Will Gant Wrote:
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> As I said over on the facebook page. Each fuel has
> its own challenge. I've fired Wood, Coal, and Oil.
> Most of my experience is with Oil though. Oil is
> not an easy fuel, you have to pay attention to
> every throttle movement, every change in the
> johnson bar, because that effects your draft. Oil
> is not physically demanding, but mentally
> demanding. You always have to be thinking ahead,
> it helps to have good communication between
> engineer and fireman. In the 111, its quiet enough
> we can just yell at each other, in the Shay, we
> usually use hand signals because its too loud to
> yell over. Oil does still take all your senses,
> looking at the color of your smoke, smelling the
> smoke, raw fuel is a unique odor, so you know if
> your drooling without looking under the engine.
> Listening to your fire, do I have too much or too
> little atomizer, is my blower sucking the fire
> out. In the right hands, oil can be no harder on a
> boiler then any other fuel, but its far from a
> cake walk.....same as coal. Gotta know your
> engine, and know your engineer too. Its a
> challenge thats different from coal, but still a
> challenge in its own right
Interesting post Will, thank you! This reinforces some of my observations from a number of operations that oil-firing really requires even better teamwork between the engineer and fireman than coal or wood. Bad things can happen when communication is poor, ranging from blowing the fire out to causing an explosion. Locomotive ergonomics can really interfere with communication. On the White Pass 69, which has a deckless cab, the crew members are seated on opposite sides of the backhead and cannot even see each other. Not only that, but the fireman has no direct view of his fire. He spends a lot of time leaning out the window watching his stack. Fortunately, on a K-37, a D&S crew won't have all of those issues. Still, I think that training crews and maintaining a level of proficiency will be one of the biggest challenges of running with oil, especially if they don't run that way all year long.
/Kevin Madore