DeTour? I see that name all over the place nowadays! I believe he was chief mapmaker to Louis XIV whos efforts got everyone hopelessly lost!
As I recall, a watch fusee was used to equalize the pull of the mainspring as it wound down so that the pull on the gears would remain the same as the spring lost its tension. I also have a memory of a device called a stackfreed that was also at one time used in watches.
As to why that fiery device was called a fusee, perhaps a Frencman named DeTour had something to do with it?
Johnny
Back in the 18th Century the word fusee meant a light flintlock musket, sometimes carried by officers or carried by light infantrymen. They were also called fusils, which does come from the French. Ever hear the term fusileers? They were soldiers, originally in the French army who carried fusils.
Fusee is probably an English variation of the French pronunciation, "fu-zeel."
I have no idea how the word fusee became the railroad name for what the rest of us would call a flare.
A fusee was also a mainspring compensator used in antique pocket watches before the balance wheel was invented. Aside from the pocket watch it's got no railroad connection at all.
I think the word Fusee is French, When I was in the Army we used them at accident sites and they were labeled "Fusee" we had red and yellow, 5 and 15 minute, the 5 minute ones had a cardboard tube handle and the 15 minute ones had a nail in the end to stick into something
A former sheriff here was once relating that he'd stuck a flare/fusee into a tree at an accident scene. He somehow managed to catch part of his glove (but not his hand) with the spike.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
"Fusee" seemed to be the railroad term. Highway drivers seem to call them flares. I always liked the sound of the word, fusee.
Bill Knapke mentions fusees with spikes in his great book "The Railroad Caboose." The idea was a well-thrown or dropped fusee would stick that spike in a tie and stand upright. According to Mr. Knapke that hardly ever happened, but as long as the fusee was in the gauge it didn't really matter.
I've seen that segment in "The Greatest Show On Earth" where the bad guy throws the fusee and sticks it in the tie, quite dramatically I might ad.
I wonder how many "takes" it took him to accomplish that bit?
Probably not, Norris. A good coal fire needs a lot of air, and a carload of coal is probably unlikely to provide those conditions. Overfilling a locomotive firebox, or even certain areas of one, would cause problems. Smouldering coal doesn't produce the power.
Carl
Railroader Emeritus (practiced railroading for 46 years--and in 2010 I finally got it right!)
CAACSCOCOM--I don't want to behave improperly, so I just won't behave at all. (SM)
Does a fire in a coal car ever turn into a raging inferno?
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Minor miracle we don't have more R/W fires than we do.
It used to be a call of the the local trainmaster or agent as to which type of fusee got used. Sticking them in x-bucks is new to me. The obsession here was keeping them between the rails or on the pavement at crossings. (usually pretty hard to start a tie fire although some had holes burned in them from fusees or rail grinder slag.) Fusees had all kinds of unintended uses - favorite was to soften asphalt to drive 60d nails flush into for survey points in winter.
Even if a conductor has the best pitching arm in the business, since more of the right of way is ballast than ties, wouldn't there be more than a 50/50 chance of hitting rock and not wood?
On CN all our fusees still come with a metal spike on the bottom end. It is redundant now, as we mostly use them for thawing out locks, air lines or other frozen things on locomotives, but in the past they would be stuck in a tie or in the signpost at a level crossing to aid in providing protection. Jeff is correct, many old heads used to be pros at throwing fusees off the unit or caboose and sticking the landing in a tie, he is also correct that torpedoes are long gone from today's railroads, having been made redundant by radio communication.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
I don't recall ever seeing a fusee with a spike used on a railroad. The ones I recall had a rolled cardboard tubular handle about the diameter of the fusee and six inches long. I do recall that highway fusees had spikes, and have generally understood that spikes on fusees were standard of railroad fusees.
I did find a pre-1902 fusee spike base with a metal detector along an old railroad grade. The spike was attached to a cast iron plug about 3/4" dia. by 1-1/4" long. I assume that plug was encased in the end of the fusee body. It is rather amazing to have a throwaway piece made of cast iron. It would also be a rather long-lived hazard for feet.
Fusees were once commonly used to pass signs at night when the distance was too great for lanterns, or the weather visibility was limited. There were one or two hand signs that involved tossing a burning fusee straight up about 30 feet in the air. I don't exactly recall what the signs were, but one I think was to cut off.
Dad was a reserve cop and always had a supply of flares/fusees in the car. They were usually the 20 minute variety, and always had spikes. When I first got on the FD, pretty much all of them had spikes, too. You had to be careful after an incident so you didn't leave any of them where they might flatten a tire.
Sometimes it was tough finding a spot to stick the spike on the road, especially in the winter when the gravel shoulders are frozen, too.
All we see now are the type with the wire. While I usually try to pick the wires up, if I miss one, it's not a big deal.
Deggesty Thanks, Jeff; you beat me to explaining to little boy Carl that fusees indeed used to have spikes. The one I lifted from the station in my home town about 1951 certainly had a spike. I'm sure Carl acknowledges that I have more whiskers than he does when it comes to knowing how it used to be with fusees.
Thanks, Jeff; you beat me to explaining to little boy Carl that fusees indeed used to have spikes. The one I lifted from the station in my home town about 1951 certainly had a spike. I'm sure Carl acknowledges that I have more whiskers than he does when it comes to knowing how it used to be with fusees.
AH! That explains a scene in the movie "The Greatest Show on Earth"... where the bad guy lights a flare (fusee?) and drops it in the gauge and it sticks straight up... all the flares I have ever seen only had two flimsy wires that could be bent to sort of form a tripod with one end of the flare so it would stand upright. I never understood how the bad guy did that with those flimsy wires.
Semper Vaporo
Pkgs.
Never saw one at work, Jeff. I guess I was too close to what was then the company stores department (housed at Proviso), and they were long gone from there. Those spikes were pretty unyielding!
They used to make fusees with a steel spike for dropping them and having them stick up. I once even had one, many years ago. The railroader who gave it to me explained they were getting rare, this was in the late 1970s. The explaination was that someone went to put one into his grip, evidently jamming it in with some force and set off a torpedo in the bottom of his grip. (More likely is that trainmen were accidently stabbing them into legs or other body parts.) We don't have torpedoes anymore, either. In reality, fusees are used mostly to mark the ends of cars when being shoved at night, guarding unmarked crossings during switching, stop testing and thawing out frozed switch locks. Be careful when thawing locks, the new ones have plastic innards. Very few chances to provide flag protection anymore.
Jeff
Johnny, railroad fusees don't have spikes that stick into anything (the non-business end is just a cardboard tube that can serve as a handle when you're using it for flagging). You light the fusee (making sure that it's glowing the proper color), toss it gently, and hope it stays lit when it hits. If it doesn't, it won't cause any fires on its own. Also, if it doesn't, you light up another and try again.
jeffhergert tree68 Murphy Siding Possibility or tall tale? Definitely possible. People manage to start grass fires with discarded cigarettes... The rule says do not place fusees where they might start a fire. Like on a wooden bridge. Jeff
tree68 Murphy Siding Possibility or tall tale? Definitely possible. People manage to start grass fires with discarded cigarettes...
Murphy Siding Possibility or tall tale?
Definitely possible. People manage to start grass fires with discarded cigarettes...
The rule says do not place fusees where they might start a fire. Like on a wooden bridge.
Back in the fifties, someone commented on an engineman who would throw a lit fusee out to land and stick up in the middle of a street at a point at which a passenger train stopped so that mail could be worked--and he seldom missed the center.
Murphy Siding Well, isn't polymer another way to say plastic? ...
Well, isn't polymer another way to say plastic? ...
No. There are both natural and non-plastic synthetic polymers. Not all are environmentally hazardous.
Murphy SidingPossibility or tall tale?
I know a guy who worked in the roundhouse at the Milwaukee Road here in town about 50 years ago. He told me a story about a local that went up the valley 15 miles to a quarry to pick up cars. On the way, the conductor lit a cigar with a fusee and then pitched the fusee out the window. On the way back, the train had to stop for the local fire department who was fighting a grass fire near a railroad bridge-started by the fusee. Possibility or tall tale?
The five-minute fusees were for use in suburban territory (one guy tried to give me one because I was too new to use a regular one once).I've never seen any color-changing fusees on the job. I know some railroads had rules in which yellow fusees were used instead of red. (So you needed both in your supplies.)No, Jen, no LED fusees (the amount of time they would burn was significant, and I doubt that a battery could be designed to last only that long). Also, no wicks. What may have looked like a wick was just the tape to pull to get the cap off and expose the sandpaper and the chemical that would light.As for throwing one on top of a loaded coal car, having the heft to get one up there would be no problem. However, when it landed it would likely be put out from the force of the impact. You could drop a fusee on the ground from a caboose platform and it would stay lit most of the time. However, the way to extinguish one is to give it a little more forceful contact with the ground.
I last saw a fusee about two hours ago. I checked the flagging kit on the locomotive as I was getting off. Still required to have them, and a red flag. They still look the same, although I am seeing some shorter, five minute types mixed in with the usual ten minute ones. (I've even seen some 5 minute ones with CSX lettering.)
I've only seen red ones. I know there are, or were, other colors available including ones that would burn red, yellow than green (like Johnny said) but I've never seen one.
I don't remember when I last saw a fusee, but I doubt that they have changed in shape. Back in 1959, I was riding from Statesville to Asheville on #21, and spent some time on the rear vestibule of the last car; the flagman had a topless box of fusees secured to the gate. At one point, a sixth? grade boy looked inside the box, and said, "Look at the dynamite!"
Are fusees that burn red for so many minutes and then yellow still used?
Should I have started a thread on fusees?
Speaking of fusees...do they still look like the ones from the 1940's? Have they graduated to LED lights and not look like sticks of dynamite like they did? Maybe I wouldn't know one if I saw it.....not a clue!
She who has no signature! cinscocom-tmw
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