Steam 101: How to COLD START a steam locomotive!

all right old passenger cars old old greats old broken things from sad rgs times we're here at the colorado railroad museum today and we're gonna start making things happen here shortly gonna go in the shop and see what's going on let's go check it out hang on first things first really helps if you look the part there's a lot of hair inside this hat why do you think they make them so tall welcome to the next installment of the steam 101 course and this time we're gonna look at how you fire up a steam locomotive from absolutely bone cold it hasn't seen a fire and has had enough time to cool down completely and bring it all the way up to operating temperature today's subject is denver and rio grande western number 491 the colorado railroad museum special thanks to the colorado railroad museum for letting me come film everything while i was out volunteering this past trip make sure you guys check out their channel they've got all sorts of cool goodies and great history about the locomotives that they share pretty frequently so make sure you check their channel out and give them a subscribe really helps them out too how you doing big girl so the first thing you need to do typically when you come to a locomotive and you need to fire it back up is usually you still have the old fire in there that you got to get rid of so we talked about it a little bit in the first steam 101 class if you haven't seen make sure you check that out here it gives a really good overview of a bunch of different levels of understanding of different parts of steam locomotives but i talked about how the grates are set up specifically in the 491 in that video and the short version is that there's four primary sections that can actually dump and allow dead fire to drop out into the ash pan and so first things first you gotta shake the grates out and get all the fire out and this sucks there's gonna be a lot of you're gonna hear a fair amount of heavy breathing out of me because i wasn't used to the altitude anymore because i live in seattle these days uh and because it's a lot of work over time with the excessive heat of the firebox the grates warp the linkage warps the pins warp it's just kind of the name of the game with how they are and things get out of adjustment and the grates can really become a chore to shake and they're a total pain to set up and get set right i recall a very not fond few weeks spent in the firebox bent over with an angle grinder getting the grates to fit nice and easy and eight years ago when i did that they worked great but we're eight years into the service life of this thing and yeah the greats could use a little attention so uh i had i definitely had to suffer through it getting this going but that's that's really the first part is getting the old fire dumped out those don't want to do terribly much more me too [Music] um okay now you can see the four quadrants all dumped variously differently plenty more to still scoop out so shovel in a rake here we go and because of course it's never that easy the fire doesn't just dump a lot of times you'll end up having ash or bits of coal or something that'll get stuck and it won't want to come out so you typically have to go in with a shovel in the back and scoop the bits out or you get one of the two fire rakes and you go and use those and rake the bits out of the front or any of the the pieces in the middle that gets stuck 491 has two different rakes one that's really long and lives on the tender and one that's a bit shorter a bit more stout that lives on top of the tender easy access on the engine let's grab the reek so [Music] okay right friends i got a pile that won't dump so we gotta rake it back with the rake that's a little interesting because it's about the lego box 491 is kind of like your cat when you go on vacation you know at first really happy to see that you're back but then gets really mad at you for leaving all over again and she was messing with me all week and on this day during this recording she ate the rake i pushed the big long one all the way in to get something off the front and i got stuck behind the grate and i couldn't move it and i fought for like 20 25 minutes to get it out um and we'll just skip over that because that was just pain oh boy oh that's a first i might have to go in there after that one work smart [Music] so all right we can see it's mostly clean in there now we'll push the last of the junk right in front of the door ahead dump that level the grates we're done with the rake i think though okay so there's the the front left leveled now we do the rest looking pretty good it's hard to see up there in it okay let's see about the last set okay and well there's no perfectly level or perfectly clean fire but that'll do she ate the rake on me yeah the one on the tender the big one oh i had to rescue it and that was a chore 491 messing with me continuously it's just that's just what she does so once you've got the old fire cleaned out and the grates are leveled you're almost ready to go but almost more important than the next step of actually starting fire is do a good visual inspection of the firebox you want to make sure that everything is happy nothing has started to leak nothing looks odd nothing's out of place you want to make sure everything is ready to go because your firebox is where all your heat concentration is if you notice a crack that had happened or a leaking bolt or something that's stuff that you need to note and you may not be able to fire up the engine so before you put the fire in you always check the whole fire box now let's do our visual firebox inspection now make sure nothing looks like it's been leaking or broken nothing on the door sheet where we normally can't see inspect all the firebox here and we'll stick a fire in it now for the fun part rag plus accelerant [Music] doesn't mean go fast it mean burn fast yeah pretty much is this when i start singing boston it begins into the box with you followed by copious amounts of kindling in this case very long kindling just like making a campfire and so it begins let that catch for a minute okay for some bigger wood yes i'll get that going bigger wood will be good in a minute i need to get the circulator going next all right there we go you know how to read the direction on a pump right do you know how to redirection on a pump so this guy down here this is our circulator pump and there's a handy arrow for you but it is a centrifugal pump so the inlet is right in the middle because it's doing a spinning like a fan and throwing it off the outside it's your outlet's over here so that's how you read it yep outlet is on the flingy audi side and the inlet is on the in the center and that's pretty common for most water pumps yeah i've had a couple that are just straight yeah that that's also a possibility of course it's a bazillion styles but we had those yeah i mean you know it's not a requirement by any means but it is beneficial and it helps keep the temperature smooth all the way across and all three engines are set up for it but obviously we only have the one so until you get steam so one mechanical fact of pumps i guess it's a thermodynamic fact of pumps is that they can't pump two-phase flow which means if you have water and steam or water in a gas or liquid and gas form the pump cavitates rather than pump so it loses the ability to pump once you have steam but we usually run it so you see some steam on the gauge or until you've closed the monkey tail for long enough because if you have steam up here the steam's up here you may not have that temperature gradient all the way across you probably still have water at the bottom so it still can be helpful but also that now well that'd do it too um so on 491 she's got this little hose valve here and then we also have to open the blowdown i think all the engines are plumbed off the blowdowns for the intake but the uh the delivery is usually into the injector line in one way or another well in the old days they planned on replacing fire boxes and didn't care about longevity near as much yeah just take it slow or if they had to take it fast know that they're gonna have to replace something anyway time to pitch some more wood all right oh yeah we got a cute little campfire going now the wood's caught just drafting out the stack it's a good day 491 for having a cyclone does draft out the stack pretty good which is cool just down the middle for now because we got long candle in and we'll try and kind of move the fire forward shortly here but we're going to let it catch for a little bit so things are progressing along quite nicely we've got those long pieces of kindling have burned the fire forward so the smoke's going straight out past the arch brick rather than rolling out the back that is rolling out the back still a little bit because you got a bunch of resistance in the front with the cyclone front end that's in this locomotive so we're going to try and toss the wood a little bit further ahead and uh keep the fire burning about the middle of the fire box and it'll warm us up nice and toasty so let's go for it and then this is just like flammable bowling and at the end of the day if you miss like i just did it'll all catch fire eventually so who cares all right probably good for some some wood wood and we'll let that go for a bit thank you for the wood as we can see we are quite ready for it it's like pitching onto a bonfire through it through a goal from six feet away ten feet away and sometimes you hit the goal that'll catch and burn back there we go that's a good big hunk of peace okay well that pile will now catch and start to do things so we'll let it sit a lot of hurry up and wait for this stuff yeah it is it's just the railroad everything in the world the railroad is hurry up or hurry up and wait there is no in between it's burning nice and hot but a little low so lots more so i want to note that this video is actually shot over three different days we took a couple days to fire up both of the engines we had for the colorado crossings event wanted to make sure that everything got up to steam nice and easy nice and slow for the sake of the boiler and that we'd have time to fix any problems that may have arisen once things got steamed up because you're always not 100 sure if something's gonna decide to leak or not within the heating and expanding process so we wanted to make sure that everything was ready to go and so this video is actually cut as if it was one long fire up session despite it coming from three different sessions so the process is the same either way all you're really missing from what actually happened was watching me shake the fire and then build a wood fire again each morning and we'll we'll probably look into that in a future video as well if you'd like to see kind of the day in the life of an operating day for someone like me and you want to see the 4am wake up and the 5am fire up and how that transitions to the day let me know that'd be a fun video to put together and i've got a lot of that shot well it's been a couple minutes let's check the fire and see what's going on we're making enough smoke that we got the exhaust fan on so it's light as hell oh yeah burning nice and hot a little slow but that's all right toss a couple freshies on there [Applause] and we're just heating up for now so it doesn't matter if we don't have fire all the way across the box we've got it good big pile in the center and it takes a hell of a lot more than 10 in the class 70. the couple in she's happy so i'm joined in the cab of the 491 my frequent guest to the channel brett hello but this time in person and we're not playing train games yeah while we were playing trains well we were playing train yeah games the big scary ones so what i'm doing right now is i'm raking that fire pile forward so that i can have my bonfire kind of in the center of the firebox so it stops smoking us out a little bit and like pretty much everything that you do railroading wise there's about a million different ways to do it oh absolutely and i figured we'd see what brett's thoughts are on firing up so you don't just hear from me yeah i don't know what you've talked about but i know we certainly do it differently and i do it really differently from say dust or jeff you know the other people that are in the shop in charge of things yeah dust really likes putting it on coal as quick as possible at least waste as little firewood as you can well which is understandable but if you can see the haze i can't see the band through the haze let alone myself so yeah it's a little smoke cap here yeah um that's that's why i like pushing the pile forward is that hopefully it drafts out the front instead of out of the back yeah yeah so what do you do i tend to do a little bit of what you do you know you build the bonfire in the back or in the middle back i i don't really care as much where it is because i don't really push the bonfire i kind of knock it over just you know a little here a little here a little here a little here low here and then rebuild it makes sense and that that seems to do all right with spreading it out but like you say there's a million ways to skin the cat yes the big one is don't asphyxiate yourself and you try to get on coal as quick ish as possible yeah but we're still not uh we're still not even on steam yet so it's kind of a as soon as you get coal in there you need a lot more ignition temperature yeah which means air which means forced air yeah right which we could put it on a little bit of draft if you would like but no i don't i don't think we'll need it we're not not in any rush today we've still got a couple things before we're really running so that's true i don't know if you've talked to any on the channel about how long it takes to steam up an engine of this size but it is thursday currently it is thursday we had a fire in it yesterday yeah the engine is not needed for service until saturday indeed so we are taking a little longer than it's probably necessary but uh you know well it's the it's the whole game of balancing thermal stress where you've got this much steel that has to expand and it's got so far to move absolutely you want to take it nice and easy i mean we've heard stories of people firing these things up in an hour from cold yeah you can that's called cold firing in engines you guys playing at home that's actually a thing there have been stories from way way back in the days of you know the 80s and 90s in durango these crews have largely left but in an absolute emergency you can get a k-class from cold to operating in like four hours if you really really railed on it and we we here take closer to probably 12 in total yeah pretty much 12. yeah but i mean if you force air you get the fire going crazy yeah yeah you can you can get an inferno in there and i mean you boil water quick right that's setting your stove on high but um you're whipping the boiler that's there's a lot a lot of mass here and particularly the k-37 mostly rigid stables which means that there's no ability to flex talked about a little bit in the 101 class on how steam locomotives work 491 is almost all rigid stays so if you were to crank this thing up you'd be breaking stables you'd be potentially wasting the sheets um causing it you know a lot of excess wear so back in the day they'd do this all the time because they could put new boilers on stuff right right but uh why don't i have that luxury in the museum no absolutely not so we try and take it nice and easy and gentle you know we could have fired up starting today for saturday but yeah but we've also got a second engine kind of shot over there that we have to work out so oh you got that one yeah now there are two of them two choo choose and then the third choo choo that has its tubes cut out yeah so we're hannah and grandma but yeah we're uh firing up two engines here and we're just tasked with this one so yep we sit in the seat and we boil water sit in the seat and boil water indeed yeah i've got a nice bonfire in the center here i'm gonna i'm just gonna keep making the pile bigger and then spread it out a little bit and we'll start peppering in a little bit of coal just the cutest little pieces because you start getting a lot of coal it takes a lot to ignite you start getting lots of smoke and you can choke out your fire like that so we'd rather not do that then you have to throw liquid encouragement on the fire and bad things happen yeah like you'd like to avoid the liquid encouragement if you could but sometimes it has to happen but that's why we have a whole tank of accelerant it's not fur fires but you can use it for it it burns pretty well it doesn't burn and i think i'm gonna let the uh let the fire pile burn but we're gonna have to go get another helping i think and load up the tender so we'll be right back all right more fuel [Music] all right got some big beams coming this time i think there's a big firebox bricks we can't burn those that needs to go there you can see that big bonfire but itself to spread out to the sides in the front on the back corners can't forget about them so this is the fire rate it's a lot like a big industrial version of the one that you have at home for the leaves [Music] [Music] well use a fair amount of wood and we want to try and get the coal a little bit so i'm going to dig around the coal pile find a couple small pieces that i can chuck in with the shovel and i'll start transitioning to coal hopefully without making too much smoke all right we've got a big pile of nice hot coal and wood and we need to make it a little bigger and then we're going to spread it everywhere because the wood burned down really quick after we spread it out earlier so more coal [Music] now we'll smoke out the neighbors for the next you know 30 minutes or whatever and then spread it out so cold fired engines are really interesting in that you get to see a bunch of different things happen with the fire itself with how burnt out the coal is so when we've got this big pile in the box and we spread it out all of a sudden all this big black smoke starts rolling out despite us not really having much smoke before and it's because you're exposing all of those new surface areas for combustion and that's trying to ignite and because it's not complete combustion yet what was underneath your pile of coal all of a sudden there's all this more surface area for reaction to happen and so it's trying to ignite all that stuff all at once which is why you get all that smoke despite not having put more fuel in but then as the coal starts to burn and combust evenly it really cleans up and and a fire that's burnt down and relaxed back quite a bit you can easily see the whole firebox and so i really wanted to make sure you guys could see that in this video all the different states of i can't see anything to oh man i can see everything and it's vibrant or everything it's just kind of hanging back now we can see that if the coal raked out we don't have a full box of fire and we don't have a level fire bed but we've got a good semblance of what's going on that smoke's cleared so we gotta clear that big pile there and fish hitting up our sides here we've got a good fire going on here it's smoking out the back a little bit and brett shall help here we can see that the coal is spread out we got some fresh burning stuff it's light in the coal nice and easy still not level and it won't be for a minute but we'll work on that but we start to have some steam so we need to go shut the monkey tail so i'll be right back that way i'm gonna go this way because i don't know if i can fit out the front door with uh with the camera on i guess we could try it you could give it a shot let's try it folks welcome to why k37 are more of a pain than any other locomotive is because this right here [Applause] the big boilie thing and the johnson bar next to you know things all right nope do i need a big shoe horn yeah pretty much the camera does not fit on my chest through the door because i'm the size of the door and people wonder why our collision models suck in railroads online it's because narrow gauge is small yeah and as brett says this is the big engine all right clamber up here this is the monkey tail and it is steaming which means that we have steam so we want to start making pressure so we got to close it no more steamies and now we're going to start making steam pressure and we're going to climb down the front edge here always these three points of contact we're going to come over here this is the blower pipe this is the air compressor exhaust we want to make sure that our blower drain is open we open it by going counterclockwise lefty lefty loosey right and then we go just to back a turn a little bit so that when you grab the valve you know that it's open because it's not stuck on one seat or another so our drain's open so we can start sending blower from the cab and here we are this is the blower valve and we'll crank this open now and we'll go check and see if we have enough steam to make that leak and we do look at that it's got the monkey tail closed brett has rejoined us once again and uh the light is casting me like jesus for some reason anyway uh fritz brett has rejoined us we have steam we have enough steam to run the blower which we were talking about opening with the drain there and it's about halfway open right now there's shot there's shut your reference with this little cluster of bailing wire there yep usually when you're running you go between here and about there that's it but um that's with 175-ish psi behind it not not nothing uh we have we have some amount of pressure but no we're not oh that's the fun of steam pressure gauges is that they don't really work until they work so until we get about 5 10 psi it's gonna continue to show zero so anyways eventually we will actually have some pressure on the gauge there but you can see when we look in the fire that we actually do have draft going you can see that the flames are much taller you can see it's all throughout the box and most of the smoke is getting sucked in which is the whole point of the blower and so now we'll be able to build pressure and temperature a little bit more quickly because we've got forced air and that the steam is already hot enough that it doesn't really make too much of a difference if we run it a little faster because the boiler has already done a significant amount of expansion the temperature difference between uh you know no pressure but hot fire versus uh just absolutely bone cold is a lot less but we still want to take our time with it so we'll just keep a nice gentle blower going and keep it going until we start seeing the pressure come up so one of the nice things now that we've got a little bit of blower rolling is we can actually see the fire quite a bit better you can actually see where it's actually drafting hard and when it's not so you know where you need to put the coal in let's take a look we can see almost all the way up see that there's light flames in the upper right front right up there we've got lower spots and valleys in terms of coal height mid way up on that left side and pretty close on this right side here and so we're gonna hit all three of those spots with a couple scoops of coal now nailed it you talked about scoop sizes yet i haven't brett on the shovel cam come on up you're our next contestant so brett just mentioned scoop sizes why don't you tell the people about different shovels basically you think about it when you have large locomotives you want large shovel because you want to be throwing a lot of coal they're rated we actually discovered the other week they're rated differently between brands yeah that's always the convenient thing right so they have different numbers for different sizes of shovels number four number four as it says right there it's a wyoming red edge good manufacturer of shovels we like wyoming red edge big big snow shovel for big choo choo but um if you use this large of a shovel on 20 or 346 the odds that you hit the door go exponentially up you go like this and then it goes and then the coal goes everywhere and the firemen swears because that's the way that that's what happens yeah the um the actual fire doors on those engines is you know about not quite three-quarter the size right around there so it's the whole thing i found another source of shovel hey here we go so this one the handle is broken yes you can't use this job be very careful with that but there is a number that's number two number two as compared to the number four yeah so considerably smaller this is actually really small but this is probably what you'd use on 20 and 346. something about this size and you also get the aspect ratio changes a little bit they're about the same length but obviously much wider yeah you need the depth and the scooped rear to actually secure the coal and fling it it's a common prank told to me by a good friend of ours from pennsylvania oh i see he said that when when he would train firemen they'd tell him to put all the coal at the front edge of the scoot and then you'd get to watch them throw the coal all over the cab because it just would not go anywhere because you need to have it propelled from the rear to have the weight of the shovel behind it to fling it so there's actually a fair bit of science that goes into these which is really cool i never had really considered it but you have to keep the length the same as well because then you can go between different scoops and although the mass of the shovel changes your technique for actually yeah when you're once inside the door doesn't change yeah because you're still gonna aim the same way and the coal will still take the same vector whereas shorter it would scatter more right like slice or uh or whatever engulf i don't know the terms i'm not a sports person i don't know yeah anyways take this tiny little shovel away so yeah shovels they're important so check it out off the peg barely got about 10 psi but hey 10 is more than zero steam's happening so we call this the shovel cam and i was so impressed i was floored with a the quality of the gopro footage uh and the stabilization and how it turned out but i had i had the idea okay well maybe we'll try and clamp a camera to the shovel and see what it does love shovel cam but it turned out so fantastically i'm so excited by it the slo-mo shots you watch the coal fly and you can really see that this is a precise thing that you have to do you have to aim where you're shooting in that fire box with your coal and this the shovel cam confirms hey that i was able to hit what i wanted to hit but also b that the groupings are really really tight [Music] as the coal burns the reaction kind of changes in the firebox depending on the oxygen availability and right now what we got is some pretty well burnt down coal but still providing a lot of heat which is building our steam pressure here we're sitting at about 35 psi but we can get a really good look inside the firebox finally because the smoke has died down enough that we're completely combusting the coal rather than just sitting there trying to ignite it so let's take a look so now we can see pretty much the whole firebox you can see the front corners you can see the big giant mound in the center that we never raked out but it'll burn down because we're just firing up and the whole thing's gonna shake down but you see we got some spots to the left spots to the right we kind of need to hit with some fresh stuff because we can see the whole fire now and if you don't if you're not able to pattern fire it's really important that you can actually read and see the fire so you can see that valley over there you can see a little bit of thin spot all the way up at the front right there and then tight here where it's kind of gray and ashy on top of the coal we want to hit those spots there live them back up and we'll keep building steam pressure so okay okay about 80 psi now really getting there and the fire is really cleaned out the big mound that we have in the center is kind of relaxed back it's a little thick across the front but it'll stay thick until we can actually work the locomotive and it looks like the front right you can see there's flame all the way up there flame right there but that front right corner doesn't have much and that's the hardest place in the firebox to hit so we're going to give it a shot here so you wouldn't think so but handedness actually plays a factor in firing a locomotive like this a right-handed fireman likes to balance off of this post you come over here and you just put your back up against it and that's how you brace yourself and so it's really easy to make any moves towards you towards the left side of the firebox but it can be really hard to get that reverse arc getting to particularly the front right corner so let's see how this goes i'm a little out of practice with this big engine it's been a couple years since i fired it but we'll see if i can nail it you gotta remember 491's firebox about the size of a pool table five and a half by nine and a half feet and that's just a great surface that's not including any slopes or any other stuff in there or the great bears for all intents and purposes your front corner is about three feet off center and about 11 feet up ahead of you and so hitting those front corners i mean you got to be really precise with that you've got all of that area to hit and you're doing it with something basically the size of a small snow shovel that's one of the things that media of every variety video games every variety get completely wrong and miss out on this really cool and fun nuance where you have to be really good with the scoop you gotta know where you're gonna go and you gotta be able to hit there accurately and quickly and be able to read it quickly too you don't just throw coal into the box and that's that so the front right corner shot's just about the hardest shot to hit watch as the shovel comes back up and around there's no pause to the motion you get your coal you bring it back up and you kind of do a little bit of a loop almost with the head of the shovel so you can build some speed so that you're ready to go and you're also ready for the arc of reversing back into that front right corner and you can watch as i almost get out of the way with my chest as the shovel comes flying by and you can see the coal fly off into the front right corner and you watch the coal fly there and then you get a responding huge burst of fire right there i could not believe how cool some of this footage turned out so we got almost 100 on the gauge we start getting into the 120 150 range we're going to start firing up the air compressor but in order to do that we need to start sending it oil and in order to send it oil we need to make sure the hydrostatic lubricator is nice and warmed up so we're gonna come up here this is the hydrostatic lubricator on 491 make sure the condenser valve shut make sure the feeds are shut now we'll come over to the turret starting and now we play which one is it is it this one this one this one or this one for the only tag one air pump right it's this guy here this is the hydrostatic so we'll start the steam to the hydrostatic and we can hear our blower change because we're evacuating the turret as we fill that line and so now we'll start preheating our lubricator and our oil and so when the time comes to start the pump we'll open the condenser we'll open the feed start sending oil out that pipe right there that runs into the steam delivery line to the air compressor so that'll be in a minute but it's good to get the oil preheating nice and early so almost at 100 psi almost time all right we got 125 pounds on the gauge we're gonna start sending some oil to the compressor so open up the condenser valve and we'll just get the feed kind of opened up and it'll just start sending oil at whatever rate it needs to send it at and we'll find it back down once we get the pump going it's most important to get all that started then we'll start sending steam to the air compressor over here it's got an individual throttle down at the compressor itself which makes it really easy to start from the ground while you're watching the pump to see what the drains do so we'll get that open back it off a quarter and we'll go start the thing chocolate milk so 491's air compressor is what we call a cross compound air compressor and that basically means that it uses the steam twice so the little cylinder on top is the high pressure steam that exhausts to the low pressure bigger cylinder also on top to the left and then the steam vents out and on bottom is where the air is getting compressed and ultimately ends up going to the reservoirs now starting most air compressors is pretty similar you got to make sure all the drains are open and slowly admit steam in and then as the drains kind of clean up you close the drains off and start to increase the speed the really important thing with air compressors though is you want to make sure that you have the cushion of the air behind it before you get the pump running fast the air pressure back feeding from the main reservoir is actually what cushions the bottom piston if you run too much steam pressure too quickly you can actually ram the piston head of the air compressor into the cylinder head on the air end and you can hear it if you start to advance the throttle of the air compressor too quickly you can actually hear that sound start to happen it's not a terribly pleasant sound so you you know you definitely learn okay no we let it run longer than that if you do that forever so [Applause] so once you've got air pressure built up you can do a quick air test in the shop make sure the locomotives happy sign off on your paperwork and that everything's ready to go take the locomotive out and the last couple steps are putting more coal in the tender if you need it and cleaning out the ash pan and boy howdy does that suck on the k37 for those of you that watch the channel that deal with other coal burning locomotives um i don't have enough experience with enough other coal burning engines to confidently say that the k37 has the worst ash pin but it's gotta get it's gotta be pretty high on the list um from for based on other engines i've seen you've got so much more room to work there's not a trailing truck necessarily smacked in the middle of it but in the case of the k-37 you've got giant boiler giant frame big trailing truck right in the smack center and you've got just a narrow slit to get the hose and wand in to actually get the ashes dumped out so you have to sit there you shut the air compressor off first thing you put on a mask for yourself because you don't want the air compressor or yourself to be breathing in any of this mess you then get the air wand and you try and shove that ash out using air pressure down through the hopper you can see that the lever underneath the cab down by the frame is actually open and that's actually what dumps the ash pan but you'll get a lot of stuff stuck in between the great linkage and stuck in the narrow shelves that doesn't want to go and that's going to inhibit your draft later and yes you can draft the fire pretty hard but you're not going to draft hard enough through the firebed through the grates to then move stuff around in the ash pan so you really need to do a good job blowing out the pan and it just sucks on the k37s that's there that's their one downfall as a locomotive class if you if you ask me i love the engines every way but yeah that ash pan is that's not very fun if you look at a k-36 it's got so much more space [Music] uh uh man and i just cleaned the damn thing off blow out the ash pan one time and it's a mess so i hope you guys enjoyed this look at how you fire up a steam locomotive from cold it's a long process that you have to do to make sure that you don't hurt the boiler and we can help maintain and preserve these locomotives for generations to come so it's definitely a labor of love and i'm glad that i got to share it with you guys so i hope you had fun watching this video if you liked the video make sure you click the like button hit the subscribe button if you're new to the channel feel free to click the little bell if you want to know when i'm uploading stuff and if you want to join the lovely crew of the esd brakeman and join the channel as channel member get some sweet perks particularly for live stream stuff a little bit more behind the scenes things and a little bit more communication with me if that sounds good you can click the little join button or click the link in the description we just spent all this time watching the locomotive get fired up we at least gotta watch it run by at least once thanks for watching everyone [Music] so you

Channel: Hyce

Views: 916,303

Keywords: trains, railroad, how trains work, steam trains, train game, train crash, train wreck, fireup, fireup611, 491, Denver and Rio Grand Western, D&RGW, narrow gauge, durango and silverton, Cumbres and toltec, k-37, steamup, fire up, coal, shovel coal, shovel cam, cold start, colorado railroad museum, CRRM, how to, education, how to fire up a steam locomotive, jeff berrier

Id: 4nyt1lB5tP8

Length: 55min 13sec (3313 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2022