Big iron.
Big stuff to work on that big iron..
Big pistons.
Big boilers.
Big.
When I was a kid we had a big (N gauge?) setup. It was too big to do anything but one circular track around the living room. I think the individual cars and loco were 10-12" long, if that sounds right.
I took two live steam trips, one to upstate New York in the late forties, one to Florida in the early fifties. Not that I really appreciated it at the time, but I remember the dining car service and food was outstanding. Shiny spotless glasses of ice-cubed water that wiggled and danced and clinked as the train rolled along. White elegant knapkins, black elegant waiters. Smell of the coal. Metronome of the tracks. Tunnels. Three-noted whoop of the whistle.
Later lived on farmlet near Burlington and Northern Tracks, all diesel by then. Walked across the pasture toward the tracks with my second son, six. Coal train to Valmont Power Plant rumbling by slowly because of the RR crossings, catch eye of engineer, one arm hanging out of cab. Poke son, say, "Watch this, boy," raise arm in pulling whistle chain motion. Engineer grins and gives us loooooooong couple of blaaaaats on the horn. Kid delighted, still remembers that, thirty years later.
Love live steam. Built a few model engines, not locomotives, but horizontal, in my machine shop out of found materials like an MG automobile wheel brake cylinder, double action piston valved. Others mostly oscillating-type. Ran off compressed air, no boiler, no steam. Oh, well.
Union Pacific 844 parked at Union Station in Denver a couple of years ago, open for tours of the cab. Converted to diesel-fired boilers. Smelly. Valve linkages big as your leg. Big drivers taller than I. Imagined big lathe to turn and true those wheels.
Big iron.
Big stuff to work on that big iron..
Big pistons.
Big boilers.
Big.
Terry, 230RN
ETA:
844 at Union Station ca 2007(?), shrouded for streamlining:
My own pic with a chemical camera that knocked around in my backpack for years. Wheels are 80" (203 cm) in diameter. That valve link (vertical arm with slot in it) is actually as big as your leg.
They had to keep pressure up on a standby basis to run a little turbine genset to power up the concession stand in one of the cars. I jokingly offered to run an extension cord from my office for them, and the engineer laughed but said that because it took more than a day to bring pressure up from cold, they had to keep fire on the boiler anyhow. You could hear the firebox roar intermittently as it automatically turned itself on and off... you can do that with oil-firing. Interestingly, according to the engineer, they drained the water from the boiler whenever they shut down completely because they could not use anti-freeze in the boiler water.
REF:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_844
