Steam & Excursion > When This Many Acetylene Tanks Are Delivered It Spells The End!

This scene is certainly a gruesome one for anyone who loves steam motive power.  A line of engines parked in a yard that is already strewn with the carcasses of fallen sister engines tells the whole story in graphic detail.

At the head of this line of 0-8-0 locomotives is SP #1304.  She was built by Baldwin in November 1901 as a coal burner.  She later was converted to oil and served until January 1934 when she was stricken from the roster.  We see her in October of 1935 in El Paso, Texas just before she and the others were finally cut to pieces.

What a sad start to the week.

Martin



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/16 03:01 by LoggerHogger.

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That surely is a lot of work to cut up a steam locomotive.  I wonder if anyone knows how many man-hours and how much fuel was used to complete the job.
I hear today that railroad rail must be cut to 4' pieces and that is now becoming so expensive, the rail is nearly valueless and not worth tearing up off the ties. The pieces must be able to fit on a conveyor belt that feed them into ships for export or to melting mills.
Was there a procedure how they cut up a cast frame or made pieces out of the drivers or drive rods?  I see the bell is missing but the number plates we not retrieved yet..
At Coatsville,PA was a steel mill and nearby was the Lurica Brothers who cut up many RDG and PRR engines and they took the bells and number plates off first and put them in the office to sell to fans who went in to request them.  They were not cheap and I had to pass on buying any.  I guess they also saved the brass builder plates.
Where was a steam locomotive most recently cut up and are there any photos of the step by step process, or was that too sad to photograph?

I have several hundred photos of the beginning to the end of the scrapping of Northern Pacific's last steam locomotive to be scrapped in Tacoma in April 1960.  The entire process from begining to end took a day and a half.

Martin

A faster cheaper method for cutting large heavy objects is to use a burning bar or lance with a bank of oxygen tanks.12 large O2 tanks are all interconnected to one regulator on a skid. The baurning bar is a length of light steel 3/4 inch diameter tube ten feet long with 6 or so magnesium wire rods inside of it. You place the bar into a clamp that is hooked to the oxygen line. You turn on all of the twelve O2 tanks and regulate your pressure down somewhat.. A regular cutting torch is used to light the bar up, when you have a molten pool of magnesium you turn the O2 on at the valve on the clamp. This device is like turning on the fires of hell! It will melt through very thick steel with a flame that is about three or four feet long in a major hurry! There is no trigger on this,the constant flow of O2 blows away the molten metal and enhances the burning of the magnesium.. The bars last about ten minutes and they cost around twelve bucks each. You don't need acetylene or propane for this except to light it up in the beginning. When the bar burns down to around eighteen inches you shut off the O2 at the clamp and that extinguishes the flame. Needless to say this method is preferred by pyromaniacs and should not be used by someone that is afraid of fire. 

This engine is of historic interest to the southwest. Built as Southwestern RR of Arizona No. 5, it was one of the early locomotives on the railroad from Douglas, Arizona, to  El Paso, Texas, soon to be known as the El Paso & Southwestern.  Built by Phelps Dodge & Company, it served the copper industry after the SP refused to provide adequate service or capacity.
Vern
 

Note that the bells and whistles are not on the engines.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/24/16 06:25 by tomstp.

With exception of the smaller drivers, lower tender height and few other small details, there is a sister to this Burnham Williams & Co. model, which still exists today at the Wilmington and Western: 0-6-0 #58...albeit a few years younger being built in 1907.

Posted from Android

Pretty careless with those tanks back then.

All have caps on them, the two standing up have guards around the top dont see any without. 
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> Pretty careless with those tanks back then.

This is a picture of Canadian National 4-8-2 6034 at the London ON reclamatin yard in 1959.  She was the first steam engine I rode on and saw her several times again.  This is a very painful picture of a great lady

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You actually only need acetylene to make the first area of molten steel.  When the "cut" lever is pulled on a regular torch, all that is delivered is straight O2 at high pressure.  A skilled man can actually turn off the acetylene and save some $ on a long cut, or in thick material. My uncle taught me this in the family welding shop in the 1970's.  I suppose maybe an unskilled man needed that magnesium torch, but the cost seems very high to me?

A hundred years ago SP used dynamite to scrap locomotives. I think I posted that story a few years ago.

TonyJ Wrote:
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> A hundred years ago SP used dynamite to scrap
> locomotives. I think I posted that story a few
> years ago.

Sounds like the Mythbusters method.

Mary McPherson
Dongola, IL
Diverging Clear Productions

Kimball Wrote:
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> You actually only need acetylene to make the first
> area of molten steel.  When the "cut" lever is
> pulled on a regular torch, all that is delivered
> is straight O2 at high pressure.  A skilled man
> can actually turn off the acetylene and save some
> $ on a long cut, or in thick material. My uncle
> taught me this in the family welding shop in the
> 1970's.  I suppose maybe an unskilled man needed
> that magnesium torch, but the cost seems very high
> to me?
In the early 70's, I was a Carman at the Topeka Shops. I was working nights out on 13 & 15 tracks, and were running a bunch of old box cars through an upgrade program. My job was taking down center plates, which were riveted to the bolster & center sill. The rivets were about 3" long I'd guess, x 7/8". If the plate had to come down, we would use a torch to cut the rivets out, from underneath. We used the biggest single hole heating tip we could find, sit down under the car on our "ass" box, with a 5 gal bucket of water between our legs. We would work the flame around the bottom head of the rivet until it looked ready to flow, then turn off the acetylene, and open up the oxygen. The molten flow would just start running down into the bucket of water. You had to keep the tip ahead of the flow, going in a slow circular motion, so the drippage would not fall onto the tip of the torch, and just slow enough for it to keep cutting, once you started. Usually, with experience, you could get enough of the rivet blown out that it could be removed easily with a punch, or sometimes if you got lucky, it would blow out the top, indicating you had made it all the way through. Those old cars were all hot riveted, and if done right the rivets always swelled in the hole Going through several layers of plate, there was no way they would just punch out if you cut the head off, like a huck bolt. So you had to burn them out, and I still have the scars to prove it.