It's Steamy Sunday here on the Blog! Today's image is a very steamy one. This is one of the 12 inch scale Ottaway locomotives that I work with during a blow down. This lets the water and steam out of the boiler and, hopefully, any solids that might be in it as well like scale. It also cools the boiler down fairly quickly so you generally want to wait until most of the pressure is gone so that there isn't too rapid a temperature change which is not great for the locomotive. I learned recently that it takes at least a week for the Big Boy to cool down enough to blow it out. WOW These only take about an hour or so.
If it takes a week to cool down Big Boy, I assume they don't run him very often, or he can go a long time between blow downs??
ReplyDeleteNo, not run very often, usually only once or twice a year. Takes a lot of various things you wouldn't even think about to operate a locomotive that large.
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