--- In BRHSlist@y..., Bill Chambers <ace1942us@y...> wrote:
> Hello, Pete, and everyone else.
>
> > Of course at the investigation the fireman stated
> > (correctly in this case) I
> > was back in the engine room.
>
> All the talk about firemen being in the engine room
> has
> raised one big question in my mind -- WHY? I have
> always thought that the main role of the fireman was
> to
> verify signals with the engineer and also be present
> in
> the cab to bring the train to a stop if the engineer
> became incapacitated. I know that the fireman also
> answered alarms if something was wrong with any of the
> units in a lashup. But did the reasons for his being
> in the engine room go beyond these? Years ago, when I
> used to subscribe to "Trains," I recall several
> stories
> about people's experiences on board the locomotives in
> the early days of dieselization, but these were
> generally EMD people. Did the fireman have the
> responsibility of maintaining or repairing the diesels
> while the train was on the road? I am indeed curious.
>
> Thanks for any enlightenment you all may give me.
>
> Bill Chambers
>
>
I'll take a stab at this. I'm sure there will be more enginemen
chime in on this.
yes a fireman's job was to call the signals, when he was in the
cab. the headbrakeman (called a fixed signal by older enginemen)
would call the signals too, that is when he wasn't a fixed signal.
you usually only called the bad signals, yellow and red. that
is unless an offical was riding then you called everything, clear
board,.... clear board,..... clear board, ..... clear board, ......
when you were departing a terminal the fireman would walk thru the f
units in checking the engine oil, water, governor oil, etc. before
leaving. after leaving the terminal and getting out of town and
being notched up to #8 you would take another walk thru the units
just to check if everthing was ok. later on in the trip the engineer
might remark "sure are pulling funny, we got 'em all?" that was a
clue to get off your duff and take a stroll back thru the units.
during the day you could look back to see if they were all hazing
but on f units it was just as easy to walk back.
usually you had an alarm bell that rang when a unit had a problem,
ground relay, low oil, overspeed, (kinda common on the Q, some
divisions) there were problems where a bell did not ring. you could
have a dead engine and no bells. you could have problems with an
engine not transferring right (shifting gears) this could be solved
sometimes with a flagstick inserted properly in a relay contact, you
could have an engine hunting, that is not picking up the load all
the time. pick it up for a while then drop the load then pick it up
again. you could have false alarms with nothing wrong that you have
to keep reseting. you could have a flashover with a ball of fire
bouncing around in the unit causing a ground relay before finally
going to ground, if not setting the unit on fire before it did. some
of these problems you may ride the unit most if not all the way in.
you can have fuel problems on very cold days, fuel getting
thick/lumpy and having to power down each unit and remove the metal
fuel filters then restart each unit. can have a bad unit that
runs but not for long before dying and a heavy train that you put
the unit online when making a run for a hill then take it off line
before it dies after making it up the hill. this is just a few
examples of why a fireman would be back in the units.
and it was very noisy back in the units. as i mentioned in a
previous post some of the older good firemen were hard of hearing.
don't know if staying back in the units being curious of how
everything worked and trying to learn it all caused this on some of
them, but the good firemen that could fix most problems were hard of
hearing, back in the units learning, watching, instead of asleep.
this was all self taught or if you were lucky you caught a trip
where an emd rep was riding and he would show you some things. the
rr did not teach you, you got the greybook, maybe an engineer would
give you a clue if he knew, and thats about it. some firemen carried
cotton to put in their ears.
know more experienced enginemen will provide more info than this
sampler.
hope this gives you an idea of what was going on back there until
they log in and add to this.
warren
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