Kenneth, Minnesota
Along with my renewal to your magazine, I am also sending a few
bricks in regard to some of the pictures in the ALBUM which show
steam engines in operation with no tender and no visible supply of
either fuel or water. What are they running them on anyway? Their
reputation or compressed air??? — It can’t be the latter as
I read some comments on a good threshing scene because there was
no smoke from the engine. You can’t burn coal in an engine
without having some smoke. The best coal that was ever offered was
Hocking valley because it produced the most heat units and it was
identified by giving off the blackest smoke of any other grand of
coal. Of course, if an engine smokes all the time, it denotes a
poor fireman, but there has to be some smoke when the fire is
replenished with fresh coal. That is why the upright pipe on the
front end of a direct flue boiler or on the rear end of a return
flue boiler is called a smokestack.
Yours for continued success and more realistic pictures of steam
engines in action
