Oil Firing

Bob Meanley’s magnum opus on Swindon in the steam age, Wiltshire Wisdom, includes a section on the short-lived post-war oil firing scheme.

The GWR conversions used heavy fuel oil (Bunker C) which due to its viscosity presented some challenges, particularly with regard to storage.

Interestingly, the boiler currently fitted to Rood Ashton Hall was converted to oil firing in 1946 when fitted to Garth Hall. So it should not be a problem to reconvert it to oil firing. Bob does mention that the top face of the horizontal firepan and lower sides of the firebox were heavily protected with refractory firebrick.

Also, there is a photo of Garth Hall in its oil burning guise, and it is fitted with a 3,500 gallon tender. It does leave quite a lot of the oil tank showing though.

Nick M.

 

Considering that Ahorns died a century ago his comments are hardly relevant to subsequent locomotive development. Steel fireboxes were widely used in the British locomotive construction industry between the wars, just not by the Big Four companies. I suspect that this was probably because locomotives built for export were often expected to be working in a far harsher railway environment than the relatively benign and well resourced systems back home. It was considered that steel boxes were easier to maintain and repair than copper ones in countries with less resources to call on. When Bulleid introduced his Merchant Navy Pacifics he had to turn to North British to build the initial steel firebox boilers as they had been building such boilers for years.

Peter

 

Not even Big Boy 4014? ;-)

 

At the Festiniog we used to just "turn them off", and that would be it. So, presumably, the answer to your question is "Yes". The loco would then be cleaned and inspected on an outdoors pit then driven - gently - back in to the shed usually without re-lighting.

 

Sometimes it goes wrong: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xK0vEsUumY8

White smoke (fuel vapour) indicating the fire has gone out. Then it relights using, probably, the residual firebox heat.

 

They might have been used widely by the private builders for the export market but they were not used, at least extensively, by the Big Four. I don't know of any GWR use of steel boxes, and bearing in mind their tendency to use brass and copper all over the rest of their engines, this is a good indication. To the best of my knowledge the LMS's use of steel boxes was confined to ten Black Five boilers 12928-37 fitted to 4718-27. These engines were allocated to Scotland to take advantage of the soft water there. No financial advantage was found with the steel boxes and at least eight, and probably all ten, were later replaced by copper fireboxes.

Again, I don't know for sure but I haven't heard of any LNER moves towards steel while the Southern also stuck to copper until the arrival of Oliver Bulleid.

Steel boxes do have advantages but the LMS experiment also showed that there were problems, water treatment being the main one. It has been noted that they were fed with soft Scottish water and it must be asked how well they would have fared on the London Tilbury and Southend section? The water here was atrocious!

 

Weren't some B1s given steel boxes?

 

I think one of the two V4s had a thermic syphon and a steel firebox, the other had a normal copper box. Their early demise was attributed to there being no spare boilers for them when their existing ones became life expired.

But as @LMS2968 says they were next to non-existant in the inter-war period among the Big Four

Peter

 

In the NRM's Drawings Archive for Derby Works there is a listing for Derby Numerical Series Drawings. In this list there are approx 50 drawings for various oil firing components. The prefix for the drawing numbers is D5/T1. The LMS locomotive Classes mentioned are; - Class 5s, 8Fs, Garretts, S & D 2-8-0s, LMS 7F 0-8-0s and 4F 0-6-0s. So there were definitely plans for oil firing post WW2.
Indeed, didn't some MPDs have circular concrete bases cast to receive the oil storage tanks? I think that the bases at Normanton MPD were still there at closure.

 

It was part of a government sponsored post war program. Certainly the GW, LMS and Southern all started to convert selected types of locos before the availability of oil became a problem.

Bath Green Park shed had oil facilities installed and at least one of their Black 5s was an oil burner for a while.

Peter

 

Indeed. The oil firing plans were, to say the least, odd since all the oil would need to be imported and Britain had little in the way of reserves to buy anything from abroad. A lot of money was spent installing the oil storage and refueling equipment at several depots, some of it never to be used, while quite a few engines were converted just to revert back to coal firing a short time later.

One of those typical British cock-ups in which we excel!

 

Sometimes driven by parties with a vested interest and no accountability .....

 

What we forget is the difficulty policymakers had at that time, as much production was required to support both debt repayments and continental Europe in the aftermath of WWII. Use of oil addressed one problem (requirement to export coal) but ignored another (the lack of capital to pay for imported oil).