dodgy place this internet...

14 miles of driving sounds nice, but 14 miles of firing? Sounds like hard work!

Not likely, my old man had an Aveling Barford diesel roller, one of the first diesels ever made, with two sodding great big flywheels on either side. Half a tonne each, one sheared off and capered off down the road at great speed and shattered, glad it didn't hit anyone! The proper steam fairground engines are bloody expensive though, quite amazingly expensive.

Steam fairs are great, there's a big one coming up near here soon, the smell of the old engines is fantastic. You usually get a brace of

101s and landies showing up in military garb.

Thankfully these B*gg*rs have not mailshotted me for a bit or I would be even more skint

Sod you Austin. ;-) I'd just about managed to forget that work commitments mean that I have missed a 350 mile steam excursion today.

It's strange when you think about it....... it seems to be the case, more often than not, that people who are passionate about landrovers are often passionate about steam power, yet those very people get so hot and bothered if the steam comes from the landrover.......DOH! ;-) Badger.

My only claim to real steam is having built a little Stuart Turner Victoria engine a few years back, and going on the footplate of a freshly restored loco being tested at Gympie with my beloved. We both were amazed at the feeling of raw power as the loco moved off.

Karen

Dirty inefficient things! We used to shunt the bitumen sidings at Cranmore, adjacent East Sommerset Railway. On one trip they wanted to move Evening Star out of the shed for a photo shoot to promote the "Heaviest load moved by a steam locomotive" world record stunt at Merehead Quarry. It would have taken 2 hours to raise steam, and something like 4 hours to cool down and clean, all for 2 mins work.

We, completely aginst the rules, used our Class 47 to loose shunt it! - and shunted their sidings while we were at it. As the BR driver observed (he'd passed out on 9F's during the steam days) - "nice to look at, and excellent for making breakfast, but I'd not swap for all the tea in China".

Tin hat donned......

Richard

I doubt you'll need it, they've died out for good reasons, specifically the ones you've stated! Even a 30-year-old car in a modern environment is unjustifiable other than on nostalgic grounds.

Now I might need a tin hat for that one ;-)

That and the fact they feel "alive" - anything alive with that much power is some form of magic.

Which everyone knows is the wife's job...

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 14:58:01 +0100, Ian Rawlings scribbled the following nonsense:

should imagine it is.... They run on fuel oil as I found out last year when I asked the question. The fuel oil is burned to generate the steam. Something to do with coal generating sparks in a national park...

Oil converted ones just ain't right - they smell wrong and they are far too easy to fire.

I am of course assuming that "firing" is basically shovelling coal into the boiler, might be interesting for a mile or so but could be boring, not to mention tiring. As a professional computer geek I like to avoid all that grotty physical stuff whenever possible.

EMB uttered summat worrerz funny about:

I'd think it's a bitch to shovel too, make the footplate a bit slippery.

;-)

Lee D

In some ways they're harder to fire, since they don't have the thermal inertia of a half-ton of red-hot coal in the firebox. Every time the driver adjusts the steam use, which affects the draught, you have to adjust the fuelling.

You can still arrange things to use steam, briefly, faster than the sustained steaming rate, but it has that little bit less reserve of energy in the system than coal firing allows.

There's a bit more to it than just throwing coal into a firebox - getting it right is an art form which takes a fair while to perfect (and which some people can never master).

With you being a non-physical computer geek type I think that after a mile of shovelling your arms would probably drop off which is likely to be amusing rather than boring. ;-)

Any idea how long the firebox is? ISTR that the more advanced boilers use a honeycomb of pipes that sit in the hot gasses from the fire, but given the length of the engine I doubt that they run the whole length of it, or do they? In which case getting coal dispersed and burning at the same time could be quite hard. Even a 10-foot long evenly spaced fire could be quite hard though I expect.

I've got a few old Eagle annuals in the loft somewhere, might have to dig them out, I think they had cross-section views. I suppose the newfangled internet could come up with better but it's not quite the same ;-) Get a bit of the old Dan Dare while I'm at it.

The word "painful" would be more appropriate I think... I stopped exercising regularly a few years ago, but since then have pulled several muscles around my ribs doing quite simple jobs on the pinz, so am taking up exercise again. Ouch!

Easily the best all-rounder - especially now they are rated back at

100mph.

Kicking the little grey memory cells back into gear, 12 coaches is

36 x 12 = 432 tons train weight (the engine wasn't added to passenger train weights in my day), but the Pitsea & Chadwell Heath stonie was 41 tipplers - 35 x 41 = 1435 + 117 for the engine = 1552 tons - a 47 could do either with ease. The speed would be about 35 to 40 mph over Savernake[1], after climbing continuously from Lavington - something around 10 miles. Then it was coasting from Savernake, brakes on through the Crofton Curves, coast again (with possibly a bit of a boost through Theale) and trundle up the board at Reading West - hopefully to get our pathway through Reading on the Up & Down Through, putting on a display of full-power through the station, then either full-tilt up the Up Fast or a pain-in-the bum trip behined a stopper on the Up Slow to Acton. Just ocasionaly the "Terrible Twins" (2x Class 37's) would not be available and a single 47 would do the Acton, 37 x 50 Ton Procor's plus the engine, 2004 Tons - about 20mph over Savernake but would coast all the way to Reading at 60mph. We once got lumbered with a Class 56 on the Pitsea & Chadwell - they never tried them again on our stone trains while I was there, a truly dreadful machine (at least the Bulgarian built ones were, now all withdrawn). For some reason they tried Class 50's on the 5,000 ton experiments (actually, thinking about it, they used them because they were equipped for multiple working, whereas the Class 47's weren't). A 5,000 ton train going round the Westbury avoider at 60mph was a pretty impressive sight (and sound).

Happy days....

Richard

On or around Sun, 25 Jun 2006 08:32:39 +0100, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

nah, the firebox is at one end. The boiler tubes carry the hot gas from the firebox to the smokebox at the other end, and the steam exhaust goes up the chimney and thereby creates a forced draft. For when you're standing still, you have a "blower" which feeds steam from jets at the bottom of the chimney to achieve the same effect.

On a big loco the firebox is still quite big, though. I understand that you try to arrange the fire to be sloping from back (of loco) to front so that you can scatter the coal down it by gravity, to a degree. It's also important to have coal that doesn't generate clinker, and not to let a hole develop in the fire, otherwise all the draft goes through the hole and the rest of the fire doesn't burn properly.

The continuous and heavy shovelling of coal only applies when the loco's working hard and using a lot of steam. Under normal running conditions a suitably-sized and properly designed loco has spare boiler capacity...

in fact, it must be quite hard to successfully and efficiently run one of the really big locos with a few coaches-full of tourists behind.

yeah, I must do that.