mark e czerwinski Wrote:
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> Gents, Please educate what is a fine ?
> thanks Mark C
Fines are bits of coal generally smaller than about 1/2" in diameter. When a shovel full of them is thrown into the firebox of a working engine most of them never hit the fire bed but are, instead, sucked directly through the flues, igniting as they travel, and are ejected out the stack still burning. They can be more successfully used if thoroughly wet down and carefully placed in the fire by dumping them in a pile rather than thrown in dry.
MD Ramsey Wrote:
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> I was never sure how much this actually reduces
> the fines, but does really good at washing them to
> the bottom of the coal pile. The fireman still has
> to deal with them, in one big batch, and throw
> them somewhere, usually in the firebox. I always
> experienced that it would gradually decrease the
> coal space by allowing the fines to accumulate at
> the bottom.
>
> Back in the day, we would do this now and then on
> the D&S in Durango. At that time, it made a big
> mess and tended to loose some good coal to the
> ground. Again, it seemed to concentrate all the
> fines to the bottom of the coal space rather than
> removing them and decreasing coal capacity..
My experience with this is pretty much the same as Mike's. However, I will say that washing the coal out at the end of the trip when the pile is small does accomplish considerably more as there is less of a pile of coal to catch the fines and more of them get washed out under the coal doors. That allows us to start with a fairly clean load in the bottom of the coal space when the tenders are loaded before the next trip.
Washing a freshly loaded tender does wash out the light dust but most of the fines get washed out of the top 10" or so of coal down into the middle of the pile where the fireman gets into it about half way up the hill. This may, or may not, give you cleaner coal for part of the trip. Most of the fines are still there and eventually have to go into the firebox.
The coal we get from the mine consists of everything from chunks about the size of a basketball down to dust. The amount of fines and dust varies greatly from load to load. The more it gets moved around, the more small pieces break off creating more fines and dust. Getting more consistent, smaller lumps, without the fines from the mine is the ultimate solution to this problem. We hope to be able to work with them on this although, we and the other steam railroads they supply are fairly small customers volume-wise and there is a limit as to how much they can do to accommodate us without substantial cost increases.
We took other steps to reduce the number of fires during the extremely dry fire season this year besides the coal washing. We ran extra fire patrols and fire trucks behind each train, slowed the trains down while climbing the 4% grade (which noticeably lessened the amount of cinders ejected from the stacks), and double headed some trains that we would not have absolutely had to to lighten the load on the engines. In my opinion, all of these efforts taken together helped make the difference in fewer fires.
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