SMOKE FROM LOCOMOTIVES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXII, Issue 18943, 14 February 1925, Page 7

SMOKE FROM LOCOMOTIVES.

Sir,—ln reply to " Fireman," permit me to state that I am surprised that he would admit the bad practice of leaving the firebox door open to check the steam rising, and then give a futile excuse for doing so. If the delay is for only a few minutes, what is wrong with using the injector? " Aye, there's the rub." It car.not be done because the boiler is already overloaded with water; more bad practice this for two very distinct reasons; first, that the water is there t.o the exclusion of a good body of steam, and second, because of the unequal stress set up betwesn the top and the bottom cf the boilei? by the weight of the water. Then the fireman's troubles are intensified by the cooling of the furnace. It is not the smoky nature of the coal, but poor methods of firing that mostly produce smoke. The most elementarv knowledge of stoking tells us that the heat in the furnace must be sufficient to ensure complete combustion of the liberated gases and minute particles of carbon or they pass off as smoke. This can be accomplished by, at all times and in every circumstance, having the furnace registering a sufficient degree of k That, I submit, is a matter almost entirely within the control of the fireman. During the late war, it was decided to pufc~' naval ratings aboard commercial liners. To the amazement of officers in charge of stokers, it was found that the stoking by the certificated firemen was " simple and rotten," mainly consisting of watching the steam gauge and overloading the furnace with coal. Arguments and persuasion were of no avail, so the officer in charge would usually disappear while the naval stoker, working alongside, pushed the requisite knowledge home with a pair of branny fists, an adjunct to the argument that carried convittiSn These certificated firemen were only following along lines of bad practice that had been handed down by previous generations ot firemen that knew no better. W - J • n.