If he couldn't do the job, he didn't keep the job.
My father worked for the IC which included working with steam. I was told of instances when the Head Brakeman would pitch in and shovel some or shovel in tandem with the Fireman. It was not a time of gauranteed rest breaks every hour, though, and they were expected to keep the steam pressure up regardless of the weather. They would not want to stop the train with it strung out on a grade just because the fireman was fatigued. Of course, as the locomotives became larger, many of them were equipped with mechanical stokers.
Bill
Thank You.
A good fireman knew how to bank coal and keep it banked in advance of demand. The rail road would put 2 firemen on when needed on larger equipment. If the fire door was constantly opened the engineer would give the fireman heck for losing heat and making the cab hotter then it should be. Banking coal in the box was better then constantly shoveling and opening the doors. Rocking or shaking the grates to loosen the banks of coal when needed was easier then shoveling. Here is a great link to a PDF on a firemans exam.
http://prr.railfan.net/documents/MachineryExaminationsForLocomotiveFiremen-1949.pdf
Chapter 7 will explain how to hand fire a loco.
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
About a century ago, the Pennsylvania Railroad was designing ever larger locomotives and they were concerned about a fireman's ability to meet the demand for coal. Stokers had been invented, but the PRR didn't like the expense of added mechanical equipment, especially since it proved highly unreliable. So they did a study to determine the limits of a fireman's endurance. PRR decided a fireman could be expected to shovel 4.5 tons per hour. Doing the math, that comes out to 180 50-pound scoops per hour, or one every 20 seconds. In practice it was too much and locomotives did not perform up to expectations when a fireman was pushed to the limit. PRR's answer was to add a second fireman, but even that was not enough. The ultimate answer was a better stoker, which was developed around 1920 and opened the way for ever larger power with modern fireboxes and an enormous appetite for coal.
BTW, the world's champion shoveler was a Detroit native, James "Whirlaway" Turpin, who was able to shovel 7 tons of sand in 20 minutes. He was reknowned for other shoveling feats such as ditch digging, as well. I don't believe he ever worked for a railroad, but I could be wrong on that point.
Aside from the physical limitations, I would think that proper firing would be difficult to attain at the high rates mentioned above. PRR's aversion to stokers reminds me of a comment I read in TRAINS about Leonor F. Loree when he was president of D&H. The firemen's union had requested that stokers be installed, to which Loree replied, "You have the best stokers that $2.50 can buy, Red Edges!", which were a well-known brand of coal shovels.
When I saw it up close, I was really struck by how much hard work was involved in doing the fireman's job on a hand-fired coal-burning steamer.
It was in 2005, on Nevada Northern #93, one of the locomotives which can be "rented" at Ely, Nevada.
Even that relatively small engine (an Alco 2-8-0), running light, required a large amount of shoveling. It was a tough, dirty job.
In the diesel era, the fireman in the cab became a poster boy for outdated labor agreeements, but those firemen of the past worked like dogs.
Red Standefer helped with the edification of young firemen that were coming up in the Cotton Belt ranks. “And after I was running a locomotive—after I was promoted to an engineer—and had been running one a good many years, they started hiring young firemen, and I would start out with one. Of course, he was interested, and he’d ask me about my early days of railroading. They never fired nor ever saw a coal burner. We were burning oil then when I was running one. I’d tell him about starting out, like out of Commerce to Ft. Worth, which was a hundred miles, and putting 25 or 30 tons of coal in that firebox between Commerce and Ft. Worth. Well they could not believe it.” said Standefer to Dr. Joe Fred Cox in a 1973 interview.
From Chapter 6 Cotton Belt Engineer
“I wish that I could see in one pile the many many tons of coal that, as a fireman, I have shoveled into the hungry firebox of the steam locomotives. I also wish that I knew how many miles that I have made in the cab of a locomotive.” Said C. W. Standefer for an interview for the Commerce Journal upon his retirement. From Chapter 9 Cotton Belt Engineer
Red Standefer started firing coal burners on November 6, 1917 as an apprentice fireman and marked up as a Cotton Belt fireman on January 8, 1918. He fired coal burners until they were replaced by oil firing on Cotton Belt's Southern Division in 1923. He was the fullback on his high school football team so you could say he was built for the task of fireman. It helped that he dearly loved his job and steam locomotives. Red retired as the #1 engineer on the Southern Division on September 1, 1967.
Sawtooth500Shoveling coal in a steamer where it had to be manually shoveled must have been exhausting - especially if going uphill on a steep grade. So what happened when the fireman just couldn't shovel any longer? Did the engineer take over and the fireman was qualified to drive the train for a bit?
I've read of instances where an engineer would shovel for a while to give the fireman a break. I've also read engineers who said they liked to shovel once in a while just to kinda "loosen up" after sitting for a long time.
Remember that in the steam era people were more used to manual work; a typical fireman might have grown up on a farm doing hard work all day (there are worse things to shovel than coal....) They may have started working on the railroad as a teenager in trackwork or something similar until they were old enough to become a fireman. (I think you had to be 18, but a century ago guys sometimes would lie about their age and start earlier. Long ago, many guys left school after getting their eighth-grade diploma and started working at 14 or 15.)
That was very interesting and I know being a fireman in those days had to be very hard work
My grandfather had it a little easier working up from brakeman to conductor, but one of his sisters was married to an engineer, so he started out the hard way.
I'll bet most of those crewmembers spent time loading boxcars, or shoving ice, or doing something heavy and demanding (and probably darned good and dangerous) before they were given the thumb up to join the train crews. So, I would say most of them had 'schooled' backs, shoulders, thighs, arms, and hands by the time there was mutual agreement that they should try their hand at feeding fires.
-Crandell
Red Standefer started working as an Engine Watchman for Cotton Belt at the outpost station of Hamilton, TEXAS on June 1, 1917. Red didn't go on the road until that November.
“My duty when a crew came in and were relieved from duty to spend the night—get their rest before starting out on their run next morning—it was my duty overnight to move that locomotive near a carload of coal. And I would shovel ten or fifteen tons of coal up onto that locomotive. I would clean the fires. In other words, shake the grates, like we did our old pot bellied heaters in that day and time; get out all the clinkers; have a nice clean fire for them next morning; and drain and refill the lubricators, and the hand oilers. In other words take care of the steam locomotive overnight. Sometimes I would have from two to three locomotives to take care of, and I had no regular assigned hours. I would go on duty until the last crew was called and ready to leave the next morning,” said Cecil Standefer in a 1973 interview by Dr. Joe Fred Cox at East Texas State University.
Sunnyland My grandfather had it a little easier working up from brakeman to conductor, but one of his sisters was married to an engineer, so he started out the hard way.
Way back in time if a "boomer" came into a railroad office seeking work as a brakeman, they'd have him hold his hands up. If he had one or more fingers missing they knew he was an experienced man and would generally hire him. Back in link-and-pin coupler days, it was almost impossible to work any length of time as a brakeman without losing all or part of a finger...or two or three.
So although they did get to ride in the caboose and didn't have to shovel coal all day, being a brakeman did have it's downside....
tpatrickPRR decided a fireman could be expected to shovel 4.5 tons per hour.
Just speculating here, but if we could assume a shovel of coal weighs 6 pounds net (coal isn't exactly like rocks or gravel...it is considerably lighter), and if we forget about the cyclic weight bearing needed to swing the shovel, itself, back and forth between bin and firebox, the fireman would need 333 cycles of 6 pounds net each per hour to shovel one (1) ton. That works out to five and a half shovel loads per minute.
Not an arduous undertaking.
But, we have the shovel at capacity @ 6 lbs, so the only recourse to double his effort to two (2) tons would be to double the cyclic rate of shoveling. This means our intrepid fireman is now digging into the bin, turning, and firing the coal load off the shovel at the rate of 11 times per minute.
That's a lot harder.
And could he keep that pace up for a trip of two or four, or six hours? He wouldn't be much help doing anything of consequence that other firemen, say on oil burners, would be expected to do.
Tripling the rate to get to three tons? Well, Ford or Toyota might have a robot for that, and the fireman could just oil it and call signals, or work the injector.
If the typical shovel load is 10 lbs per, then the cyclic rate falls to 3.3/minute/ton. Three tons would require 10/minute, or about 6 seconds per cycle....not terribly hard....at first. Swinging 10 pound loads net every 6 seconds is going to be demanding, and almost impossible after two hours.
Could that have been why steam crew districts were so SHORt the firemen wore out and had to be replaced so fast.
Back in the 1970's I had the priveledge of firing at IRM on Commonwealth #5, an 0-6-0 coal burner; Frisco #1630, a 2-10-0 coal burner; J. Neils Lumber #5 coal burning Shay and Tuskegee #101, an oil burning 2-6-2. Being the largest engine, Frisco 1630 was the hardest to fire but that was only in a relative sense. Back in those days we barely had 1 mile of mainline and only used about 3 tons of coal per DAY.
What really kept my brain going was trying to figure out how much water to keep in the boiler in between shoveling coal. Too much and you drown the boiler and lose steam, too little and you risk blowing it up. Then there was the problem of the bed clinkering up, this would show itself as a dark spot in the fire. If it got bad enough steam pressure would drop. The remedy was to gently rock the section of grates the clinker was on in the hope it would drop into the ash pan. If it didn't drop you had to try to pull in out with the clinker hook through the firebox doors.
Last but not least were the engineers themselves. A good engineer worked the throttle like it was melted butter and ran the engine so that you could ballance a wine glass on the backhead when starting or stopping. This was great because you didn't have to worry about the engine over drafting and pulling your fire up the stack. The engineers that would just yank the throttle open usually got a lot of wheel slip for their effort and a mad fireman desperately trying to plug holes in his bed. 1630 was especially slippery on starting.
Commonwealth #5 and J. Neils #5 were pretty easy to fire because of the relatively small fireboxes and the low speed we ran them at. Tuskegee #101 was somewhat temperamental due to having too large an oil gun. The gun had sixteen positions but we could only run it on the first two, anything more would snuff the fire out and it could be a real pain to get it restarted.
I found out that a fireman constantly walks a tightrope between making too much steam or not enough. Now trying to ballance all of the varaiables of firing while shovelling 3 to 5 tons of coal per HOUR is something else, my hat is off to the men who could pull it off.
As to needing 2 firemen on larger engines, this may have been a double edged sword. A certain amount of draft is needed through the bed for good combustion and with 2 men firing the firebox doors would have been open almost constantly with a lot of draft going over the fire instead of through it. With a mechanical stoker the doors could stay closed except for occasionally checking the status of the fire.
I believe crew districts were more a factor of how far the prevalent locomotives on the district could run without refuelling, with water consumption being the limiting factor. I doubt very much if the railroad cared how much they worked their crews as long as the specified work got done. Crew treatment was primarily a concern from the union up, not from management down.
Firing steam was one of the hardest (voluntary) jobs I ever did but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything! Hope this helps answer some questions.
Pat
Keep in mind that, except perhaps going up a stiff grade, it would be rare for the fireman to shovel continuously for a whole trip. Once the fire is built up with plenty of coal, it's going to be hot enough to produce enough steam for the fireman to sit down for a while. From what I've seen it's more of a back and forth thing...check the fire, shovel in 3-4-5 shovelfulls in quick succession, sit down, check the water gauge, look out the window for a signal, look back to check on the train around a curve, check the fire, get up, 3-4-5 shovelfulls in the fire, sit down again, etc. etc.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.