Boilerwork

Here's a picture from the rare book on Southern Pacific 'Daylights' by Robert Church that I featured recently. It shows the boiler of a 'GS' class being brazed at the Lima locomotive works in Ohio in 1937. The boiler is on it's side and the men are working in the firebox. Most of the structural strength comes from the heavy duty riveting.

That's a heck of a firebox eh? The grate area must be about 100 square feet. Like almost all other Southern Pacific engines this one will be oil fired when complete. That's a mainly American technology I never had much experience with but I guess the burner was attached outside the fire door and made a huge flame into the firebox. Engines like this could use 6000 gallons of fuel in a day in service.

In Britain most of our engines were coal fired by hand. Absolutely no chance of even an Olympic weightlifter hand firing this GS boiler with a shovel!

I've actually made model locomotive boilers with brazing and rivets and it's really fun to flange copper plates.

In the full size boiler shops like this one the noise was incredible. In those days no-one thought much about occupational injuries and all boilermakers were completely deaf. I once went into the boiler shop at Swindon when new boilers were still being made and I'll never forget how the din of all those pheumatic riveting hammers almost knocked you over as you walked through the door.