From that terrible place called Facebook, a post and photo on the demonstration of a tire heater at a Steampunk Festival.

Like the operational air compressor that did a bit of touring for the New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society that's restoring ATSF 2926, this could be another way to capture attention beyond our own facilities.

Photo and caption by Dale Roberts, of S.T.E.A.M.

A crew from Steamtown came up to give demonstrations of "The Ring Of Fire" at the Steampunk Festival in Honesdale, Pennsylvania on July 22, 2018. While fire was used to heat up steam locomotive tires to expand them to get them off the wheels, in actual practice, the fire would have oxygen introduced to make a hotter, blue flame. That would expand the steel tire quickly before the hub would get hot and also expand, thus defeating the process. The lower temperature orange flame is used as an attention grabber for folks with cameras. (Such as Dale E. Coyote)



Facebook link here.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater

I like it.

How did they do it in 1870? Was there oxygen available then?

Last time I helped "change" a tire, they used propane and compressed air.

Regulator on the compressed air, needle valve on the propane.

-Hudson

I've always imagined it was done the same way wheelwrights heat up the iron tires for wooden wagon wheels, with an open fire built on the ground outside the shop:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXZMFz_6nZ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEpqY4niD3g

(Examples above from the UK and Ireland)

The use of shrink-fit tires on locomotive drive wheels is clearly just an adaptation of this much older technology from the horse-drawn era.

-Philip Marshall

There is even what looks like film footage of this alternate technique. . .from the New Haven in 1942, at 20:40:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5Q06EFEqjg

Of course, this still doesn't answer the question of how the really old timers got the tires off without a heater ring.

1942? Some old power on that branch line!

I suppose if you were careful you could saw cut the tire and it would spring off.

The local fire department in the small town I grew up in had a locomotive tire that had been cut to remove it. They mounted it on the building as a bell. It may have actually been used as an alarm in the early days, but in later days it was mostly a decoration/artifact.

I seem to recall hearing that was a somewhat common means of recycling them.

Gongs or bells made from old driver tires are pretty common among small-town volunteer fire departments in New England and New York, and probably elsewhere in the US as well. They always seem to be cut in one place, presumably when the tire was removed.

The summer camp I used to work at in Vermont has one (still in daily use in the summer, as far as I know) that was said to have been purchased from the Rutland RR. I've often thought I should go back and measure it to try to figure out what class of locomotive it might have come from.

-Philip Marshall

The cut is to make them sound nice, if they were a solid ring they would clank, look up Triangle (musical instrument).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_ ... instrument)

Unless it is made to get them off the wheel center, then it's already there when someone wants to make it a chime. I suppose nowadays, when tires are removed in one piece, someone has to cut them to convert them to chimes.

If you go over this discussion again, someone wanted to know how tires were fitted before there was compressed fuel gas to fuel the "ring of fire." The obvious answer was heating them flat in a fire, the way wagon tires were done for a couple centuries before locomotives came along. That begged the question how the old tires are removed, and the obvious answer is, since the worn tire is of no further use, they are cut to save the wheel center. This is the primary reason for the cut; the fact that it makes them excellent bells, gongs, or chimes is just an added bonus... it was not the driving force for cutting the tire, at least not until tires could be removed in one piece.

Interestingly, the YouTube video that popped up immediately after the wagon tire mounting was someone mounting a locomotive tire with the tire laying flat. The tire was being heated with a welding cable wrapped around it to form an induction heater, and the wheel center, one of a pair still mounted to the axle, was lowered into the expanded tire with a fork lift, and brought to final alignment with shims and C clamps, so I guess mounting in that orientation is still a viable method.

The New Haven had a fair number of older locomotives in secondary jobs. That included a lot of relatively "modern" (early 20th century) 2-6-0s that the road had found preferable to the more popular 2-8-0. That was due to the New Haven finding 2-8-0s too slow for a railroad with fast freights that had to stay out of the way of all the passenger trains it ran. Later those engines were pretty useful on branch line jobs and for special work, like the wire train in electrified territory. Some of those 2-6-0s were running into the postwar era, including the one on the wire train (which had been converted to oil firing to keep from sooting up the catenary).

The 28 4-6-0s in Class G-3, which included the 960 (don't have its original number available), were purchased from Rhode Island in 1904. They were actually lighter than the main line 2-6-0s already on the roster, and were specifically designed for service on light railed lines.

https://sites.google.com/site/nynhhstea ... g-1-to-g-3

Not all of the jobs for those older engines were of secondary nature. The road assigned some of its F-1 Atlantics (originally built in 1907) as backup power for its Comet streamlined motor train (three car articulated set, the only train built by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation, 1935). This was one of the fastest schedules on the railroad in the late 1930s.

Page on the F-1s:

https://sites.google.com/site/nynhhstea ... -atlantics

If you want to explore this site some more--and it's quite worth doing--go to the upper left corner of the page, and click on the word "sitemap." Then you will see two small icons, one of them being a small square with lines. Click on that, and you will go to the list of various classes of the New Haven. From there you can get collections of photos like the one in the link above.

On the same page with the icons, you can also see a line of text, "NEW HAVEN RR STEAM LOCOMOTIVES A to Z." Click on that, and you go to the "home page" of this New Haven collection.

The best part of that home page is a list of other photo collections by this gentleman, Edward J. Ozog, with still more photos to, well, drool over!! Most are northeastern region, with a strong New England leaning, and a wonderful collection of Camelback pictures, too.

Oh, and some information on the New Haven Comet from another source.

https://www.american-rails.com/comet.html

Outreach is outreach. Find something that your museum does well, and take it on the road. John Bibalo goes with this wheel set to a lot of different locations, because fire is an attraction.
Three years ago, Steamtown took the cab of Boston & Maine no. 3713 to the Nicholson Centennial street fair for people to take selfies in, and to promote the restoration project. Quite a few people knew about Steamtown, but had never made the 20 mile trip to Scranton to see it.

If your museum or railroad can only set up a tent with brochures and someone talking about the operation, that is better than not being there. Never assume that "everyone knows where we are/what we do." That is a false assumption.