Very early locomotive boiler feeds

Edited By Jonathan Howes on 10/04/2010 13:50:00

Edited By Jonathan Howes on 12/04/2010 08:55:40

Hi Jonathan

If you go to my thread on Lancashire Witch you can see I'm interested in creating a 3D model of The Lancashire Witch 1828 which in your thread in 2010 you stated that you were going to produce drgs of it. did you do that and if so would those drgs be available to the likes of myself.

I create these loco's from drgs or/and pictures available on the net but there seem very few available on the Lancashire Witch so at the moment I'm struggling, any help would be appreciated

I see that the above discussion on boiler feeds took place some time ago, but maybe for completeness I should mention that early American locos, from about the beginning up until injectors became common, usually used crosshead feed pumps controlled by a valve in the suction line. This is quite likely a feature that they copied from their English predecessors. I have somewhere a book about early American locos that discusses this feature, and it does seem odd that they persisted with it for so long, when a simple bypass arrangement would work so much better.

A pump controlled by the suction side will cavitate badly which tends to wreck the pump in short order...nevertheless they persisted with this arrangement for maybe 50 years or so. I know for instance that the Rogers 2-4-2 locomotives supplied to the New Zealand railways in 1877 came with a crosshead feedpump on each side. They were replaced with injectors quite quickly.

John