Romance of steam

Trains are steam - everything else is just transit for the masses

Tony
--

Tony Roberts
PP-ASEL
VFR OTT
Night
Cessna 172H C-GICE

In article .com,
"Denny" wrote:

Sunday out on a test flight with my son after installing new oil hoses,
etc... We are out over Lake Huron and looking inland at the color
changes in the trees and about 15 miles away we see what looks like a
major fire with black and white smoke (old tires?)... So we change
course to go see... We find that it is a steam train (apparently the
one used to design the Polar Express movie)... Certainly looked
dramatic with the black and white smoke/steam billowing - and of course
this being a post maintenance flight I didn't bring a camera from the
car...
Anyway, I'm sure the 'romance of steam' types were happy... I doubt
that the farms and towns getting the dose of coal smoke were quite as
happy with it... I remember being a child at the end of the steam age
and they smelled just like our coal furnace when the draft wasn't set
right... Not pleasant at all, and to have 2 or 3 trains an hour go by
belching black all over the wash on the line must have been hell... I
remember going to town on a still and frosty morning and seeing the
individual columns of black smoke rising from all the chimneys as
people got out of bed and began stoking up the furnace... There's a
reason for progress...

denny

Denny wrote:

Not pleasant at all, and to have 2 or 3 trains an hour go by
belching black all over the wash on the line must have been hell...

My mother grew up not far from the tracks in Waynesville, NC. She told me that
when the whistle blew for crossings a few miles away, everyone rushed to get the
laundry off the lines. Sometimes you didn't make it.

George Patterson
Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you quarrel with your neighbor.
It makes you shoot at your landlord. And it makes you miss him.

I remember big steam locomotives pulling commuter trains on the Chicago &
Northwestern line -- this would have been as late as 1955. They were a lot
more fun to watch (and hear) than the ugly green-and-yellow diesel-electrics
that succeeded them. I don't recall a smell from the steam trains; the
diesels stank. I also helped my dad stoke the furnace with coal on cold
nights, and the hot water clanking in the pipes to the radiators. Clinkers
from the furnaces were thrown out into the alley when it snowed, for
traction, and after the snow melted the cinders lay an inch or two thick. I
learned to ride a bike, on balloon tires, skidding around in the loose
cinders all summer. Taught me how to control a drift when I finally got a
motorcycle . . .

Seth
"George Patterson" wrote in message
news:JQY4f.25664$p_.16166@trndny05...
Denny wrote:

Not pleasant at all, and to have 2 or 3 trains an hour go by
belching black all over the wash on the line must have been hell...

My mother grew up not far from the tracks in Waynesville, NC. She told me
that when the whistle blew for crossings a few miles away, everyone rushed
to get the laundry off the lines. Sometimes you didn't make it.

George Patterson
Drink is the curse of the land. It makes you quarrel with your
neighbor.
It makes you shoot at your landlord. And it makes you miss him.