Yikes...

I am currently reading up on firing full-size locomotives, as of this point I have only operated miniature engines.

One thing that I did not realize was that with the full-size boilers on 12/12 scale engines was that the water glass is much more difficult to read and the water bounces around in there when you aren't on 99 percent flat trackage. With the smaller engines you see the water is going below 1/2 in the glass and you inject more water. But this apparently is much harder on 36" ga and larger engines.

I had thought you could simply find a good time and every X minutes inject some water to make sure the crown sheet doesn't go dry...but apparently this isn't that great of a technique.

I have had nightmares of boiler explosions after reading the "Train Wrecks" book and seeing all that spaghetti and boilers hundreds of feet from the rest of the locomotive. I heard that during a boiler explosion the boiler can go maybe 200 feet into the air!

The Medina incident was pretty scary. I think the last major incident on a railroad boiler was at Gettysburg in the early 90s. Then the 844 blew a tube at Railfair, I got there a day later and the 844 and 3985 were sitting dead in the Sacramento yards off-display.

-Ed Kelley

GTNGRR@aol.com

Don't worry Ed, the bigger ones are much more forgiving as they have a mass of water and fire to sort of "iron out" fluctuations, although fires in oil burners do require a higher standard of consciousness.......particularly since we don't tend to overwork and undermaintain to the extent done commonly in the good old bad old days.

dave

irondave@bellsouth.net