Romance of steam

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

On 2005-10-17, Denny wrote:
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...

Well, they should use good Welsh steam raising coal then!

I have ten steam trains go by my house each day (the Isle of Man Steam
Railway is a narrow gauge (3ft) line that goes from Port Erin to
Douglas). We don't get black smoke. The smell is actually rather nice,
you smell the hot lubricating oil rather than the combustion products.

They are only little 0-6-0 tank engines though. (However, on the various
steam railways in Britain which have main line steam trains, they've
never belched black smoke that I've seen).

--
Dylan Smith, Port St Mary, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Oolite-Linux: an Elite tribute: http://oolite-linux.berlios.de
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net

Coal is difficult to find anymore, here in Michigan... It may be they
cannot find the good stuff.. Interestingly this is in the
country/continent that has the largest coal deposits in the world...

In article . com,
"Denny" wrote:

Coal is difficult to find anymore, here in Michigan... It may be they
cannot find the good stuff.. Interestingly this is in the
country/continent that has the largest coal deposits in the world...

As I recall from 50-60 years ago, the steam trains burned high-sulfur,
"soft" coal, which put out quite a smell.

Orval Fairbairn wrote:

As I recall from 50-60 years ago, the steam trains burned high-sulfur,
"soft" coal, which put out quite a smell.

It depends on what part of the country you lived in, and what was
available.

The Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad used to brag about how they
were the "Road of Anthracite." It was still high sulfur, so it had the
characteristic smell. They used a fictional character for advertising
called Phoebe Snow, who was dressed completely in white, to demonstrate the
cleanliness of hard coal. It still wasn't clean. The advertising campaigns
were the first to combine a fictional trade character with a jingle, like
th following:

==============
Says Phoebe Snow about to go
Upon a trip to Buffalo
My gown stays white from morn 'til night
Upon the road of anthracite.
==============

Well, you were just out of place in your gasoline-engined airplane!

http://www.airbornegrafix.com/Histor...ngs/Besler.htm

A few years back I happened to visit the California Railroad Museum -
and was
surprised to find myself in the middle of a steam festival. They
brought out and
fired up a number of antique engines, and had several visiting as well.
They even
had a steam calliope. Great fun!

On the other hand, riding a steam train thru a tunnel is no fun at all
(done that, too).
And I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody burned coal. Guess who
often
got the job of fetching a bucketful from the bin? The soot made a mess
of the snow
in the winter, too. It's not surprising that almost no one uses it
anymore.

David Johnson

wrote:

And I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody burned coal.

My grandparents house had a coal furnace at one time. The driveway was made up
of clinkers from the ashes. I remember trying to walk across that barefoot. No fun!

As I recall, Papa said they had an automatic stoker, but it wasn't foolproof. He
still spent some time down there with a shovel.

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.

"George Patterson" wrote in message
news:XNY4f.25663$p_.17329@trndny05...
wrote:

And I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody burned coal.

My grandparents house had a coal furnace at one time. The driveway was
made up
of clinkers from the ashes. I remember trying to walk across that
barefoot. No fun!

As I recall, Papa said they had an automatic stoker, but it wasn't
foolproof. He
still spent some time down there with a shovel.

You still had to load the stoker every so often and remove the clinkers from
the firebox. The automatic stokers took the same amount of work just took
fewer but longer trips to the basement.


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.

wrote:
And I grew up in a neighborhood where everybody burned coal.

ah, these people spoilt by modern amenities; coal! in the
neighbourhood where I was keeping a flat while in college,
we were burning good ol' peat (and that was before they
imposed the 'clean burning' kind -- so Dublin in winter was
a sight to see -- well, if you could see anything that is);

--Sylvain