Fireless Steam

Fireless Locomotives

This is Peckett 2155/1955 which has been preserved by Salford City Council and is on display at Irlam, Manchester. 

Photo by courtesy of Salford City Council.

Perhaps Huntley & Palmers No.1 will soon look as smart as this!

Preservation

About 30 fireless steam locomotives were preserved in the U.K. but two of these have already been scrapped and others might follow.  They are not popular with preservation societies, because they are less than ideal for hauling passenger trains, but it's not impossible. 

Kenavon Railway Society would like to stop the rot.  Many preserved railways have a single fireless locomotive rusting away on a siding.  It would be useful to gather two or three of them together in one place and restore them to working order.  A continuous service could then be provided by having one locomotive at work, a second on charge, and a third in reserve.

Although fireless locomotives were rarely fitted with vacuum brakes, they usually have steam brakes so it should be possible to fit a proportional valve to create a vacuum-controlled steam brake.  To save steam, the vacuum exhauster could be driven by a small petrol engine mounted in the brake van.  First-generation diesel multiple unit trailers (which have two-pipe vacuum brakes) could possibly be used as passenger vehicles.

Here is a picture of a fireless loco working a passenger train!  This photo was taken in Serbia - date uncertain but either 1998 or 2001.  Scroll about half-way down the page to see it.

Information

A fireless steam locomotive has a large insulated reservoir instead of a boiler. The reservoir is charged with steam from a stationary boiler and the locomotive can then work for 2-4 hours on the stored steam. Fireless locomotives were useful for factories which already had stationary boilers and for sites where cleanliness or low fire risk were important. Examples included food factories, oil refineries, paper mills, munitions factories, etc. Huntley & Palmers No. 1 is one of about 30 fireless locomotives which have been preserved in Britain. Here is a list.

Buckinghamshire Railway Centre has produced a brief history of the development of fireless locomotives. Production of fireless locomotives in Britain ceased in 1961 but, in Germany, it continued into the 1980s. The Meiningen Locomotive Works built over 200 between 1984 and 1988 and some are still in service today. This website shows photos of German fireless locos both in industrial service and in preservation.

We hope to create a centre for working fireless locomotives. Preserved fireless locomotives have occasionally been operated by charging them with steam from conventional locomotives but this is inconvenient because two locomotives have to be prepared instead of one.

We are looking at various ways of raising steam for the locomotives.  The favourite is an electric boiler, using electricity generated by a wind or water turbine. There is a wind turbine at Green Park, Reading, and Goring & Streatley Sustainability Group is planning a water turbine at Goring.

The use of electricity for steam-raising on railways is not new. Swiss Federal Railways converted two steam shunting locomotives to electric heating, in the 1940s, as a wartime coal-saving measure. It was also common for electric locomotives to carry small electric boilers, to generate steam for train-heating, before direct electric train heating became widespread.

Fireless Locomotives Abroad

A number of British-built fireless locomotives were exported to other countries including India, Iran and South Africa. Customers included the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Electricity Supply Commission of South Africa. Here are two which have been preserved at Colenso, KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa.

German manufacturers were also exporters of fireless locomotives. Henschel supplied five 0-10-0F locos to Turkey for the construction of the Baghdad Railway between 1916 and 1918. Some long tunnels had to be bored and my guess is that the fireless locos were used in the tunnels to avoid the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. This photo depicts three of them. I believe the track gauge is 600mm (2 feet).

Next, a selection of European fireless locomotives, including examples by Tubize, Henschel, Borsig, Hohenzollern, Orenstein & Koppel, LKM, Krauss-Maffei, and Floridsdorf.  And here are two by La Meuse of Liege, Belgium.

Here is a drawing of an imaginary 0-10-0F loco. The text sounds convincing but Ruhnia is a fictitious Principality which is "situated" in the triangular corner between Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic. I don't know who created it but he's obviously a fireless steam enthusiast!

American fireless locos often have the cylinders at the front, like a conventional locomotive.  Here are some:  Lima  0-4-0F  at the  Southeastern Railway Museum, Duluth, Georgia.  ¦  Heisler  0-4-0F  and  0-8-0F  at the  Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

More Fireless Links

 Solar Steam Train ¦ Researching The Ultimate Fireless Steam Locomotive ¦ Lancashire Evening Telegraph 

Photos of other preserved fireless locomotives:

Bagnall 3121  Barclay 1477  Barclay 1944  Barclay 1950  Barclay 1952  Barclay 1984  Barclay 2126  Barclay 2243