Mishaps whilst attempting to fry bacon on a shovel

[Dick Turpin]

My son asked me yesterday how likely it may have been, whether anyone attempting to cook bacon on a shovel in the firebox might have left the blower on and had their bacon sucked in and incinerated. A bit of a silly question really, but this is wheeltappers, and so I thought I'd ask here. 

[Ruffnut Thorston]

You certainly would have to time breakfast cooking carefully.

 

One careless opening of the regulator, or the blower.....

 

Just as well most footplate crews worked as a team! 

[Blandford1969]

You can only do it when stabled as the regulator will pull it straight off, similarly, the blower on anything but a tiny amount will do the same. 

 

The good thing is you don't need long a minute or two and your done. Jackets are best done in tin foil left on the manifold, 

 

There would have been some accidents and messing about where the blower 'accidently' gets turned up.

 

 

[Free At Last]

This is where the term 'went like sh*t off a shovel' comes from.

Edited May 9, 2021 by Free At Last

[The Stationmaster]

1 hour ago, Free At Last said:

This is where the term 'went like sh*t off a shovel' comes from.

Which was of course another important task for which the shovel was used.   Hence you will find a lot of old Enginemen who never cooked on the shovel - which in any case needed a lot of cleaning before it could be used for cooking anything even if it had not been used for that other (non-firing) purpose.

 

Incidentally there was third task for which the shovel was used and that was to encourage the crew of an assistant engine - even as far back as the rear of a train - to put a bit more effort into giving the train a good shove.  That one involved doing something else on the shovel and chucking the resultant collection of liquid into the firebox which in turn gave a particular, not exactly pleasant, 'aroma' to the exhaust.  i was told that it tended to be particularly effective when done in a tunnel

[russ p]

Although cooking did go on it was nowhere near as much as some preservationists and modern rose tinted TV documentaries would have you believe. 

I was given egg and bacon many years ago cooked on a shovel that had no history of defecation and it was bloody horrible.. tasted of coal

[Dick Turpin]

Thanks for the replies - nice and humorous. I'll tell him what everyone has said when he gets up (yes he is still in bed!).

[APOLLO]

14 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

Which was of course another important task for which the shovel was used.   Hence you will find a lot of old Enginemen who never cooked on the shovel - which in any case needed a lot of cleaning before it could be used for cooking anything even if it had not been used for that other (non-firing) purpose.

 

Incidentally there was third task for which the shovel was used and that was to encourage the crew of an assistant engine - even as far back as the rear of a train - to put a bit more effort into giving the train a good shove.  That one involved doing something else on the shovel and chucking the resultant collection of liquid into the firebox which in turn gave a particular, not exactly pleasant, 'aroma' to the exhaust.  i was told that it tended to be particularly effective when done in a tunnel

 

 There is a tale in the Foxline book "Blackburns Railways" about heavy goods trains being banked up from Darwen through Sough tunnel on the Blackburn - Bolton line. To make the banker crew "hurry up" said liquid was thrown into the fire on the lead engine !!!!

 

Brit15

[F-UnitMad]

3 hours ago, Dick Turpin said:

 I'll tell him what everyone has said when he gets up (yes he is still in bed!).

Ah. A teenager.  

[The Johnster]

Bacon and eggs up the chimney often occurred as a result of the generally relaxed nature of yard pilot duties.  Scenario; loco is parked and in mid gear, and breakfast is cooking on the shovel but the crew are making tea in the shunters's cabin.  Loco has to be unexpectedly moved for one reason or another, and fireman is sent out to do the job because the driver can't be *rsed.  Fireman climbs on to loco, forgets about breakfast, releases handbrake looks both ways, pops the whistle, blows off the steam brake and opens regulator; breakfast goes into orbit.

 

Or t'other way around, driver ejects fireman's breakfast up the chimney for similar reasons.  Either way, an altercation results and aspersions are cast on the perpetrator's character, heritage, intelligence and parentage, and I have heard tales of fisticuffs being resorted to.  It was by and large the sort of mistake you took trouble not to repeat.

 

I was assured by steam men at Canton in the 70s that, whatever unpleasantness the shovel had been previously used for, the acidic content of urine applied to it and placed into the fire would burn it off and the shovel would come back gleaming and fit to be eaten off.  I am unable to confirm that this is the case but I've heard if from NCB crews at Maesteg and Mountain Ash as well.  Perhaps the crew who cooked Russ's breakfast were not familiar with this procedure...

[Reorte]

Interesting thread this, I always thought the cooking breakfast on the shovel thing was more a myth than reality (for various reasons already given in this thread!)

 

[The Johnster]

A steam locomotive is pretty good for cooking in general, having a source of heat and a supply of boiling water on tap.  On many steam duties there was no opportunity to access food from canteens or cafes and you had to fend for yourself, and as the work was physically demanding, a pack of sandwiches and an apple were lovely but not going to keep you going for an 8 hour shift of shovelling coal or moving stiff controls.  So hot food was cooked on locos; shovel fried, boiled, and heated on the shelf above the fire door where the tea can was kept.

 

I worked with a driver at Canton in the 70s who was in the habit of frying a whole onion directly on the loco's hotplate.  The smell was amazing and he claimed never to have colds or sore throats.  A mark against the WR hydraulics was that they had 'food warming cupboards' that were not much use (though they'd keep a hot pie or a baked potato warm for about an hour), but other locos had proper electric hob hotplates that you could fry on or boil water on.

[Dick Turpin]

3 hours ago, F-UnitMad said:

Ah. A teenager.  

 

Spot on. He's 19 and doing Physics at Dundee University, but home early and studying from home until the end of term because of covid. I feel sorry for him actually because he has spent the whole of his first term doing lectures on zoom, debates and meetings the same, and confined to his set of rooms between those on his floor. He has however achieved some notoriety because he has a set of lock picks and can pick most locks. Once his immediate neighbours learnt this, he was in demand unlocking those restrictive (health and safety) devices that only allow two inches of the window to open. Fear not those of politically correct inclinations - he did instruct them to relock them before they all headed off for home.

Arthur is a bit different from most of his peers because he is interested in all things engineering from a bygone age (wonder where he got that from?). Actually his question does demonstrate that he is thinking about the workings of steam locomotives in ways I hadn't imagined he might be. He asks me all sorts of whacky things I struggle to answer!

 

And - thank you for the fantastic anecdotes @Johnster, I have told him all what people have said and he was suitably amused. 

Edited May 9, 2021 by Dick Turpin

[The Stationmaster]

19 hours ago, Reorte said:

Interesting thread this, I always thought the cooking breakfast on the shovel thing was more a myth than reality (for various reasons already given in this thread!)

 

I suspect that it was perhaps far more common on traction engines than on railway engines and as Russ P has said above it is something which has been given a lot of attention in more recent years than what really happened.  Even if you dished the fire on a pannier (the way to quiet it down during break time on a pilot job etc) you'd hardly leave. a shovel with bacon and eggs on it next to the firebox door let alone part way in the firebox and nip off to the cabin because the contents of the firebox were still red/yellow hot and would quickly fry/burn  an egg.

 

In my experience Western men would almost invariably go to the cabin for their break when they were on a pilot job, especially in a yard, and that was very long established habit which went back well into the steam age.  In fact although it would often have been difficult stuck in remote loops or on goods lines during the war years - when men could sometimes spend an entire turn on an engine without moving the train - there was very good incentive to go to a canteen or even a station refreshment room if they were anywhere near one because a cup of tea obtained that way was cheaper than using things which were rationed.

 

I spent a fair chunk of my railway career working with footplate men whose careers, in quite a few cases, went back to the 1930s and when asked about cooking food on the shovel their reaction was similar to Russ's - in the very rare cases of those who had tried the results were not at all good.  And obviously on train working turns it was basically impossible anyway.

 

Incidentally onions were done on the steam manifold and were quite a popular way of obtaining something hot to eat and I did see it done back in 1985 when a few hot onion afficionados relived their youthful years because they had a chance to do so.   Making tea was a big problem as, oddly next to a boiler containing steam, there wasn't a way to boil water.  The shelf above the firehole door would keep a can of tea nice an warm but some older Drivers preferred to keep the oil feeder there to ensure that the oil would flow easily if needed out on the road.  The only source of boiling hot water was the pep pipe and that of course meant water from the boiler which was useless for making tea, especially if it had been chemically treated as became comm on in later years.  Hence tea would be made in a cabin when opportunity present itself and left on the shelf to keep hot although a number of men I knew who had fired on long distance passenger turns preferred in any case to bring to work a bottle of cold tea which they reckoned was far more refreshing.

[Steamport Southport]

Probably perpetuated by those whose dad drove The Flying Scotsman.....

 

I think I first seen it on Blue Peter in the 1970s, so you probably got a generation of kids believing it from that. Those kids are now fiftysomethings and have told their kids and grandkids.

[Free At Last]

Joe Brown tucks in to a shovel full at 3:00 mins in...

 

[ikks]

Off topic a bit but I travelled with a certain sales manager who's  father regularly drove F/S into St. Pancras ...........Yes, a real !!!

Mike

 

 

 

 

 

 

[peach james]

We used the main and desup stops to cook on- they were lovely, one at 800F the other at 514F

Beautifully lagged too- and couldn't be bothered with trying to shove the steaks on a shovel in the oil fired boiler...that'd never work anyway, as the casing was at 25" WC at full power, so no, not happening.

Same sort of thing for treated water- you don't want to drink the water from after the softener, and certainly not after you've added compound to it.  It's only pH 11 here :), with a bunch of Sulphite and Phosphate in it :).  

I can see putting a billy can into the fire on a traction engine, or as dad apparently has, cooking on the top of a Sentinel boiler (IIRC eggs & bacon), but not on the shovel.   I think the more normal way with a traction or similar for brewing up is to use the injector overflow.  The issue will be where you got your water from, because quite often it's not going to be nice water to drink, coming from a river or pond.

James

[Titan]

I am rather surprised that more traction engines / steam lorries / steam locomotives etc did not have the equivalent of a "Windermere kettle", a must have accessory on a steam launch for making a hot cup of tea.  A simple device which was basically a thin coil of pipe in a small pot with a tap at the bottom. You filled it up, fed steam from the boiler through the coil and in about 20 seconds had boiling water! You then opened the tap to dispense the boiling water to make the beverage of your choice.

 

https://youtu.be/pXE6CDOhRB8

 

Edited May 10, 2021 by Titan

[The Johnster]

Once had a summer job with a bloke who insisted that he'd relieved the fireman on an up Cornish Riviera with KGV after she'd stopped to raise pressure and was half an hour late; his heroic efforts got them to draw to a stand at Paddington exactly on time.  He further affected my view of the credibility of this by saying he'd boarded the loco at Swindon...

 

My dad used to hard boil eggs on the way to picnics in the oval cutouts clearly intended for that purpose inside the bonnet of a 100E Ford Prefect, wrapped in newspaper.  He never drove FS into St Pancras, though.

[NorthBrit]

Used a garden shovel once.   Everything smelled of manure   and made a mess of the cooker.    

[Steamport Southport]

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

Once had a summer job with a bloke who insisted that he'd relieved the fireman on an up Cornish Riviera with KGV after she'd stopped to raise pressure and was half an hour late; his heroic efforts got them to draw to a stand at Paddington exactly on time.  He further affected my view of the credibility of this by saying he'd boarded the loco at Swindon...

 

My dad used to hard boil eggs on the way to picnics in the oval cutouts clearly intended for that purpose inside the bonnet of a 100E Ford Prefect, wrapped in newspaper.  He never drove FS into St Pancras, though.

 

I hope the fireman enjoyed it.....

 

 

[Ian Smeeton]

At the Great Casterton Machinery show a couple of years ago, there was a 'portable Engine' in use on a sawbench.

 

At break time, the 'Driver' opened up the smokebox door and fished out a foil wrapped package

 

When asked, "Belly Pork" was the answer.

 

I was downwind at the time, and I have to say it smelt and looked delish!!

Regards

 

Ian

[2ManySpams]

Not a shovel but bacon cooked in about 90 seconds...

[rab]

On 10/05/2021 at 20:54, Ian Smeeton said:

At the Great Casterton Machinery show a couple of years ago, there was a 'portable Engine' in use on a sawbench.

 

At break time, the 'Driver' opened up the smokebox door and fished out a foil wrapped package

 

When asked, "Belly Pork" was the answer.

 

I was downwind at the time, and I have to say it smelt and looked delish!!

Regards

 

Ian

I've had pasties that had been wrapped in foil

and warmed on top of a traction engine firebox.

Some of the best I've tasted; probably something

to do with the oil that seeped in.