Fire Risk

There must be something someone can invent? Maybe something that sprays a mist of water over the chimney or something??

 

Ships have funnels, locomotives have chimneys!

I don't think there is a magic bullet. Minimising risk will come from a combination of control measures, including - but not limited to:

• Spark arrestors in smokeboxes
• Proper maintenance of ashpans and ashpan doors
• Ashpan sprays
• Defensive driving
• Control and clearance of line side vegetation
• Carrying of adequate fire-fighting gear so that crews can (within safe limits) tackle fires they discover

Note that that list contains actions on loco crews, workshop maintenance staff; loco overhaul groups and lineside / pway staff; it's a collective effort.

Tom

 

A number of industrial locos and also road steam machines have an additional basket type device on the chimney, does anyone have any experience of how effective they are as an addition?


Ta in advance
Chris

 

Interesting to note on the Clan Line website, the diary dates have been updated to show the Pullman trips for 2027. After early May there are no trips with the Pullmans listed until end of September currently. I can only assume after the last few years of very hot weather in the Summer, Belmond are taking the safe option and not doing steam in the summer, saving it for spring and autumn when they can definitely run as advertised with steam.

 

What do they do in Australia (other dry fire-afflicted nations are available)?
Re the basket, I only ever recall seeing it on small shunting locos, I suspect the continuous blast of hot corrosive exhaust on a big passenger engine at continuous speed would render such an item a consumable.

But I guess we have to consider spark ejection mods that may cost performance to be better than no steam (eg a less permeable screen in any spark arrestor).

 

(Whilst it's different for all steam engines, I think it better for the sector overall to treat steam as one "type" of loco given that if differentiated on that point, what else would have to differ (would every footpate position need to requalify for every different engine?)

 

The largest loco I've seen fitted with a 'basket' was an NCB Austerity at Graig Merthyr Colliery. The duty involved taking trains of empties up a steeply graded 2 mile branch in a narrow valley. So I imagine there was significant propensity to start fires with vegetation either side of the line. The steam was in use there during the 1976 summer, there was no diesel so I imagine the chimney basket was an attempt to reduce the throw of hot cinders.
There must have been similar risks at other valley collieries like Maesteg for example, which had close residential proximity too.
Incidentally the loco I remember, 'Norma', is now at Oswestry.

 

Oh, I'm not saying those things don't get exposed to hard blast, but for comparatively short times.

They'll get burned away eventually on whatever engine they're on, but I imagine even if you fitted a fresh one on a Duchess prior to going over Shap with a heavy load, you'd be looking for a new one after the next stop. (Although that comes back to my point about performance reduction to reduce risk. Depressingly, that is probably the answer, and increased aircon)

 

We're going away from fire risk, but the situation you describe is standard for diesels and electrics where type specific qualification is the norm, while I also understand that there are separate "passenger" and "goods" qualifications at many operators. I've never quite understood how, given the range of differences between steam locomotives (cough, Blue Peter, cough), that this is not also true of steam.

 

Yup. Now imagine a railway with 4 steam engines in steam, all of which are deemed seperate competencies, and 45 drivers, 25 of whom haven't been there since at least 2 of those engines came back into service, 43 of them are only qualified on some of them, and 6 are impossible to tell becuase they refuse to update their records becuase they know better...
(ie there is a case, and a precedent for doing that, and it would mire everyone in yet more admin of a level that could sink everything, so accepting a blunt instrument on fire is probably better)

 

Sorry going off topic a bit.

We deliver training mostly with 4x4s, ATVs and winching.

The training we deliver is generic to machine types, but is then segregated based on different operating techniques and system by risk assessment.

As an example, we deliver ATV which is segregated by;
Conventional steer side-by-side, skid Steer, and sit astride (Quadbike)

Within this we also then differentiate by wheeled/track laying/accessory tracks.

The expectation is that once you have competency on the type, if you use different brands/operation systems you would do some level of transfer training or sign off within the workplace- particularly if there are particular quirks to that machine type.

No different to having a manual car license that covers all vehicles up to 3.5t GVM, auto/manual etc. Etc.

 

Which seems entirely reasonable to this layman, yet diesel competencies are rigorously class based

 

It was true from my time on the footplate [at ELR] that you were signed off for different traction types within the broad steam category. So you might be passed out for LMS/BR std but not GWR, LNER until further competence shown.
Then there might be specific owner requirements to be applied as well that would limit authorisation.
All.of which I thought essential to the driver standards regime even if it created rostering headaches. It also isn't easy when you get a new loco type to the line which has to go straight into traffic when you might have a small pool of competency until familiarity can be gained.

 

If over-rigidly used that would mean qualification on a pannier tank would cover you for a 28xx down to the steam railmotor... (and LMS would qualify you for the Rocket?)

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a structured way of doing this.

My point is that inviting an external body to impose a classification system is inviting more admin that won't fit how things have built up.

There a gap, but it's a gap in the movement's favour, so don't poke the bear

 

That's not exactly how it would work because a 57xx has some features which a 28xx doesn't and vice versa so distinct knowledge and competence would need to be demonstrated.
As another example 828 and 1300 are both on paper ex LMS 0-6-0 tender engines but, due to their differences, no presumption of transferrable competence would be made. At least that's how it was/would've been in my day, which was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ....

 

I think we are going away from fire risk, so maybe this is worth its own thread, but I suspect - on heritage railways at least, I can't speak for mainline operators - there is an element of "we do it that way because we always have". In BR days, type competence came in with diesels - steam men were expected to get on more or less anything and just get on with it, and to a large extent that attitude prevails today.

To take our line as an example, that requires considerable experience and training. Looking at what we have available right now, we have right- and left-hand drive locos; boilers with grate areas ranging from about 10 sq ft to nearly 40 sq ft; loco braking systems that encompass vac, air, steam and (not in traffic now, but not long ago) handbrake only; pole, screw and steam reversers (and one with an air-operated screw reverser that works in the opposite direction to normal ...). It's a lot of variety!

That said, introducing a formal type accreditation is fraught with difficulty. The risk is you collapse the rostering system. At times we are rostering further ahead than the loco plan extends, so what happens if Jo Bloggs is rostered for Duty B next month, but when the loco roster is announced, they aren't type-competent? Or even if you roster in the knowledge of which loco will be out, late substitutions are not unknown. So type-specific competence risks paralysing the whole system.

Having said that, these are also expensive assets, and the last thing anyone wants is pranging your £500k overhaul through a set of buffer stops because someone got on who didn't understand the braking system - or, more prosaically, setting up a load of leaking stays because the fireman wasn't used to a wide firebox and got the sides uncovered. So for the reason, I suspect type-specific training is likely to become more common, particularly as railways introduce new types that have perhaps not been in traffic for many years. Similarly, if a loco goes to another railway, it would - at least in our case - always be accompanied by a rep from our side to ensure the foreign crew knew how to manage it correctly. (Doing that also protects the borrowing railway crew, of course, from any accusation that they did not properly operate the loco).

In our case, the last three locos that came into traffic (Fenchurch, Sir Archibald Sinclair and Beachy Head) all had a process of training and assessment with inspectors before you could go out unattended. I suspect that will become the norm, and it is why for all three of those locos there was a gap of several months between when the loco was nominally outshopped, and when it formally entered traffic. But it is best seen as part of the commissioning process - managing it through formal competence would in my view introduce a lot of problems.

Tom

 

I'll bang my drum again as I have been doing for several years now.

Someone with the financial ability could investigate the NR view on an oil fired class 8 steam loco.

I cannot ever see any coal fired steam loco being let out on the main line during the increasingly regular heatwave conditions we are seeing.

Bryan

 

35028 might already be booked up for End Of SR Steam events next Summer as it is the 60th Anniversary. This might explain the gap in the Pullman bookings in 2027.