Filling Up

One of the exciting events around running steam express trains in Britain was taking on water. An express locomotive would need to fill up it's tender with water around every hundred miles or so, they were very thirsty machines. This was usually done from a water column beside the track at stations using a large capacity hose, but on longer express passenger routes they would fill up on the move from troughs between the rails. A few other European systems and some North American railroads (where they were called 'pans') used this process too, but in Britain it was very popular and happened at high speed.

The trough between the rails had - for obvious reasons! - to be on completely level track and was about half a mile long. As the locomotve approached at perhaps 80 mph the fireman would quickly lower a scoop under the tender and the speed of the train would transfer perhaps 5000 gallons into the tender in around 20 seconds.

If the fireman left the scoop down even a second too long everything in a wide radius got a shower from a 'tidal wave' as several hundred gallons overflowed. It was all a rather dodgy business, and especially in the dark!

I was looking for a photo of Whiske Moor troughs near Darlington where I often watched engines taking water like this as a child from a safe distance, but this lovely print of a GWR train on Reading troughs by Barry Freeman was the best I could find. You can see other examples of his work here Sadly it's something you can never watch now - I don't think there are working troughs left anywhere in the world.