fit it would just rattle around. Reason is that the tubes carry the products of combustion and they go into the “smoke box” which shows in the picture someone added. Then all the gasses are collected and the exhaust steam from the cylinders is expelled upward through a steam nozzle in the bottom to impart velocity to the smoke and up the stack. A bottle dropped in there would just break when it hit the metal at the bottom or become part of the stack of cinders in there that some lucky guy got to climb in and remove.
Thanks nbdprr, now I know the answer to that question. The guy told me that the engines would stop in town and would be moving slowly under the overpass and they would try to drop coke bottles (probably could have been any bottle) in their stacks.
Proves that vandals were active in the 1930s, too.
Part of a boiler wash is to open the smoke box and clean out the cinders and soot. Generally one of the smaller or newer members of the round house crew gets assigned that opportunity.
dd
…good picture but what is not shown is the stack…the stack you see on top of a boiler extends almost half down into the smokebox in a cone or funnel shape…a venturi actualy…the blastpipe…or exhaust jet…is pointed up toward this venturi …the increased velocity of the venturi creates a strong vacume in the smokebox…the only place to fill this vacume is thru the flues and firebox…but on the point of it…if the bottle got thru the stack completely and missed the exhaust beat chances are it would bounce around the bottom of the smokebox until Billy Bob Fix-it-guy at the roundhouse opened 'er up and wondered who in the heck was puttin coke bottles in his engines
just to show…
#12 is the blastpipe…the stack isnt marked but its there
Here’s a link to some pictures of UP428’s front end at IRM. These are a little better than the CP photo, but not ideal either.
…Every act in those great photos shows nothing but excruciating, hard work. It is rather easy to see, if anyone ever got “lucky” and did drop an object into the smoke box, I believe no damage would occur. The blast from an operating steam engine emanating from that nozzle would send that “Coke” bottle flying in a thousand pieces as it would be slammed against steel…{anything in there}.
Everything in there is of heavy material, and not too much damage could be done by a 7oz. glass Coke bottle. Actually, when they were glass, they were rather small.
I suspect rocks were more common to drop in than coke bottles, although I’m sure you could do both. I don’t the exhaust of steam and smoke would have enough force to keep the bottle from going down the stack…although leaning over the side of a bridge and trying to drop a bottle down the stack while it’s exhausting black coal soot couldn’t have been very pleasant!!
A more common rail related prank was finding a streetcar line going uphill and greasing the rails so the car slid back down to the start of the grade a few times before making it up the hill. My Dad says he saw that many Halloweens in the '20’s-'30’s but that he never did it himself…[:-^]
…The exhaust of a {hard working}, steam engine emaninating from right at the stack, looked to be blasting strong enough {to me}, to throw a small Coke bottle.
Yep…6.5 ounces for Coke back then. Most other soft drinks came in 8-ounce bottles. Then came king-size (12 ounces), and I think Bubble-up was the first to advertise “a whole half quart”.
And I remember when bottle deposits went up from two cents to three. We Dutch folk wouldn’t have wasted those three cents by putting one down the stack!
No one has mentioned either the petitcoat pipe or the netting. I would think any foreign object dropped into the stack would be caught or deflected because of either of those two things. I’m no expert, but I know that many locomotives had those two things normally.