After my grandfather was killed in a fire my grandmother bought and ran a boarding house for railroad workers in Aberdeen, SD. About 1905. She had 13 kids. My dad, the youngest had the job of walking the tracks, picking up coal that fell off the tenders. Not far from the coaling tower, many train crews overfilled the tender. One of the boarders told my dad, this area would be the best coal picking. Coal was used in the cook stove and to heat the house in the winter. Normally the railroad police would grab a kid with a bucket of coal near the railroad yard, but the relationship with the boarding house gave him a pass. The railroad was constantly on the crews about coal and water waste.

@Bob.W.

4 ай бұрын

That's quite the story. My grandpa was from Florence SD and worked out of Watertown. He fed the family in the Depession by shooting waterfowl, pheasants and other game from his county road grader. Folks did what they had to do to survive.

@oceanmariner

4 ай бұрын

@@Bob.W. My dad said they use to take a Model T, a brother on each fender, and another driving. Just road hunting pheasants. He said their record was 110 in one day. My grandma use to can the meat. Sometime before 1915 when my dad left to get in WWI. Streets of Aberdeen were still dirt.

@Bob.W.

4 ай бұрын

@oceanmariner sounds familiar. When I was a kid in the 50s the basement shelves were still full of canned pheasant, duck, geese and venison. My dad said you hardly had to aim your shotgun as the pheasants were so thick. My mom remembered Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard flying in to Watertown to hunt pheasants.

My father initially hired on the B&O, Baltimore, in 1942. Before acquiring his seniority date he enlisted in the US Navy, but was guaranteed that job upon discharge after the war. A locomotive fireman was entry level at that time. Having a job as fireman was highly desirable employment at that time even though it was irregular, dirty and labor intensive work. Even with automatic stokers the job required constant monitoring of the fire in order to make sure the coal was evenly distributed in the fire-box. When working the engine up a hill or on a long switching move with a hand-fired locomotive it was one shovel-full after another as fast as physically possible. I used to work at a rail-yard with men who had worked with steam. They said they would pay to have the experience once or twice again, but would quit the railroad if they had to do it on a daily bases.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Yeah, I just imagine that kind of work... Dont get me wrong.. I have worked hard..But nothing like that on the same hand. So I suppose I can say that I dont know the real level of hard work.. I.E. Coal miners.. Steam Loco firemen and pit crew. ETC.

The entry level jobs were : 1.brakemen 2.Yard hand 3.Porter 4. Shop hand(mechanic's assistant/janitor) 5. window clerk (station ticket stand) 6. Dishwasher 7. Rail Mail sorter 8. Janitors everything else was usually a position you had to first be one of these roles to be promoted into or come from a line of work that your cousin/family member could vouch for would work for the position you were aiming for. Employee turn over wasn't viewed in such a negative light as today so people who were good actually got promoted into the higher positions and the chaff either were fired or demoted accordingly.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Wow! Thank you!

There were engineers and firemen who worked only in yards, called hostlers. They ran loco to and from roundhouse, water spigot and fuel. You started as an engine wiper or cleaner, and worked up.

Fish in the locomotive tanks was also a problem in some places in England, even in the early British Railways days. The famous locomotive Flying Scotsman had this happen once, having just taken on water from a standpipe fed by a waterway, and it nearly resulted in a boiler explosion because the fish was blocking the tube between Scotsman and his tender. A KZreadr who made Thomas and Friends like stories with his model trains recreated the incident for one of his videos. His videos are called the "British Railway Stories" and are still on KZread last I checked. And of course, stories like that were the source that the Rev W. Awdry used when he wrote the story "Thomas Goes Fishing."

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

I had to re-dub that segment a couple of times because I started to laugh.

The New Haven railroad had a HUGE renforced concrete coaling tower in East Haven CT., where they had a huge roundhouse facitlity (mow long gone), also near the former Cedat Hill freight yard (mostly abandoned, though a large amount of track & structures are still in place, mostly overgrown & derelict). The coaling tower is easily visible from the right side of Amtrak passenger trains heading southbound into New Haven, just a few minitues arrival at the station. 🙂

At IRM we have an ancient 50 ton American clamshell crane named "slewfoot" because one track has a blown clutch. Since the 70s she has loaded thousands of tons of coal into our locomotives. Great video, thanks much!

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Very cool!

Thanks I use to work in underground coal mine in Kentucky

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

I really hope you don't pay for it a bit later in life. I really do.

There was another use for the ash. When I was a young kid, my school burned coal for heating. During the winter, the janitor would spread ash over the ice slides we created. Coal was still used in some houses back then and people would spread ash on their driveways and sidewalks in winter.

@victorbertolina6545

4 ай бұрын

My grandfather had a coal (actually coke) furnace. We lived next door. The ashes were taken from the coal furnace and used in winter as anti-skid on the driveway. The driveway was "paved" with red dog, the burnt shale from the coal mine. These events occurred over 60 years ago!

@daveborchers5649

4 ай бұрын

Our school burned coal in its boiler also. The ash was in chunks called clinkers. You could see the size of those clinkers in the video. Our school would grind the clinkers with a Letz burr mill to 1/4 To 3/8 inch size. This was them put on the athletic track hence the term cinder track. My town of Holstein, Iowa had what was considered the 2nd best track in Iowa at the time.

@johngibson3837

4 ай бұрын

Was used on speedway tracks in uk hence the name cinder track

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

I ran on a cinder track in High School myself. Not nice on the knee's if you hit the ground. It tore mine up after falling on the hurdles.

@johngibson3837

4 ай бұрын

@@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower I'm guessing that was in America and athletic track

My dad and uncle worked steam lines in the winter (they hired college students because it was tedious, and they could study between trains) for the iron ore cars in the staging yard before their run to the ore docks on Lake Superior to load the freighters. The ore would freeze between the mine and the staging yard. The steam would thaw it, allowing it to bottom dump at the docks.

the jobs that emptied the ash pan, loaded coal or water before the train crew reported to duty (along with starting the fires etc) were called Hostlers. they could sometime bid to a Fireman's job but Engineers were the top of the pay scale. not sure if Firemen could go to Engineer or if they had to be a Conductor first or not. before my time but I've known gentlemen who did all the positioning of the locomotives in the right spots for the train to be made up and got them ready to pull into the repair facilities for maintenance. they were all Hostlers

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Cool story!

The old Marietta and and Cincinnati Railroad went across our old farm between Dunbar and Napier stations. Lenny Gallagher and his boys would jump on the coal wagons and throw coal over the side. 75 years later we would still pick up coal along the rail bed to burn at our lake on the farm.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Great story!

lol - Portland is insane.

There is a big concrete coaling tower astride the double track main of the old PRR, now NS, near Marion, Ohio. You can see it driving route 23.

Clinker is generally comprised of glassy materials from the sand and grit in the coal itself, as well as other incombustible solids that aggregate together into chunks. It can embed unburned coal, but generally not. It also has high concentrations of the lovely carcinogenic heavy solids mentioned earlier in the video, though the ash also carries some. It's also important to remember to pick the clinkers out of your forge before you try and heat for forge-welding.... wait, wrong use-case.... One of the local coal power plants that was decommissioned a few years back still had the silo-like bunkers full of low-grade lignite from when they mined it iust across the highway. The prior 5 years of operation they had decided it was cheaper to haul in the much nicer PRB sourced sub-bituminous coal via train, as it produced dramatically less ash and clinker, fouling the whole works much less. A couple other plants in the area still burn the crummy lignite that is readily available though. No anthracite or bituminous in this region though.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Well hopefully the use of coal in this way will be eliminated in favor of something far cleaner in the next 20 years.

I still heat with coal in a outside water furnace it also heats my domestic hot water my shop and my hot tub it’s run year round . I save the ash for the winter to put on my driveway

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

My Grandmother did that same thing on her driveway.

The entry level in the UK was the engine cleaner.

Actually the term “ jerk water town” came from remote areas where water was between the rails and locomotives could drop their scoop from the bottom of the tender and pickup water without stopping.

You did indeed start as a cleaner on the railroad. I have been a fireman in preservation, and it was hand firing. Power stokers were usually used on the largest locomotives, and in general less common in Europe, even on locomotives which should have had them. Imagine firing a 3000hp or over locomotive by hand, and this was often the case, no wonder many firemen wouldn't like these, like the Belgian type 1 out of my video request. But in my case it was a 1600hp 2-8-0, and being younger and fitter then, it wasn't that hard, even with the inclines we had on our railway. Of course did the operations at limited speed and with 6 coaches not demand all of the engine. What was hard was the heat and often the humidity in the summer. On many smaller depots and staging points at smaller RRs and branch lines you would not find the huge concrete hoppers, but often a coal yard with a crane with grab if you were lucky, or like in one picture in the video you had to hand fill small dump cars or even buckets which could then rapidly being dumped in the coal bunker of the loco, buckets often used where small tank locomotives were used which took only 1 or 1.5 tonnes of coal at a time. But I know several large depots have existed in Belgium, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands which had large hoppers, those in Belgium and the UK very similar to US ones being loaded by an elevator which transported coal out of a dump pit, those in the Netherlands and Germany being made out of steel and loaded with a grab crane mounted on the coaling tower which unloaded the coal from open wagons.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Great info as always Tom!

They still have an operating coaling tower at the railway I volunteer at, see the very short clip of it in operation below. Regarding your question, yes the entry level is ‘engine cleaner’ which incorporates the job of shovelling the ash out of the pit. kzread.info/dash/bejne/Z6mu0ZVmdZa8mM4.htmlsi=4Jmylj0Ko9ZNF_3b

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Very, very cool!

@struck2soon

4 ай бұрын

We also hand-fire our locos, this is me in action on one of our larger engines: kzread.info/dash/bejne/X59hpqOwpKSsqM4.htmlsi=XkCkBMbZblaPAJUj

One road that is notable for never operating coal-fired steam locomotives is the Flagler System, the Florida East Coast Railway. Flagler, being a partner of Rockefeller, used cheap residual fuel oil to fire locomotive boilers and I believe that is why the FEC granite ballast is still blue, the track wasn't dusted for decades with cinders and soot.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

I did not know this

@Toledo1940

4 ай бұрын

Not true. The FEC used coal as fuel for its steam locomotives until around 1910, when its locomotives were converted to burn oil. New locomotives acquired after this date were built as oil-burners.

Fascinating!

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

It is kinda neat

yea it was a coal tower interest here in town that got me searching about information about what used to sit here on the old b and o main, turns out the coal tower that was actually a tower built in 1947 before that it was an incline with pockets on two sides and after that they used the gatry crane to fill on the cinder pit, which was replaced by the ogle engineering coal tower built here that had a pit under it to empty the ashpan and fire and conveyed ot over to a skip hoist to load it into a waiting car, it also could take on water on three engines and put sand in carried 500 tons of coal 200 tons of sand which I am not sure how they loaded the coal was a bucket skip hoist like the ash lift and had 3 water pipes or penstocks as they were also called or standpipes. was last used in 1958 but no one knows when they took it down. it was overall 95 feet tall and a picture of it could be found in modern railroader in the same issue as the flue processing plant put in at the cumberland shops intrestingly though in 1909 they had a simaler one at garrett in the back of the boiler shop here in a 20 by 30 room I think it was or area commingout of the flue rattler which is a spinning drum that functioned like a washing machine to clean the pipes of dirt and scale and it would roll in on a track, can also be seen in living Color on this kzread.info/dash/bejne/mamHo6qCftCzhaQ.html its the giant silo thing on stilts in garrett and funny thing back then they let the guests into the railyard right up close you would not get away with that today as for me I have cleaned the firebox out and cleaned grates on nkp 765 many times as well as blowing the flues, and a few times drilled out staybolt tell tells and have a handfull of times filled up the firebox with a bed of coal for it to be lit off and started to get it ready for trips I still have a way to go on my aim half the coal on the shovel ends up in the cab heh but its good practice and you got to keep an even layer and cover all the grates otherwise the cold air of exposed grates can ruin them from the heat and you loos efficency not using every square inch to heat that you got, cold air also seeps up though the bottom and its not good on the metal of the firebox as another thing that not good about exposed grates.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Great response, as usual!

@manga12

4 ай бұрын

@@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower thanks I am mearly trying to get the stories out there and teach about who we were in the city, and the area with its high speed trains some of the fastest in the usa and in the world at the point

5:55 reminds me of thomas. Inspector can you see/smell fish.

Re entry level positions. During WW2, one of my uncles had a part time job lubricating steam locomotives, when he wasn't in school. I don't know if he did much else though, as that's all he mentioned.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

I would have a blast doing that job... Just to be around the loco's, you know!

@James_Knott

4 ай бұрын

@@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower All locos? Or just steam? Years ago, I was a telecommunications technician with Canadian National and back in the mid 70s, when I was working in northern Ontario, I frequently rode freight trains in my work. I rode in both the engines and cabooses.

Very nice to see North American steam engine refuelling solutions and the coal towers. On the water trough, I have a picture of a UK class 40 (type 4) 2000hp diesel filling its water tanks from such troughs! In the early days of diesel they were fitted with steam boilers to provide steam to heat the coaches, (also a steam engine coupled to a diesel when the diesel steam heater had failed) this as we transitioned steam to diesel with electric thrown in! UK steam suffered from different qualities of coal around the country, certain engines were designed (our big four regional companies 1923 to 1948 all had different chief engineers and thus views and needs on engine designs) for high quality coal e.g. Welsh coal for good performance. Problem with most coaling towers is every loco gets the same from local collieries (now all closed) so not necessarily good for optimal steaming, unless there is a choice/ multiple chutes to cope with. Did N. American engines suffer from this or less prone to such variation?

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Thank you for sharing!

Most locomotives down here were oil-fired (Bunker C). Only bituminous clinkers up; anthracite does not. This video definitely needed more research.

Anyone know the location of the Pere Marquette coaling tower shown around the 3:57 mark?

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

There are a few video's on KZread that has a guy touring the country looking for them. I would not doubt that you find it in one of his uploads. Just search coal towers

One had to be pretty spry if or when the water overflowed.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

Hmm... I've never seen that operation... How so?

@stevew270

4 ай бұрын

@@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower Oops, I meant when they were standing on top of the tender filling it and weren't paying attention and let it run out the top.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

@@stevew270 in that case..yeah, that would not be a good thing.. One just as likely would be going for a unwanted ride in that event.

I'm also from Portland and I find banning coal trains here to be BS.

Portland has bigger problems than coal dust... Lol...

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

No doubt about that!

Those cinders are full of arsenic and other heavy metals. That is worth remembering. And, the storage facilities at coal fired power plants have contaminated rivers and underground aquifers. Had this video just started with the "shaking down" process I would not have mentioned that. But, the disregard the creator of this video showed by downplaying current concerns about coal was disappointing to say the least

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

The video wasn't about those issues. That discussion belongs in another dedicated topic. It was only brought up to magnify the difficulty of the workers involved. Nothing more and nothing less.

@davidbross6942

4 ай бұрын

And yet you chose to include comments about current conditions. That's on you. To be clear, it was your down playing the concerns of the town that coal trains run through today that is the issue. Not the working conditions of miners. @@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

At 2:13 especially hundred years ago? A hundred years ago was 1924. America had already asserted itself on the world stage by bullying poor, old, tired Spain, building the Panama Canal and supplying English and France with the products necessary to hold off Germany as well as contributing 116,516 American lives to a fight we didn't really have much at stake. Probably add at least another half century to that building America time line.

@TheRailroadCrossing-SteamPower

4 ай бұрын

It was also a time the coal industry was running nothing less than sweat shops.

@curtislowe4577

4 ай бұрын

Worker safety didn't make much headway until FDR. Although the railroads did adopt air brakes and knuckle style couplers well before that worker safety was an after thought.

Yes it was entry level jobs normally performed by children at the start but then moving to slightly older boy’s whilst the railroad found out what they where good for (children of railroad workers were guaranteed job’s but just because the father is a great engineer it doesn’t follow the son’s would be some a lot more intelligent gaining higher positions the dumber one’s not going anywhere special)