Time to take to Fire and Operate a steamer from dead cold.

[dredmann]

Spike, you don't read carefully, and evidently understand even less. You said:

"All my [that is, Spike's] statemnets said it could not be done in two hour from dead cold. One side you said it could and the next you say it could not."

My position has been consistent: you probably can do it, if you use all sorts of unorthodox practices, but unless there is a true emergency, you should not do it, because doing so is very hard on the boiler and can be dangerous.

Things that allow a locomotive (or battleship, for that matter) to bring a boiler on-line faster than normal include: using an unusually large amount of, or unusually hot buring, fuel; applying an extra heart source, over and above the fire in the firebox, especially to areas without lagging (boiler insulation); using preheated water, instead of water at ambient temperature; injecting externally-generated steam into the boiler; and probably many others.

But again, for the most part, these speed-ups have no responsible application to current steam locomotive operations. At least some of them, if not all, can be very hard on the boiler. For that reason, they are more a matter of historical interest than anything else. Was anyone ever justified in using any of them? Sure--if you were a Royal Navy engineering officer in 1914. Maybe others too. But today, almost nobody / not any more.

Unfortunately this has become a sideshow to the more worthwhile question of how long it takes to raise steam on a locomotive. And the best general answer is probably between several hours and the better part of a day, with the exact time depending on the starting temperature of the water in the boiler, the ambient temperature, the overall size of the boiler, the boiler's relative dimensional properties, the working steam pressure, and last but hardly least how conservative the hostler wants to be with equipment that is often over a half-century old and can be both dangerous and expensive to fix.