selector Ulrich .. A fireman could shovel 5000 lbs of coal per hour... ??? I read that a fireman on the Pennsy was required to be capable of shoveling 8000 lbs a shift. Whether that is correct or not, 5K/hr works out to about 20K-40K/shift, depending on the route and shift length and on the work required of the engine...quite beyond credibility.
Ulrich .. A fireman could shovel 5000 lbs of coal per hour...
.. A fireman could shovel 5000 lbs of coal per hour...
??? I read that a fireman on the Pennsy was required to be capable of shoveling 8000 lbs a shift. Whether that is correct or not, 5K/hr works out to about 20K-40K/shift, depending on the route and shift length and on the work required of the engine...quite beyond credibility.
BackshopHard manual labor was the norm back then.
"You load sixteen tons of Number Nine coal and the straw boss said "a-bless-a my soul" was more than a song lyric.
I had two great uncles who came from the Old Country around 1905 to work as miners in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Country. There was no machinery at the coal face. If you were lucky, you had pneumatic drills, otherwise it was Jawn Henry revisited with sledge hammers and steel drill rods to drill holes for the explosives. As a miner you paid for the oil in your lamp and the blasting powder or dynamite to blow down the face. After the blast, you used your Red Edge Shovels, "the best money could buy", to load the mine cars. Yet, thousands of men flocked to the mines - it was a better life than "back home" offered
Grandma was lucky, her brothers saved their money to pay for her passage to America and a "cushy" job as the 16 year old maid at the mine manager's "Big House". She got room - her own, what luxury! - and board and her mistress was a kind lady who, she said, treated her more as a daughter than a servant.
My one grandfather came from Slovakia and worked the coal mines in SE Ohio. The seams there were only 2-3ft thick so you worked lying down a lot. He died of black lung disease.
I don't know. I got the 5K figure from a Wikipedia article (or maybe I read it wrong). Perhaps it is inaccurate. In my younger days I could handbomb a floor load of Campbell Soup in six to eight hours.. that's roughly 40K lbs. I'm not quite sure how handbombing soup cases compares to shovelling coal.. but likely similar effort and fitness required although the fireman is performing his task on a moving conveyance which added a degree of difficulty.. not to mention the heat.
I wish my memory were better...maybe what I read was 8 TONS a shift, which would be much more realistic. And I agree that a strapping young'un should be able to fire about 10-12 tons over four hours, although it would be a very tough first week or two... Hard on the back, bent and shoveling while pivoting, and doing it almost incessantly for his period of duty. Three friends and I unloaded 20 tons of cement off a flatbed when still in our teens, and each of us handled every bag at least once. I remember that as well as rolling and splitting large rounds cut off a towering fir four feet in diameter at the base of the trunk. I was by myself and had rented a gas splitter. I don't think I have ever worked so hard as that day, already 56 years old. And as you say, it might take time to work up to that level of consistent output, but.....sumbuddy had to do it!
The high end of what was possible:
C. D. Young, PRR test engineer, said when they were testing the E6 in 1911 they used a fireman who had already shown his ability -- for three hours (3 hours continuously?) he had averaged 8400 lb/hr on an engine doing better than 60 mph.
I had a cab ride on Nevada Northern #81, a 2-8-0 back in April. For that relatively small train and relatively small distance, it seemed that the fireman shoveled a LOT of coal. He was a well built, young man, and perfectly capable, but the total trip was maybe an hour and a half, and the speed limit there is 15 mph.
I would imagine that a full 8 hour shift, not to metntion what passed for regular working hours in say, 1915, would be a workout that modern folks wouldn't be able to sustain.
David
timzC. D. Young, PRR test engineer, said when they were testing the E6 in 1911 they used a fireman who had already shown his ability -- for three hours (3 hours continuously?) he had averaged 8400 lb/hr on an engine doing better than 60 mph.
There are a couple of mentions in the Q2 test program that 'at the limit' it could be hard on the fireman to access and break open the bags fast enough to dump them into the stoker worm!
Actually, 8400 lb/hr in 1911 is hard to believe, on an E2 or whatever it was. Probably it was producing 1000 dbhp or less -- could it possibly have been that inefficient? (I seem not to have noted where I saw Young's statement.)
Somebody find the original book that has the test-plant results and discussion from the St. Louis exposition operation [that's the book with the detail discussion of the original tandem-compound Santa Fe 2-10-2]. Look at the runs that determine the functional grate limit. That would be the economic highest firing rate considered, easily 50lb/hr/sq.ft. even with relatively crappy draft.
At one time the book was available for PDF download via Google Books, with scans for the fold-outs.
I believe there are more recent tables and graphs in Chapelon's La Locomotive a Vapeur -- check the '52 Carpenter translation first. I know there are some in the untranslated volume 2.
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