Smokebox Cleaning?? - Trains Magazine

Piper106a

It seems odd to me that American locomotives had the smokebox door secured with multiple bolts, what with the smokebox needing inspection or cleaning daily, or multiple times per day.  All that wrenching to get it open and then closed again.  The method used by British and French railways, of a single lever or a handwheel to latch/unlatch the smokebox door seems a lot quicker and more efficient.  

Take another look.  American smokebox doors are/were dogged shut.  Half a turn to loosen the nut, then rotate the dog clear.  Granted that the 'busted clock' lock on modern Japanese locos was faster acting, but it also prevents mounting anything anywhere near the center of the smokebox front.  On many roads, that was home base for the headlight.

There is a similar situation aboard WWII era naval vessels.  Bulkhead doors which were normally closed and only infrequently opened were clamped shut with dogs.  Doors which were frequently used, and only closed when the ship was 'buttoned up' for storm or combat, had handwheels to operate their latches.

In the same way, (at least on roads that did not have outside accessable ash hoppers on the bottom of the smokebox) getting debris out of the common American locomotive smokebox must have been a pain due to having a small diameter door high above the bottom of the smokebox. Every shovelfull of ash had to be lifted up from the bottom of the smokebox to the door.  This job would likely have been easier, if the smokebox doors that were nearly the full diameter of the smokebox, as seen on British and French locomotives had been installed.  

Different operating conditions.  European and Japanese locomotives locos ran a few hundred kilometers between cleanings.  NYC would run a single Hudson or Niagara 1250km Harmon-Chicago.  Some Western roads routinely ran a loco 2000+km without change.  Nobody wanted the contents of the smokebox to dump out on the pilot beam when the door was opened - especially if there were air brake compressors sited there.  (In Japan, the Elesco-type feedwater heater was frequently mounted on the pilot beam, directly under the smokebox door.)

Then, too, on larger roads the major cleaning tool would have been somewhat similar to a vacuum cleaner - suck, not shovel.

Bottom line, steam locomotives are criticised for the large amount of manpower needed to keep them running.  Yet here we have one example of a task that needed far more labor input than it should have due to due lack of even basic job analysis on the part of engineering and management.  I bet there were many steam locomotive operating tasks that could have had their labor requirements reduced with minor changes to the hardware.    

Bear in mind, the steam locomotive was, basically, a nineteenth century idea.  Ergonomics wasn't even a concept in the mind of an academic when all but the most recent locos were designed.  Most design features crystallized before the days of the USRA, never mind the more recent trend toward efficient initial design.

Somebody starting today with a clean sheet of paper could easily come up with a design that would be more efficient to maintain.  It would still require more maintenance manhours per operating hour than diesel or straight electric.  That's why oceangoing ships have forsaken steam for diesel or gas turbine engines (unless the steam is generated by the heat of nuclear fission.)

Chuck (Long ago Ship's Engineering cadet)