http://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/2 ... ay-museum/


Not the kind of press you want to get.
A reminder that railroading is an inherently dangerous activity.

I would assume the locomotive mentioned is Georgia RR GP7 #1026. They list no operational steam locomotives nor any other operational diesels at this time on their property.

Hi,

The open-air caboose is a Southern Railway transfer caboose that looks like a flat car with a short box car in the middle. I do not recall its number.

Doug vV

Carbon can build up in the exsaust system of diseal locomotives creating a fire hazared like this. It isen't just steam locomotives that can spit out flames.

It's called 'wet stacking' due to the gooey mess it makes in the exhaust. It's caused by extended runs at low throttle settings. It would be ideal if the engine could be load banked to clean it up or at least put the most weight possible on it and goose it hard as the track allows (without passengers onboard to burn)

Could this be resolved by running against the brakes (hard on traction motors granted but)?

Of course the local air quality folks might come by and chat with you afterwards--or the fire department if somebody calls the smoke (there'll be smoke) in.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

If you mean brakes on the train, then yes it is doable, not ideal, but doable. I'm not sure that the using the locomotive brakes would be a good idea.

As information, 4 passenger cars with air brakes in good order, set up at 40lbs (in the brake cylinder) can require 50,000 lbs of force at the coupler (between the locomotive and the first car) to achieve 10 mph.

Yes, yes. I am aware of this. Thanks. I was just identifying the locomotive

" It isen't just steam locomotives that can spit out flames".

It isn't spitting out flames. Carbon build-up comes out the stack as glowing red hot chunks of exhaust soot that has been covered with oil. EMDs are two stroke engines and there is always a trace of combusted oil in the exhaust.

FLAMES?!?

C'mon, Man!!!

NOT Photoshopped, as far as I can tell:

Sandy, those fires are not of the same type as the fire at the museum, your pics show unburnt fuel reaching oxygen with a source of ignition in the exhaust. While the fire at the museum is typically caused by an accumulation of unburnt lube oil and fuel being retained in the spark arrestors and finally getting hot enough to sustain a continuous burn. It has a unique sound akin to a jet engine. Many times it is accompanied by a burning tar like substance being ejected from the stack. Hopefully all of the maintenance people operating diesels with spark arrestors applied do proper maintenance.

Mike Tillger

Notice that every one of those flaming locomotives in the photos Sandy put up is a GE. They seem to have a propensity for doing this (dynamic brake grid fires are also not unheard of on GE's). There is even a topic section on one fan site for photos of Amtrak P40/42 "Crispy Critters", that have suffered catastrophic engine fires. It may well be a (lack of) maintenance issue. I'm not sure. I personally never had a GE flame-out on me, but I was with another engineer when I was still a conductor one evening with a consist that included an older Dash-7, that if you goosed it the right way would spit out flames like one of those monster truck car eaters.

If anyone in the western Maryland area would like to see a reenactment of the incident, all you have to do is be present at the NewPage paper mill in Luke when George's Creek Railway is doing a night switch.

Our T6 has a 1,000 horsepower 6-251 prime mover. It is never "worked" that hard, plus we spent a lot of time idling while waiting for our interchange from CSX.

When we finally do throttle up we give a pretty good firefly demonstration, which consists of small, red hot particles of carbon being blasted loose from the exhaust system by the pressure of the turbo.

To compare what happened in Georgia with the above photos proves only one thing: the posters contentious nature and a tongue-in-cheek attempt at controversy.

All of the pictures above are GE locos, I'd say they all had failing turbos....
I ran a B39-8 a few years back that did the same thing.....you'd get to notch three alright, but go to notch four and she'd bog down, start smoking and after a minute or two would flare up like that and then finally wind up to speed.....usually.
The longer the mechanical guys wouldn't/ couldn't fix it, it got worse, until finally the unit suffers a catastrophic fire or just won't run anymore.....usually they'll still run, they just don't pull very well.....

EMD's on the other hand, tend to start puking oil when they idle a lot....this is often seen as oil deposits running down the hood sides.....at some point, you get the gooey, carbon sludge in the exhausts....which then gets spewed out as burning cinders....

I run a lot of 567 and 645 powered engines for a class one, and the company sends out directives every spring about how to reduce fire risk from engines that have spent time idling excessively. I seem to recall that they wanted the engine revved up to at least channel 5 for a period of 10 minutes to burn off any oil and carbon deposits before loading the engine. While this might use a lot of fuel for a tourist railroad, it's still cheaper than paying out injury claims or line side fires.
I can remember pulling 4000 tons with a pair of GP-9s at night in channel 8 that looked like a Roman candle show for about 2 miles. How we didn't burn down the surrounding countryside I still do not know.