International Railroad Discussion > North Korean tire burning locomotive

Recently some videos have been circulating of a locomotive and train purporting to be in North Korea. It burns old tire treads for fuel. The video is well done with many tripod based line side shots, in and around the cab on the train while moving, etc. It could not have been done without explicit permission and I'm surprised that the NK government let anyone shoot and export such a scene.

I guess we're not allowed to post links here but search for "north korean steam locomotive 5" on that one popular video site and you'll get it.

My question is if anyone knows of the circumstances surrounding the train and also the video, a back story. There are some related videos showing another engine there as well pulling passenger cars I think. but no explanation is offered in the description or comments.

Mike Massee
Tehachapi, CA
Photography, Railroading and more..



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/09/12 00:09 by Harlock.

Somewhere I've read a U.S. railroader's story about fighting lousy coal on a northeastern RR (NYC? B&M?) Finally the fireman had an inspiration: he tried adding some worn-out tires (found near the track) to the coal fire. Voila! It dramatically improved steaming. The clouds of black tire-fire smoke smelled awful, and by the end of the shift there was a sticky mess of charred rubber stuck to the grates. The boilermakers improved their fluency in swearing trying to remove the remains.

With grates designed to burn large tire pieces instead of small coal and slack (dust & crumbs), it probably would work a lot better, although probably still very smokey compared to a good coal fire.

- Doug Debs

The stuff he was shoveling from the bottom of the pile was smaller bits of rubber so he probably still had to have a certain grate density. The larger tire tread strips on the top it looked like when he got to those he'd be throwing them in more by hand than with the shovel.

Mike Massee
Tehachapi, CA
Photography, Railroading and more..

Tires can be used for fuel but burning them produces huge amounts of smoke and byproducts. Until 20 years ago ground-up tires were used in Mexico to fuel the kilns producing Saltillo tile. beautiful tile awful air pollution.

Tires (shredded) have been proposed for fuel in cement kilns, with the claim that the very high temperatures causes all (?) the offending residual chemicals to be broken down resulting in acceptable levels of exhaust emissions. However the environmental regulations in the US prevent this use because the tires are a "hazardous material", not a fuel.
Can anyone comment further, are tires used in other countries for cement kiln fuel?

The local utility-nyseg used shredded tires for years in its older coal stokers in Oneonta/Bainbridge NY
until it was stopped as they had a ready fuel supply that cost less than the coal they were burning.

Its to bad really as the cement kilns near Albany(Lone Star Cement?) took a
huge hit as they were burning toxic liquid chemicals because this reduced the waste stream and aided in
making cement clinker. I am unsure if they are still grinding limestone and making clinker at these plants
now as it was many years ago that they burned all this waste in the kilns to heat the rotary kilns loads of limestone clinker to make cement.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/11/12 13:36 by leonz.

Clearly a stop-gap kind of measure in a country that has been bled to death financially. I'm guessing that the pollution from burning tires in a locomotive boiler is worse that the damage to the air from burning coal, but it's only a guess. This steamer certainly puts up a pretty concentrated smoke. Can't be good.

Don
Yreka, CA

While coal does produce a certain amount of pollution, tires produce much more and a smell that is not describable!

While web-surfing, I found what was supposedly a fairly recent video showing steam in regular service in N. Korea, some of it under wire! It seems that due to electricity shortages, they have no power to run their electric locomotives, so some steam is activated to fill in for the juice-jacks.

Hello all, I haven't seen this particular video, but thanks for the heads up. I will look for it.

For those interested in North Korean steam, Bernd did a steam photo charter in N. Korea, about 10 years ago, and has some great photos on his website. You do need to get a user id because he has had some of his images "borrowed" in the past. Simple to sign up, and it's free. He has a lot of other galleries from China, EU etc., there is an English version and a German version:

http://www.farrail.net/

Cheers,
Karl
www.steamengines.ca