Western Railroad Discussion > Did the water ever freeze?

I was looking through some train books over the weekend and came across several pictures of locomotives (steam) encrusted in snow and ice and wondered if the water either in the tenders or water lines or water towers ever froze in the winter.

I could understand a moving locomotive possibly keeping the water from freezing up, but how about in some of the more narrow piping? Did any of the crews ever come to a remote water tower and were unable to get any water out of it because it froze?

Just curious.

David Cullinane

I remember my granfather telling once the water tower in Oaklake Manitoba Canada iced over and the wooden walls burst
in the 30's or maybe early 1920s
stuart

stuart wrote:
>
> I remember my granfather telling once the water tower in
> Oaklake Manitoba Canada iced over and the wooden walls burst
> in the 30's or maybe early 1920s
> stuart

As I understand it, many of the Canadian water towers were heated. Their unique construction tends to confirm this. I presume the more important stops had a "water supply man" on duty to take care of various duties or, if a coal chute was also present, to handle those chores.

A few weeks ago, I published on a regional newsgroup a 13 page report detailing the Winter of 1936 and how it affected the ICRR's Iowa Divn. operations. The report did not mention trouble with a lack of water supply or trouble with water problems on the steam engines, but any engine that became snowbound, and had to be abandoned, had many frozen pipes. I presume it was hauled back to a heated roundhouse, allowed to thaw, and then the boilermakers and pipefitters went to work. A big job to repair.

Many water towers in colder climates had circulation
pumps to keep water moving within the tower, making
freezing a more difficult proposition. A pump would
take suction from near the bottom of the tank, and pump
thru a standpipe within the tank to near the top. I know
a moving train would keep a tender water tank from freezing,
but don't know how overnight situations were dealt with.

as experienced in montana winters.

water in a deep tank, a locomotive water tank for instance, normally froze about a foot thick at the top if there was no stove to heat the tank. usually they had a small coal stove in the pump house at the bottom and the chimney went through a pipe in the tank itself to warm the water.

house water pipes would freeze solid if you did not keep the water trickling from a faucet. water pipes were buried at least six feet below ground in order to keep the water from freezing as the frost line was accepted to be 48" below ground.

steam lines on passenger trains could be a real brass bound bitch. they always had the last valve on the last car in the train cracked so that it would leak and keep steam flowing but even that would not keep the lines free and they would have to be thawed with a blow torch, something that just about everybody seems to have in that country.

great northern would run a steam generator car on the rear of the passenger train in order to provide enough steam to heat a passenger train. in the absolute worst weather (65 below with wind). they would put the occoupied passenger cars up against the engines and a steam generator car at the rear of that string. then came the mail storage cars that had nothing in them that freezing would harm and let them go, not even trying to keep them from freezing.

the rear end brakie would ride in a small compartment built into the end of a converted pullman called a flagman's car where he had a small coal stove built into a two seat compartment.

these were the normal tail end car on the fast mail and you could ride in it, on the fast mail, if you bought a coach ticket and provided your own food etc. (they didn't stop long enough and at places where you could get food but it was a wild and fast ride if you needed to get back east in a hurry).

ArgyleEagle wrote:

. I know
> a moving train would keep a tender water tank from freezing,
> but don't know how overnight situations were dealt with.

I believe that steam could be sent back into the tender through the supply lines using the injector.

Ed

At the Heber Valley Railroad we run our two steam engines at night in December in the cold. The first year we did this we had many problems. The Cylinder Cock pipes froze, we had one injector line freeze. The injectors themselves froze more than once and the water in the injector lines froze not to mention the tender water.

The 618 is a former UP engine. As we began to study the problem, we learned that UP had problems like this as well. We found that UP had installed bleed lines in most of the water and steam lines which in short, allowed the lines to leak just a little, thus keeping them from freezing. These bleed cocks were only used in the cold. They were capped off in the summer.

Injectors do indeed have a blow back device that allows the enginemen to blow live steam back into the tender. We practice this on the HVRR in the winter. It keeps the injector from freezing as well as the feed water lines from the tender. We also run the boiler at half a glass of water and inject water more often thus keeping the feed water delivery pipes warm. WE also keep the blower on all of the time thus keeping it warm (this is also done in the summer for many reasons)

Not all of the steam lines on our engines have bleed cocks or bleed ports, so, we simple break the unions on most of the exterior piping just a bit in the winter. The problem here is, if you do this for to long, you can steam cut the pipes and unions, this is bad!

By the way, the HVRR will continue to run steam in the winter. We will also operate trains during the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake City. Winter steam RRing is fun!

John E. Rimmasch
CMO
HVRR