Bizarre Vintage Photos of Steam Engines After a Boiler Explosion | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre Vintage Photos of Steam Engines After a Boiler Explosion

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130 pointsZeljkoS54 comments

It's a fascinating set of photos, but it's plagiarized spam. Much of the text is lifted, unattributed, from the Wikipedia entry for "boiler explosion" [0]. I don't know what their primary image source was, but there's a lot of overlap with a blog from 2015 [1], the top Google result for "c&o t1 boiler explosion" [2]. That blog would make a good starting point for investigation, since it has descriptive image captions (and credits!)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler_explosion

[1] https://industrialscenery.blogspot.com/2015/11/boiler-explos... ("Boiler Explosion of C&O T-1 #3020 on May 1948"; Dennis DeBruler)

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=c%26o%20t1%20boiler%20explos... (The Reddit results look helpful too)

[1] would be a good replacement URL for this story. It also confirms what you'd fear - in many of these, the nearest crew were killed by the explosion.

And can we talk about how clickbaity the title is?

Like, pressure vessel full of tubes explode… what would you expect to see but a bunch of bent tubes.

I had no idea and was generally fascinated by the aesthetics of these boiler explosions, title aside.

I think some of this is that a lot of people don't know (and I think I didn't know until I first saw this set of photos years ago) that steam engine boilers were full of tubes.

Steam boilers were early internets - completely a series of tubes.

But you’re right - many people think a steam engine is a hot water tank in its side.

That was one of the innovations of Stephenson’s “Rocket” locomotive that won the famous Rainhill speed trials easily.(Increased surface area of pipes with hot gases in helps boil the water more efficiently.)

I consider myself quite technically minded and interested in the workings of machines. I had not considered what was inside a steam engine's boiler before, nor what one would look like after an explosion. The pictures are indeed bizarre, looking almost like entrails hanging out in many cases. I find them even a bit creepy.

So for me, and likely most others, the title is not clickbaity and the content is not what one might expect.

Reminds me of Evangelion for some reason.

Agreed. My first thought was: yep, those actually are bizarre pictures - like some hideous experiments to cross steam trains with hazel trees or giant squids.

Did the title change? Seems to me it describes what the article is about and nothing more. If this is clickbait then what isn’t clickbait?

The site seems to have lots of eclectic collections of photos - I've enjoyed their curation.

I believe these are all what is known as a "fire tube" design, whereby the water to be boiled surrounds the tubes (very visible in most of the pictures) which have the hot combustion gases passing through them. Because the whole outer casing needs to hold the pressure, they're weaker than the water-tube design, which is the exact opposite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire-tube_boiler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-tube_boiler

> fire tube

This has a similar style to oilfield names. I giggle when I hear them used in USCSB disaster videos.

> An entry in the centralized control room logbook: “ISOM: Brought in some raff to unit, to pack raff with”

You don't say. And this led to an explosion?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_oilfield_jargon

https://www.texasinternational.com/blog/oilfield-glossary/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goSEyGNfiPM&t=56s

On the upside, a fire tube boiler is much more compact, which is valuable in trains since they are very dimensionally constrained.

Not an issue for a power plant or (mostly) a ship.

Seventh photo shows tubes that have a 180-degree bend on the end — much like trombone slides. I can't see how this could be from a "fire tube" design.

I wonder if the post-mortem photos that show a more or less colinear bunch of tubes indicate that the front blew off the boiler.

I suspect that one is a super heater.

There was an interesting, related discussion on HN awhile back that touched on material science, iron and steel quality: "Why no Roman industrial revolution?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32607187

A bit of a tangent, but this reminded me of this fantastic "Filk" song called "Hymn to Breaking Strain": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5bc_Peb6s0

Which I only just realised is based on a Rudyard Kipling poem: https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_strain.htm

  The prudent text-books give it 
    In tables at the end
  'The stress that shears a rivet 
    Or makes a tie-bar bend—
  'What traffic wrecks macadam—
    What concrete should endure—
  but we, poor Sons of Adam
    Have no such literature,
      To warn us or make sure!

These are known as BLEVE explosions, in which you have a liquid maintained above its boiling point through elevated pressure. When the vessel is breached the pressure quickly drops resulting in the entire volume flashing to vapor at a massive (1000x+) increase in displacement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_liquid_expanding_vapor...

For those interested in this topic, I suggest reading RAILWAY ADVENTURES AND ANECDOTES (1885) <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/31395/31395-h/31395-h.htm>, a collection of interesting moments from the first 50 years of railroads. Note a) how often there is a mention of some accident (very often a boiler explosion, and/or a derailment), and b) how matter-of-fact everyone seems to be about such things despite (or, rather, because of) their frequency.

During one of my hobbyist dives into railroad history, I was reading old issues of Locomotive journal that I downloaded from somewhere (Google Books, maybe?). Anyway, I was surprised every issue had a list of boiler explosions since the last issues. Rare enough to list them all, but common enough to fill a couple pages every issue.

Does anyone know what it is that looks like spaghetti on pretty much all of those steam engines?

I guess those are the pipes through which water flows that is heated and turned into steam.

Other way around in locomotives. The fire goes through the tubes, the water surrounds them. The large number of tubes gives a really large surface area over which the fire's heat can be transferred to the water - it's a form of heat exchanger. The last energy of the exhaust steam from the cylinders is sent up the exhaust to create a forced draught that drags the fire through the tubes.

Later industrial and marine boilers turned this inside out and sent the water through tubes in the fire like you describe. This can be more efficient (because it's easier to hold high pressure in water tubes than a loco boiler) but only a few locos tried it and it didn't deliver much benefit there - seems to have been hard to make work well in loco format.

Trains need higher volume + they also have less space for the firebox/men to load them. In a boat you also don't have a water storage challenge. In a train you can store the water in same place as boiler - big win.

Still. The train sometimes stopping mid trip to build up steam was a thing.

Did steam ships run on salt water or did they have to carry the water?

Ships needed a source of pure water for the engines. In fact the boiler feed water system usually had the highest priority for use of pure water ahead of drinking water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i442Y6TqHeg

Not sure if you are only asking about very old steam ships. More modern designs, as used by various naval forces as well as commercial operators, still use steam to convert thermal energy to mechanical energy. This is true whether they burn crude oil or even have nuclear reactors.

They have methods to "make water" by using some of their energy to run some kind of desalination plant. Traditionally, this was a distillation process. Newer ships might have reverse osmosis systems. I don't know which are preferred in military applications. Reverse osmosis is more energy efficient, but I can imagine that distillation may have more reliability under adverse conditions. I could imagine having both for efficiency with fault tolerance...

They would still also have a reservoir to store water for later use. That way, all the available thermal power can be directed towards locomotion when necessary. They can make water periodically, when power demands allow it and in a manner that would be most efficient for the equipment.

The desalination may not be perfect either. As I understand it, multiple US Navy ships inadvertently exposed their crews to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war through this process. They were not directly exposed to the chemical like victims on the land. Instead, the run-off from land went into river deltas and contaminated water was drawn in by nearby ships. The chemicals made it through the desalination process and into drinking water supplies.

It's Boiler tubes/Flues/Superheater tubes. Basically allows the gas to go from the back to the front producing steam along the way. Superheater does the same but with the steam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_locomotive_components

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheater#Locomotives

Looking at these pictures, the phrase "spilling its guts" comes to mind.

It would probably take all day to heat to steam a boiler that was just a big vessel full of water. So little surface area relative to the volume.

Heat exchanger

We have a museum here in Mulhouse France where they cut open a locomotive and added LEDs in blue and red to show the different tubes and exchange of heat. Quiet interesting and helped me to understand how it works. Here an image of it:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Cite_du_...

Edit: Typo

That’s amazing, thanks for sharing!

Here's what one of the modern descendants of those things looks like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_generator_(nuclear_power...

Whatever it is, it gives me Cthulu vibes.

Question: What is the reason that the tubes extend like that?

Hypothesis: Is it that after material (metal) of the pipes weakens from the heat, it becomes pliable? An explosion will cause outward force which will stretch the weakened pipes?

In most of the photos, the boiler failed at the front of the engine. The steam behind the pipes could not make it's way out fast enough, so the pipes and their supporting frame were forced out the front.

In the photos where the boiler failed in the middle, they just get bowed out from the pressure.

Something the article mentioned was running out of water. As you said, the metal overheats and gets soft because water isn't there to absorb the heat by being turned into steam. So you get either an internal leak or explosion (depending on severity).

The Union Pacific has "Big Boy" 4014 running again. It is traveling with three tenders with water and fuel (but mostly water), because the infrastructure isn't there any more for steam locomotives to refill along the tracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvP59TCMePI

When an explosion like this occurred it was not uncommon for over pressurisation in the boiler to be a factor. Safety values were used to vent steam when it reached a nominated value but they were easy to tamper with and also prone to external factors such as scale.

So conceivably, if I wanted to sabotage a locomotive, all I’d need to do is turn the safety valve beyond the rated pressure of the boiler, and then wait for an over pressure event and then boom? Wouldn’t you design the safety valve such that it can’t go beyond the rated pressure of the boiler?

I read that more as someone duct taping the safety valve closed, or hammering a steel bar a little out of place so that the valve can never fully open.

Right, tampering with safety devices, even though your safety is protected by the devices remains common. Even in ordinary life, you probably know somebody who took the smoke alarm out of service because it was bleeping, rather than solve the problem.

Yes, very easy to sabotage.

My expertise is UK road steam and there were cases here of safety values being replaced with a bolt or metal shims being added so they never lifted and vented excess steam.

A few more PSI could make life easier but with disastrous consequences.

Sounds like the old fallback of swapping in a penny to substitute for a burned out household electrical fuse.

What I understand is safety valves also don't deal with sudden events like water hitting the red hot top of the firebox.

Not mentioned in the article by fatigue was poorly understood by engineers in the start of the 19th century. And actually designing steam engines is was helped them understand it.

The explosion is always due to an over pressure.

The real problem is coming from a loss of level, if you lose the level of water in your heat exchanger, your top tubes are dry and over heat. If at that time you add water again (because maybe the operator suddenly see the level loss), the water in contact vaporizes immediately and you get over pressure and explosion.

If you have a level loss, you need to stop the heat, cool down the complete heat exchanger and start again.

This is a very error prone procedure because the immediate reaction as an operator is to add water on a level loss. In most industrial plants now, on a level loss, the complete unit is doing a safety shutdown.

The code you were supposed to write: electric motor

The code you actually wrote:

That I automatically read “boiler explosion” in George Carlin’s voice teaches me how Thomas the Tank Engine is still alive and well in my subconscious.

Bizarre is right. If I had to come up with a more precise description, I’d call it “Lovecraftian steampunk”.

did train operators survive the explosions?

Judging by the Wikipedia "List of boiler explosions" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_boiler_explosions) it seems most incidents had at least one fatality, with many more injured. Seems unlikely you could be in proximity to a locomotive steam engine explosion and survive it.

Or, judging by the Johnny Cash song "The Wreck of the old 97", no.

<pseudo-edit: the operator dies, but its not clear it was an explosion that caused the wreck>

Well, they gave him his orders in Monroe, Virginian, Said, "Steve, you're way behind time, "This is not 38, this is Ol'97, "Put her into Spencer on time." Then he turned around and said to his black, greasy fireman, "Shovel on a little more coal. And when we reach that White Oak mountain, "Watch Ol'97 roll." And then a telegran come from Washington station, This is what it read, "Oh that brave engineer that run '97, "Is lyin' in Danville dead." "Cause he was going down a grade making 90 miles an hour, The whistle broke into a scream. He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, Scalded to death by steam." One more time! Oh, now all you ladies better take a warning, From this time on and learn. Never speak harsh to your true-lovin' husband, He may leave you and never return. Poor Boy.

Nice vintage selfies

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