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).

 

Actually it started from a perfectly reasonable concern. Someone on the GWR questioned the logic of hauling many tons of coal down to Devon and Cornwall, loading it into loco tenders and hauling it back again...

The intent was to convert a subset of locos to oil and base these in the west country addressing this problem. But then someone decided 'that's a good idea' and ran with it without thinking it through. When the impracticality of something at a whole different scale to what was originally intended dawned on management the whole thing was dropped.

Such was the quality of BR management at the time. I make no comment on things changing since...

 

In fact, the GWR did build a small number of steel fireboxes for use with the type 'AL' boilers constructed for fitment to the Modified Halls. To quote from Bob Meanley's Wiltshire Wisdom:

"Several carried steel fireboxes, some with riveted joints and others with tube plate and backplate butt welded to the firebox wrapper plate. The experiment obviously did work to a degree but most had their steel fireboxes replaced by a copper box within four years, at somewhat lower mileages than was normal for copper firebox renewal."​

Nick M.

 

Yes, the problem, hauling coal all the way to Devon and Cornwall compared with bringing oil from the Middle East?

In my working life I used to teach design to degree undergraduates. When designing something and you have identified what you want your product to do and have reached the stage when it does what you want you move on to the next stage: what else does it do that you don't want it to? And you then have to look at this and and identify all the negative attributes, decide which you can live with and which you can't and which you need to eliminate. But you have to look at the product very, very carefully to identify these problems. It seems that someone didn't do this but just thought, "This is the problem; this is the solution," and took it no further. Managers tend to do this, as do politicians. And we promote them, or elect them, as being intelligent people.

This idea was never going to work but it was tried and (in an attempt to return to the thread's subject!) several engines were converted to burn oil, copper fireboxes and all!

 

In his book British Stean on the Pampas (Locomotives of The Great Southern Railway Argentine )D S Purdom ,a very respected steam loco enginer world over , life obtained from steel fireboxes burning coal or oil was 20 to 25 years ,if anything life tended to be higher with oil, as corrosive effects of wet ashes etc round the foundation were not met with.Tube life on oil burners also tended to be greater as tubes did not suffer from the scouring effects of cinders. As knowledge increast with electic welding, a gradual approach to all weld fireboxes was made.No trouble was experience with these or with repairs . As a result of experance withoil burning increast the pratice was to eliminate the roof stays inside the firebox crown ,and to rivet over the ends of the stays in possition.

 

I'm not sure we're all on the same wavelength here! There are two separate issues: (i) the use of coal or oil firing; and (ii) the use of copper or steel inner fireboxes. In practice, each of these has advantages and disadvantages over its opposite and the plus or minus will depend on the individual circumstances. But coal or oil can be used in both copper and steel boxes and copper and steel boxes will accept both coal and oil. Then you need to figure out the best combination for your particular application.

But converting an engine from coal to oil firing, or vice versa, is a relatively quick, easy and inexpensive process (supplying the supporting infrastructure might not be) but converting a boiler from a copper to a steel firebox is a tad more complex - and expensive. BR inherited over 20,000 steam locos from the Big Four and of these, from what I can gather, 140 Bulleid Pacifics, ten Black Fives, one V4 and possibly a handful of others had steel boxes. Steel boxes might be fitted to the new designs, the BR Standards (they weren't) or a boiler due for a firebox replacement. But copper fireboxes had reached the stage where they were no longer replaced but had patches welded in, copper welding had advanced to that stage (the LMS built some welded as opposed to riveted copper fireboxes for 4Fs) so that wouldn't come up on a regular basis. Converting to steel boxes would be a long-term job. Remember too that in 1948 main line diesels were starting to appear and many people realised that the writing for steam was then on the wall; the Modernisation Plan came only seven years later.

For some countries coal was the better fuel; for some countries it was oil. For some countries copper was the better firebox material; for some it was steel. Which was the best option for Britain? Britain had millions of tons of coal but no oil. Britain's workshops was set up for making copper boxes but not steel, and the necessary investment in nationwide water treatment has to be taken into account also (the Americans had discovered that water treatment was all or nothing. Even a small admission of non-treated water had a major deleterious effect on the boiler).

All this was the situation in 1948. Is it the same today? Oil firing probably does bear looking at, but converting everything to steel inner fireboxes isn't going to happen.

 

My understanding is that the intention was to buy oil from Venezuela, paid for in UK pounds, and use it instead of British good quality coal, which could be sold for dollars, thus obtaining much needed dollars. The idea fell apart when Venezuela changed its mind and required payment in dollars. Between the wars oil was traded in UK pounds as well as dollars., but that changed after the war.