Anything that reaches its flashpoint will burn. The point was and is that the smoke fluid didn't burst into a foot high flame from an electrical short as was surmised in the beginning of this post..
And the flashpoint, by the way, is 400 degrees F.
Well, an electrical short can easily reach 400F and a lot more, so it's certainly possible. As far as this particular incident, I doubt we'll ever know for sure what triggered it.
My only point here was refuting the statement that smoke fluid won't burn. ;)
OK, not to put too fine a point on it but here's what was originally presented as the possible cause of the flame out in the original post:
"Well, it started sparking, and about five seconds into the run, a huge flame (for inside) a foot or so just blew up!!! (my guess is that the extra fluid dripped on the tracks and short-circuited between the middle and outside rail [O scale])."
That simply did not happen as described. The original poster even admits that is not what happened.
Yes, I did find the cause of the fire (the smoke unit itself burned) but John is right, anything that hits it's flash point will burn. However, that wasn't not the case with my engine. It was cool though!
Boston's freeway system is insane. It was clearly designed by a person who had spent his childhood crashing toy trains.
-Bill Bryson
Flame out of the stack, must be quite a sight! Sounds like one of the Back to the Future movies, the one with the train.
No actually. It was AROUND the loco. Not out of the stack. Lol. So the entire loco got a nice toasting. No damage though.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.
Get the Classic Toy Trains newsletter delivered to your inbox twice a month