Me and the missus are watching the fantasy cartoon "The Polar Express"

[Captaincrunch]

And throughout you can see the guys in the front of the steam engine shoveling coal into the engine, she reckons that the old steam trains used to run like this and i cannot believe that one man can shovel coal 24 hrs a day for days at a time and i've never heard of large number of men doing this.

Did they really shovel trains like this? How many of them used to do this? How long were their shifts for? What did they eat to give them superhuman energy to do this? What was the pay like? Could todays "Man" work like yesteryears man?
Has "Man" got considerably weaker through the ages because of all our laboursaving devices as opposed to caveman who had to run, jump and fight to eat and stay alive?

[sir.prize]

Looks like back-breaking work, Captain

[jno]

hard work, but not for 24 hours, I shouldn't think. I expect they either changed crew as long-distance flights do, or had a spare on board.

[wolf63]

My dad used to be a Fireman in the railway - his job was to keep the fire going. He did this for quite a few years before being promoted to Train Driver.

He joined British rail ( or whatever its name was then) in 1949 and retired in about 1990.

[atalanta]

Some research has been done on the ancient Greek rowers who rowed the Triremes. It used to be thought a myth that the Triremes could go as fast as the Greek historians claimed, but recently calculations, using the reconstruction of the Trireme of last century, have shown that modern Olympic rowers have nothing like the strength and endurance of those ancient crews. But the research does not suggest why, except practice and necessity.

[modeller]

#What did they eat to give them superhuman energy to do this? #
Fried eggs on the shovel and toast.

[Brinjal]

My husband was a fireman on the railways. They worked shifts and would be away from home often. He gave that up after a couple of years and Opened his own trailer manufacturing and transport business.

[Old_Geezer]

Surely one stokes the fire up, closes the door, and need not stoke it again until some of the fuel has gone. Manual work yes, but not continuous I'd have thought. Seems everyone has become weak in the electronic tech age. If you don't build yourself up then of course it looks incredible, but if you have then it's the norm for you.

[bert_h]

Yes, there have been several occasions when historians have arrived at false conclusions by under-rating the physical abilities of our ancestors. The Greek trireme rowers (above) were one example. Another is English longbowmen of the Crecy/Agincourt era, whose arrows could pierce armour. It was only when they brought up some authentic period longbows from the 'Mary Rose' that it was proved that these archers were (I think) about 20 per cent stronger than anyone had ever thought possible.

[heathfield]

On the London to Aberdeen route, crews would change at Newcastle. With the non-stop London to Edinburgh expresses, some of the locomotive tenders had a passageway connecting the locomotive to the coaches. This allowed crews to change over with the train on the move.

[craft1948]

You think that's hard, how about the poor stokers on steam ships.........

[tonyav]

Yes crafty, three shift job.

[New Judge]

Although a very few of the later larger locomotives were fitted with mechanical stokers almost all locomotives on British Railways were fired by hand. The railway unions had an agreement with British Railways that the maximum amount of coal a single fireman would be expected to shovel into the firebox was 3,000 pounds (about a ton and a third) per hour. This met all usual requirements on Britain’s railways and in fact most duties involved considerably less than that.

Large passenger express locomotives had a tender capacity of about eight to ten tons of coal and about 4,500 - 5,000 gallons of water. A crack express loco running from London to either Edinburgh or Glasgow would consume about eight tons of coal on the run but would need to replenish the water supply at least four or five times on a four hundred mile run. This was achieved without stopping by means of a scoop lowered from the tender (a task undertaken by the fireman) into a water trough laid between the rails.

As well as feeding the fire (which had to be done almost continuously on a fast run) the fireman was also responsible for keeping the tender full of water (see above), for monitoring the steam pressure in the boiler, for keeping the boiler water level topped up (by means of injectors from the tender) and for helping the driver “sight” signals in tricky conditions.

As heathfield mentions, the East Coast route operated the longest daily non-stop steam powered run in the world from London to Edinburgh with trains taking about six and a half hours to make the 393 mile run. A spare crew would travel in the first coach and would relieve the original crew at the half way point by means of a corridor tender, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley. Here’s a nice picture of such a tender:

http://www.train-phot...cture/number11900.asp

You can see flexible corridor connection which would mate to the first coach, and the round window which would provide a bit of daylight for the crew as they squeezed through the passageway (which was only eighteen inches wide and five feet high).

Firing an express locomotive was an extremely demanding job. The footplates were semi open and in the winter the crew would find themselves with roasting fronts and freezing backs (though fireman will tell you they preferred that to the summer when all round temperatures would be ferocious). To gain an idea of the demands of the job pay a visit to a heritage railway and see the effort needed by the fireman to fire a loco on a short run of ten miles or so at a steady twenty miles an hour. Then imagine the same job being done on a swaying footplate at speeds up to 100mph for four or five hours at a stretch. They were indeed a different breed!

[Old_Geezer]

In which case I am more impressed than I was before reading that.
I suspect they were a desperate breed needing to support a family in hard times.

[New Judge]

I’m not so sure they would have regarded themselves as “desperate”, OG. Fireman was a much sought-after job and could often take some time to achieve. Firemen would start their careers as cleaners and would work their way up. Their careers may well have taken them on to become drivers. As well as this there was considerable competition to gain promotion to the “Top Link”. These positions involved crewing the crack expresses which, of course, involved the hardest work. For every one of these there were hundred of lesser mortals who ran the slower freight trains and branch line services whose jobs were far less demanding, but nonetheless still hard work..

For older viewers a couple of famous people who had an earlier career as a railway fireman are pop star Joe Brown (he of “Joe Brown and the Bruvvers”) and pop producer and impresario Pete Waterman. Joe was a fireman on the London, Tilbury and Southend line which was part of British Railways’ Midland Region. Pete Waterman has, throughout his career in the music business, maintained his passion for railways (steam in particular). Like me (I’m sure he won’t mind me using this term) he is a lifetime “railway nut”. Having a few bob more than me, however, he at one time owned the iconic steam locomotive “Flying Scotsman”, runs a company that restores and maintains steam locomotives and has constructed one of the largest ‘O’ Gauge model railway layouts in the world.

To return from my meanderings, I don’t think they (or others who followed the trade) could be described as desperate. Steam finished in the UK in 1968 and in the post-war years there was much heavy industry (coal, steel, the docks, the railways) which involved heavy manual labour. There was work to be done, and men did it not out of desperation but because that was the way life was for many people.

[boxtops]

I agree, NJ - men were proud to be a stoker or an engine driver.