Trolling for old technical mags on steam railroading, I found a free scan of Railway Machinery and the Railroad Digest, New Series Vol 1, May -Oct, 1902, and came across a book review of a book by Professor Goss of Purdue, a report of experiments performed to gain information on the type and distribution of sparks on the right of way by hard working locomotives. The page numbering scheme used by the magazine confuses me mightily, but the review in question is on pdf page 73.

Noting the statement that spark losses ranged from 4% to almost 14% of the coal used, I envisioned a locomotive salesman waving a copy of the Goss book around in some locomotive superintendent's office, trying to persuade the customer that coal losses through working lighter, lower horsepower locomotives hard on his ruling grade would exceed the extra cost of a heavier, higher horsepower locomotives in only X years.

I don't know how to transfer pdf images directly into Interchange, so used the awkward method of copying from the pdf into a Word document, then taking screen shots of the three sections of the text in Word. I hope the images are readable.

Besides many articles on locomotives, rolling stock and shop techniques, the volume has scores of ads for all sorts of machine tools, giving an idea of the rich assortment available to railroads and locomotive builders back in the day.

IMG]http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t437/StevenSmith3/Goss%20book-Review%20of/Screen94834PM_zps87239d11.png[/IMG]

IMG]http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t437/StevenSmith3/Goss%20book-Review%20of/Screen94834PM_zps87239d11.png[/IMG]

IMG]http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t437/StevenSmith3/Goss%20book-Review%20of/Screen94834PM_zps87239d11.png[/IMG]

Don't know why those links didn't come up as images. (So many things I don't know. Gets confusinger by the day.)

Fixed that for you. I do note, however, that they are all the same image. Edit: Found the right URLs; all images should be in order.

The scanned text of "Locomotive Sparks" is available on the Web; one provider is Google Books:

http://books.google.com/books/about/Loc ... 1MAAAAMAAJ

(do the usual thing by clicking on the red 'ebook - free' link and then selecting the somewhat cryptic clickable blue PDF link down near the bottom of the window that opens. Otherwise you get into some irritating read-it-online-after-signing-in malarkey.

Well worth reading.