Fireman Sam Game Download !FREE!
Jerry Bradley
Fireman Sam (Welsh: Sam Tân) is an animated children's television series about a fireman named Sam, his fellow firefighters, and other residents in the fictional Welsh rural village of Pontypandy (a portmanteau of two real towns, Pontypridd and Tonypandy). It was broadcast for the first time in November 1987 on Welsh TV channel S4C and is shown in more than 155 countries across the world.[3]
My father worked for the IC which included working with steam. I was told of instances when the Head Brakeman would pitch in and shovel some or shovel in tandem with the Fireman. It was not a time of gauranteed rest breaks every hour, though, and they were expected to keep the steam pressure up regardless of the weather. They would not want to stop the train with it strung out on a grade just because the fireman was fatigued. Of course, as the locomotives became larger, many of them were equipped with mechanical stokers.
A good fireman knew how to bank coal and keep it banked in advance of demand. The rail road would put 2 firemen on when needed on larger equipment. If the fire door was constantly opened the engineer would give the fireman heck for losing heat and making the cab hotter then it should be. Banking coal in the box was better then constantly shoveling and opening the doors. Rocking or shaking the grates to loosen the banks of coal when needed was easier then shoveling. Here is a great link to a PDF on a firemans exam.
About a century ago, the Pennsylvania Railroad was designing ever larger locomotives and they were concerned about a fireman's ability to meet the demand for coal. Stokers had been invented, but the PRR didn't like the expense of added mechanical equipment, especially since it proved highly unreliable. So they did a study to determine the limits of a fireman's endurance. PRR decided a fireman could be expected to shovel 4.5 tons per hour. Doing the math, that comes out to 180 50-pound scoops per hour, or one every 20 seconds. In practice it was too much and locomotives did not perform up to expectations when a fireman was pushed to the limit. PRR's answer was to add a second fireman, but even that was not enough. The ultimate answer was a better stoker, which was developed around 1920 and opened the way for ever larger power with modern fireboxes and an enormous appetite for coal.
Red Standefer started firing coal burners on November 6, 1917 as an apprentice fireman and marked up as a Cotton Belt fireman on January 8, 1918. He fired coal burners until they were replaced by oil firing on Cotton Belt's Southern Division in 1923. He was the fullback on his high school football team so you could say he was built for the task of fireman. It helped that he dearly loved his job and steam locomotives. Red retired as the #1 engineer on the Southern Division on September 1, 1967.
Sawtooth500Shoveling coal in a steamer where it had to be manually shoveled must have been exhausting - especially if going uphill on a steep grade. So what happened when the fireman just couldn't shovel any longer? Did the engineer take over and the fireman was qualified to drive the train for a bit?
I've read of instances where an engineer would shovel for a while to give the fireman a break. I've also read engineers who said they liked to shovel once in a while just to kinda "loosen up" after sitting for a long time.
Remember that in the steam era people were more used to manual work; a typical fireman might have grown up on a farm doing hard work all day (there are worse things to shovel than coal....) They may have started working on the railroad as a teenager in trackwork or something similar until they were old enough to become a fireman. (I think you had to be 18, but a century ago guys sometimes would lie about their age and start earlier. Long ago, many guys left school after getting their eighth-grade diploma and started working at 14 or 15.)
Just speculating here, but if we could assume a shovel of coal weighs 6 pounds net (coal isn't exactly like rocks or gravel...it is considerably lighter), and if we forget about the cyclic weight bearing needed to swing the shovel, itself, back and forth between bin and firebox, the fireman would need 333 cycles of 6 pounds net each per hour to shovel one (1) ton. That works out to five and a half shovel loads per minute.
But, we have the shovel at capacity @ 6 lbs, so the only recourse to double his effort to two (2) tons would be to double the cyclic rate of shoveling. This means our intrepid fireman is now digging into the bin, turning, and firing the coal load off the shovel at the rate of 11 times per minute.
Last but not least were the engineers themselves. A good engineer worked the throttle like it was melted butter and ran the engine so that you could ballance a wine glass on the backhead when starting or stopping. This was great because you didn't have to worry about the engine over drafting and pulling your fire up the stack. The engineers that would just yank the throttle open usually got a lot of wheel slip for their effort and a mad fireman desperately trying to plug holes in his bed. 1630 was especially slippery on starting.
I found out that a fireman constantly walks a tightrope between making too much steam or not enough. Now trying to ballance all of the varaiables of firing while shovelling 3 to 5 tons of coal per HOUR is something else, my hat is off to the men who could pull it off.
Keep in mind that, except perhaps going up a stiff grade, it would be rare for the fireman to shovel continuously for a whole trip. Once the fire is built up with plenty of coal, it's going to be hot enough to produce enough steam for the fireman to sit down for a while. From what I've seen it's more of a back and forth thing...check the fire, shovel in 3-4-5 shovelfulls in quick succession, sit down, check the water gauge, look out the window for a signal, look back to check on the train around a curve, check the fire, get up, 3-4-5 shovelfulls in the fire, sit down again, etc. etc.
Anzalone, in a guest column for Metro New York, explains that the Jets' poor season isn't the reason why he has decided to hang up his fireman's helmet. He writes he left the game because "confrontations with other Jets fans have become more common, even though most Jets fans are fantastic."
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