ash removal?

Have often wondered what happened to the coal ash from coal fired boilers. Seen no mention of it.
Was it just dumped along the way? How was it dealt with?
thanks

Locomotives had 'ashpans' which sat below the firebox and had a capacity starting at 2000 pounds.

The smaller the engine, the shorter the distance it was expected to travel before having the pan emptied.

As part of the locomotive's daily servicing in the sheds, the ashpan would be emptied into the ashpit. From there it would either be shoveled out manually or conveyered, similar to how a hopper in emptied.

Engine terminals usually had an ashpit, the loco was positioned over it on a bridge structure and the ash pans were cleaned out, mostly with a hoe. Some would dump by gravity, but you had to drag out the rest. A messy job, I've done it in museum steam service. Blecch.

Bigger terminals had ashpits big and deep enough to park a gondola car under the bridge, saving lots of grunt labor. Other operations required men to shovel the pit clean.

Smaller operations dumped the ashpan anywhere on the line that might need ash for ballast.

The yard tracks at Wayne Electric Car Shop in Phila. were ballasted with cinders from Readings own engines. Recycling in the "Roaring Twenties"

I've also seen ashpans gravity dumped and then the remaining ash hosed out with high-pressure water.

Under what circumstances were ash/cinders used for track ballast?

It seems that most of the east coast roads used cinders, for ballast, on some portions of their lines, at some point in time. I've walked many miles across NJ/NY/PA, and have seen the cinder base, hidden under the additional stone ballast, added over the years. Some branchlines, are still cinder. I think of the Chester Branch, (NJ) as an example, of a line that was entirely cinder. Yards and terminals are also great places to find cinder ballast. It's hard, compacts tightly, and drains well. Other than the fact it will crush and crumble over time, it's actually not a bad material, considering it's cost. (back when it was being produced, by the tons)

Cinders and ashes would be used when better materials were not available, for whatever reason, including cost.

Ashes turns to a very disgusting mud fairly quickly so it isn't as useful as one might think. If you have a huge fleet of engines and minimal use line where MoW forces can lay ashes frequently, it might pay to skip the ballast rock, but that is another time and place.

I'm not certain that ashes today would stand up to scrutiny by FRA track inspectors, which is a major consideration for the material used in the construction of ANYTHING railroad.

In my Rail Archive site there is a section presenting a locomotive fireman's instruction book that was created in 1944, discussing the operation of the grates, the ash-pan flusher, and other things the fireman needed to use. The link to the "home" page of the instruction book is:

http://www.railarchive.net/firing/index.html

The direct link to the discussion of the ash-pan flusher is:

http://www.railarchive.net/firing/p109.htm

From the "Contents" page you can go to any part of the manual:

http://www.railarchive.net/firing/pv.htm

Dr. Richard Leonard

Thanks, rlsteam, for that link. I found it fascinating to read about the ash pan flusher and compare it with South African practice (where I am a fireman on main line heritage steam).

We call it an ash pan cooler rather than flusher, and for us it doesn't seem to be very useful for flushing the ash from the sloping wings. Whenever we clean fire someone usually works a small pricker through the openings on each side at the top of the ash pan to push the ash from the wings into the hopper. We then use the spray pipe from the footplate to wash down the wings once we've finished the main job. But the ash pan cooler does help the ash to drop out of the bottom of the hopper, by lubricating it and turning it into a slurry.

The second use in the US manual, for extinguishing hot coals and cinders, is the main reason we are taught to use the ash pan cooler.

The third one, thawing frozen ash, is not one we come across very often in our climate!

We are supposed to dump ash only in proper ash pits, but nowadays they are few and far between so we dump it on the track in depots, sidings, etc. We normally dump ash only on steel or concrete sleepers (not wooden ones) and we have to arrange for it to be removed, usually by labourers with a wheelbarrow. We're not allowed to dump on points, cables, etc.

Our ash pan cooler is connected to the injector, and will only work when the injector is operating. First we operate the injector, then we open the valve on the foorplate for the cooler. It often takes a hit with a heavy object (the heavy hammer being the most useful tool on the footplate for many purposes!) to get it open, as it has to be very firmly closed afterwards otherwise it interferes with the operation of the injector. On more than one occasion I've seen an inexperienced fireman report a defective injector, and an old driver or fitter has come along, belted the ash pan cooler valve with a hammer or drop-grate handle, and immediately the injector has started functioning properly.

Very interesting, John! Are you operating Garratts or 4-8-2s, or what is your steam motive power? (Not the “Red Devil” 4-8-4, I guess!)

Richard, there are three steam operators in Gauteng (the province which contains both Pretoria and Johannesburg) - Friends of the Rail, Reefsteamers and Rovos Rail. FOTR and RS are voluntary associations, while RR is a commercial company operating super-luxury trains which are steam-hauled for part of their journey. I belong to FOTR, but there is a lot of interchangeability of crews between the three organisations.

FOTR operates three locos - a big main line express 4-8-2 of class 15F, and two smaller locos, a 4-8-2 class 19D and a 2-8-4 class 24. Next on our list for renovation is a 4-8-2 class 15CA.

RS has a larger supply of locos, and they currently operate a GMAM Garratt 4-8-2 + 2-8-4 which belongs to the Sandstone Heritage Tust. It's a magnificent locomotive, and I had the opportunity to fire it a few times when it was being operated by RR a couple of years back.

RR operates class 25NC 4-8-4 locos, as well as class 19D. We fire for RR when they are short of crews.

Between the three operators, there are certain times of the year when you can see steam on the main line in Gauteng virtually every day of the month, often double-headed hauling long heavy trains.

To qualify as firemen, we had to do the same course as professional Drivers Assistants in the national railway company (which was called Spoornet when I qualified but is now Transnet Freight Rail, TFR), except that we substituted a final module on the steam locomotive for their modules on diesel or electric traction. We had to attend evening classes at the national railway college, pass several written exams (mainly on rules and regulations, methods of train control, safety, etc as well as the module on the specific type of traction) with a minimum pass mark of 80%, pass a practical exam (mainly on safety) on a loco in steam, then do an "internship" of several trips firing under the supervision of qualified firemen before a final passing out exam under the TFR Section Manager. We consider ourselves very privileged to be allowed to operate on the national network as "private" rather than professional personnel, although we strive to maintain (and even surpass) the best of professional standards. We are also lucky that steam on the national network continued in South Africa until the early 1990s and much later at industrial sites (indeed there is still one steam-worked industrial site in South Africa, operating three 19Ds), so there is still plenty of expertise around.

FOTR operates a discussion forum using the same phpBB format as Railroad.net - if anyone is interested it's at http://www.friendsoftherail.com/phpBB2. It contains a lot of photos of South African steam in action, as well as other forms of traction and some stuff of wider international interest.

The class 26 Red Devil was converted from a 25NC. The Red Devil is currently in Cape Town. It's not a runner at the moment, but I believe it's not in too bad condition.

Cheers!
John

There's a picture of the ashpan slide door on a South African steam locomotive, taken from underneath in the inspection pit, on the Friends of the Rail forum here, and a picture of an ash pit in a station on a small branch line here

Hello,
I want to give some impressions on that from Germany, were I am a fireman on a museal railroad.
All locomotives I know, as far I know, had ashpans. Usually those were closed by doors or flaps. In Germany those doors can be opened by a lever from the footplate. We had no partial sahking or rocking grate, like the grate of the Hulson type, we had in Germany usually sloping flat grates with a grate trap-door.
You can open those trap door by a thread-spindle from the firemans side, first older trap-doors need special hooked tools, which were used to open the grate bars into open position.

Now the cinder was pulled through the open grate-trapdoor into the ashpan. With open ashpan doors the ash was dropped into the ashpit, which was betwen the wheels below track level. In many yards those ashpits were flooded with water, to extinction all remaining pieces still on fire. With excavators those ashpits were cleaned and the cinder was used in streetbuilding purposes.
Ash hat to be shoveled out from the smoke box. Germany had no self-cleaning smoke boxes, so ash accumulations in the smoke box were common and had to be removed as a regular service during locomotive "pit service" schedules. This ash was stored appart from the clinker, but also was used in building purposes, were it was often used as filling material.

Some hard clinker layers on the grate had to be broken of with hooks or hoes, a hard work after a hard daily service, and pulled into the ashpan.
The ashpan cooler can be used to flush the cinders out of the ashpan. Because it were tubes just fit below the grate, which delivvered water on top of the ashpan, to extinct any fresh, through the grate dropped still glowing or burning material, to prevent the ashpan from over-heating, und thus material deconstruction or thermal deformations.
But: Water makes the cinder in the ashpan to a very compact, hard mass, which does not often drop out by gravitiy that easily. So you have to go down into the ashpit, using a hoe and rake out all the cinder from the ashpan into the ashpit.

And because I have to do this duty often, I can tell you from the German locomotives many details on this point.