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In TRAINS Magazine a couple months ago in the, hmmm. What do they call it? Selected reading or something like that. There was a short story from a guy who reminisced about when he was a kid. He was out at some logging camp somewhere where they had some logging engines. During Christmas the camp was shut down, and the engine in the story was allowed to go cold. (Why it didn't freeze up he didn't say) Anyway, the watchman was supposed to fire it up. He didn't get it going. His relief came in and took over. The story tells how the relief threw in buckets of diesel fuel on the weak fire, the resulting explosions out the firebox door, and the resulting searing heat radiating from the boiler shortly after. I cringed when I read it. I'll bet that engine needed some serious boiler work not long after. Probably didn't get it, though. Anybody else read that story?Mark D.

At my former place of employment, I would make a habit to point out the expansion pad on the locomotive to my student fireman. If they saw it before/at fireup and then later when the boiler was hot, they could get some sense of thermal expansion and why we would try to fire up slowly and evenly.Everyone there was a big fan of forced draft so I would try to get them to get coal on the woodfire very early because the wood fire would be too damned hot for a cold boiler that just had a boiler wash the day before.RCW