Erebus & Terror

Well they've found one of them!!!!!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-29131757
Preservation looks remarkable, considering!

 

What were the refigerators for? I can understand the use of brine pumps to remove brine from some sort of evaporator being used to produce decent water from sea water but not refrigerators.

 

At that date the term refrigerator was used for heat exchangers. Maudsley who installed the engines had patented a system of pumping water from the boiler, which would become even saltier than seawater as steam was drawn off, and replacing it with fresh seawater. In this system the 'refrigerators' referred to transferred heat from the expelled water to the fresh feedwater.

The article referred to suggested that as Maudsley had invented that system it would likely be installed in Franklin's ships. However that apparatus was invented for ships running their engines continually; as Erebus and Terror's engines were only auxiliaries, made of second hand bits from locomotives I can't see the need for such apparatus provided the boilers were completely blown down after each use then refilled.

 

Thank you for the reply LesterBrown. The problem with using sea water is that if you let the density of the water in the boiler get too high it results in carry over and heavy deposits on the tubes so some sort of apparatus for the reduction of the brine density is required. Probably a continuous blow down overboard. Maulsley must have worried about efficiency if he was proposing heating the feed water. I see no reason for a pump to get water out of a pressurised boiler by the way. I seem to remember from my days as Engineer on steamships that 3/32 was the maximum we let the brine density reach in evaporators but I would expect it to be lower in a boiler. (3/32 is three parts sea salt to 32 parts water by weight)

 

Apparently when boilers used seawater 3 or 4 thirtieths was regarded as the saltiness limit. This was usually required blowing down once every couple of hours. The advantage with pumping out the brine with a crankshaft driven pump seems to have been to automatically keep the draw off in proportion to the engine"s work.

 

Amazing what you can still learn at my age!

 

What, all those cylinder heads and exhaust valves and injectors to overhaul?

I've checked one of my books - the sort of sea water evaporators we had on ships built in the 40s and 50s using live steam as the heating medium were run at 3/32 brine density, plus daily cold shocking to remove the scale. The more modern ones using bled steam at a vacuum or diesel engine jacket cooling water as the heating medium and a vacuum on the evaporator itself ran at a considerably lower density, not that I can find any figures.

 

Not a lot of people know that the cladding was a world first and inspired the 'Ironclads' so despite being cold and wet they have a big footnote in history. Be interesting to find which loco historian is right or will there be an even broader gauge surprise! Won't be an easy salvage!

 

I have a suspicion that the locomotives will have been so dismantled that it will be much easier to identify the arrangements for brine removal than to identify their origins.

 

HMS Terror has been found also, a 60 mile Southwards journey, perhaps remanned. Given away by the Loco chimney sticking out the deck!
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt
Perhaps we need to bring them home? A Bury 2-2-0 ?!?!

 

Wonder if everybody missed a clue as to its final resting place - Terror Bay
Or was a rough area known?

 

Having been on the controls of a steam turbine & a 6cyl 'o' Type Sirron, I'd go for the hot fog any day

 

The Franklin expedition had left a note that they were abandoning their ships in this bay and proceeding on by foot, but it now seems likely that they, or some of them, reboarded Erebus and drifted further south.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ic-nearly-170-years-northwest-passage-attempt Steam pipe and perhaps tantalising glimpse of the Bury boiler in a video

 

This is all very exciting, but if it is a Bury boiler I shall be amazed - given Peter Carney's careful research mentioned above. With only two Bury locomotives in preservation, the Furness Railway 'Old Coppernob' in the NRM, and Great Southern & Western Railway No 36 at Cork, finding an earlier one would be fascinating.

But it would cause a massive rethink, much more research, and a lot of rewriting. More definite news soon, I hope.

Harry Jack.

 

Sorry, Lester, your note is from a while back, but the location was identified as definitely Cheltenham shed some time after the RCTS book came out. I suspect someone had decided it was Chippenham simply because the pioneer photographer Fox Talbot lived nearby. None of the repros of this photograph are clear enough to read the engine names, so I think claiming the date to be "not later than 1849" is just a bit of wishful thinking.

The same photo appeared in 'Railway Archive' No 43 in 2014, now said to be at Cheltenham but still claiming "circa 1849". I wrote saying the evidence for this was flimsy, but they didn't print my letter. When the facts don't fit, they prefer their legend.

 

another early broad gauge photo...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/swindonlocal/4416925830/

 

Yes, it is interesting, but from the loco's date of ceasing work the photo might have been taken in the 1860s. The coal in the tender (instead of coke) suggests a late date.