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Self trimming tender


doilum
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I wondered this a while back, the conclusion I came to is it means the coal bunker has sloped sides so as you take the coal from the front, the remainder works its way down there. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can either confirm this or explain it better!

 

 

Edited by Bucoops
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The Q6 tender had a coal space about four feet wide between the vertical sides of the water tanks. The floor sloped at the rear upto the tender top. Looking at the illustrations in Yeadons Register at least 50% of the coal was carried on the top deck between the coal rails. This must have required the fireman to perform considerable amounts of raking coal back into the coal space. I guess this task was referred to as "trimming".

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'Trimming' was usually done after taking on coal to level the top and ensure it wasn't foul of the loading gauge or likely to fall over the sides. 'Pulling forward' would be carried out during the journey, usually on the move, and was also sometimes necessary on so-called self-trimming tenders. It was necessary to know where the overbridges were when doing this.

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On 29/10/2023 at 21:00, Stoke West said:

Austerity 2-8-0 apparentley were good at pulling the coal forward

There is a story of Gordon on its way to Shildon in 75. It was running tender first, to demonstrate how to get the coal forwards the driver accelerated the loco up to about 50 and then shut off. As anyone who has been on a Dub dee will know the intermideiate buffers are pointless. The tender crashed into the loco, bounced off and was repeated countless times with the coal shooting forwards onto the footplate,

 

Those tenders rank as about the worst for getting coal down unless you get in and dig it forwards

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