Saw this little story in my click bait stream. I am not sure I ever saw night movies of steam in action. What stunned me was all the live sparks in the exhaust. In particular the couple segments after about 5 minutes in. In one part the whole stream of smoke and steam lit up like a light. Sparks showering down all along behind the train.
So is this just low tech steam there? Or would trains in the USA also look this way if filmed at night? Could they be using some fuel other than the coal we used?
Thanks
The World’s Last Regular Steam Freight Railway Has Closed (msn.com)
If they're burning fines or cruddy coal a lot of it will end up getting sucked up the stack.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
Oh yeah, I've seen videos of Chinese steam like that before, and some with even more spectacular spark displays. The thing is China has coal and plenty of it but it's not the best quality, it gets the job done but that's all you can say about it.
Back in the North American steam era a sight like that would have given a division superintendant a heart attack!
Especially where the engine men were issued smoke cards so they'd know when the bosses would say they were burning money. Can you imagine any American steam railroad getting away with a display like that? Particularly in California where everything is tinder dry?
Same me, different spelling!
pennytrainsEspecially where the engine men were issued smoke cards so they'd know when the bosses would say they were burning money. Can you imagine any American steam railroad getting away with a display like that? Particularly in California where everything is tinder dry?
Remember, it was a mine railroad using some of what was mined to operate the locomotives. Potentially, water may have been a higher cost requirement of the locomotives operation than was fuel. Mine has been closed and rail is being picked up.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
My understanding is that Chinese coal is especially dirty and they have to import their metallurgival coal
pennytrainsEspecially where the engine men were issued smoke cards so they'd know when the bosses would say they were burning money. Can you imagine any American steam railroad getting away with a display like that?
My dad was a locomotive fireman for several years after high school to earn money for college on a line that burned Bunker C in their engines. It was a mark of pride and showed you were a professional to run with a clean stack. That being said, when they were out in the country, dad would occasionally take a scoop of sand from a container on the front of the tender, hold it in front of the fire door peep hole and the draft would pull the sand right into the firebox. Then it would sandblast the flues clean of baked on carbon deposits (improving the heat transfer) with the cleaned out carbon blasting out the stack in an immense pall of black smoke. He served in the Navy in WW2 and likened the results of flue cleaning to a destroyer laying down a smoke screen to cover a battleship.
This is friable coal levitated by relatively strong draft action. There is little way it will fully combust in its time-of-flight to the rear tubesheet, and in the reducing and sub-atmospheric conditions in the tubes, luminous combustion goes out.
But the gas is still many hundreds of degrees hot as it is impelled out of the front end and turbulently mixed by entrainment in the exhaust jet, and when this hits the atmosphere within and after the stack, it lights right back up again... en masse.
If I recall correctly, it was planned for a substantial part of the Sandaoling layout to be retired about this time, "torn up"... but re-laid to another part of the site. That might be in line with the 'steam engines switching alongside diesels' in the story.
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