No offense meant as Loree was a man of daunting personality, but he is associated with technological backwardness. His forte was business organization, and lots would question how forward looking he was there.
He was heavily influenced by the culture at the Pennsylvania R.R. where he worked many years. His son , who had the same name, was responsible for the high pressure compound locomotives.
Loree, senior that is, refused to have stokers installed on locomotives.
The result was that the helper mallets built for use as pushers oover Ararat
required two firemen, right from opening day. Whats more , the nature of the wootten boiler systemused to burn anthracite culm, that resulted in those large camelback consolidations (and later small aft cabin power) was particularly susceptible to damaging overdrafts caused by opening the firebox doors.
These locos had two doors in order to cover the wide firebox grates.
They also had small spaces between the grates because the fuel was of very small size. They required fire brick arches to increase the amount of time the burning gasses were held in the fire box to heat the very large
amount of water being heated there(as opposed to locos with smaller
fireboxes). The firetube section of the boilers was shorter than on
wagon tops or other boilers because the available heat was less, having
been extracted (hopefully ) in the fire box leg. There was a combination
economizing/draft controlling butterfly valve(s) on the petticoat
pipe/blast stack in order to reduce the velocity of the gas flow.
The small sized culm fuel had to be held in the firebox and burnt there
against the strong draft created by the loco exhaust. When hand firing the velocity increased with opening the doors. This was inimicable to working
these locos under load, over grades.
The result was relief fireman were required, because the physical
effort of trying to throw enough junk fuel into the firebox , and keeping
them hot was impossible. In time, better fuel and most of all - the
appearance of stokers, increased the efficiency of some of these
collosal 2-8-0s immensely. However, the Reading, notably, but also
L&HR and others, got there years before the D&H , because of Leonor
Loree Seniors ignorance.
You should read his books anyway, -because they give a perspective on
railroading of a guy running a railroad. However, he was mechaniically
backward. Nobody is perfect, right.
Good-Luck, Peter