caseydog wrote:What's it fired with -- coal, wood, diesel?
Coal - as far as I know, no-one ever seriously thought of firing a British steam loco on anything but coal. Britain has never had enough land to make wood cheap enough as a fuel and back when steam locos were used, all oil was imported and expensive. I expect the real reason the new Tornado is coal-fired is because only coal is 'right and proper' for a steam loco to use, at least in Britain.
I believe that in the dying days of steam traction, the (nationalised) railways did look at oil as a labour-saving alternative, but by then if you were going to use oil, you might as well put it straight into a diesel engine.
In our small country, steam was used differently from the US, as the distances were low enough that a non-stop steam service eventually became possible nearly everywhere. Even the London to Edinburgh run, at 400 miles and 7-1/2 hours, became non-stop by using water troughs to pick up extra water and a 'corridor tender' to allow a second crew through to the loco to take over for the second half of the trip - six to eight tons of coal had to be manually shovelled into the firebox on the trip so that was always too much for one fireman to do non-stop!
Andrew
PS for Philip: hush your potty mouth! 'Evening Star' was the very last steam loco to be made in Britain (until this new 'Tornado'). Its name was the winner of a competition amongst the works that built it and was chosen because the same works had built a 'Morning Star' about 100 years earlier. But the 'Evening Star' is a 9F, a standardised simplified class of loco that was the nationalised railway company's sensible attempt to produce an economic loco. However 'Tornado' is an A1 loco from the pre-nationalisation London North Eastern Railway. Mixing these up is waay worse than suggesting a Ford was built by Chevy - it's still worse than suggesting a F150 was built in Korean Chevy factory.....
Oh, and Happy New Year guys - it's just rolled past 00:00 here.
