THE CRAFT OF THE FIREMAN

My last firing turn on the Severn Valley Railway was in June 1979. The reason for such a long delay in what turned into a book on the subject, is largely due to the fact that I had never ever contemplated writing anything about firing.

However, after by 18 months of gentle persuasion by Mary McCullough, in a moment of weakness in December 2009, I agreed to write some articles for Steam in Trust, the internal magazine of Tyseley’s Vintage Trains Society (VTS) of which she was the editor.

It became obvious that it would be a considerable task because the readership was going to be people who liked travelling behind steam – but knew nothing about footplate work or the controls available to the fireman to be able to perform the task efficiently. So it has been necessary to start from the outset with the chemistry of combustion, but at least this gave all readers the knowledge to be