[NC Transportation Museum Logo] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Carolina Power & Light 3 Fireless Steam Locomotive Summary of Specifications (Conrad, 104) [except where noted]: Builder: H.K. Porter Company Wheel Arrangement: 0-4-0 (geared) Serial Number: 7239 Date Completed: February 1937 Cylinder Size: 18.5 x 16 inches Boiler Operating Pressure: 250 pounds per square inch (Hedgpeth interview) Diameter of Driving Wheels: 44 inches Tractive Effort: 23,000 pounds Engine Weight in Working Order: 140,000 pounds Engine Weight in Working Order as Carried on Driving Wheels: 140,000 pounds Fuel: (fireless) Built as: Unknown [may have been built for a North Carolina paper mill] (Hedgpeth interview) Changes of Ownership, Identity or Assignment: 1) [ca. 1945]: Sold to Carolina Power & Light; apparently used at the company's Cape Fear generating station (Hedgpeth interview); 2) [1949]: Transferred to Carolina Power & Light's Lumberton Steam Plant (Hedgpeth interview); 3) September 1980: Donated to North Carolina Division of Archives and History (Allan Paul to Jim Vaughn, September 4, 1980). History: Romulus Hedgpeth remembers his first day on the job at Carolina Power & Light's Lumberton steam plant quite well. Not until that day in 1954 did he learn of the existence of a strange breed of steam locomotives. Fireless engines. "It was the first time I had ever knew [sic] there was a fireless locomotive," he recalls (Hedgpeth interview). Growing up in Robeson County, North Carolina, he was very familiar with the locomotives operated by railroads in the area, such as the Seaboard Air Line and the Virginia & Carolina Southern, whose fireboxes heated water to make steam. But an engine which relied upon steam generated by an external source? Well, that was certainly different. Carolina Power & Light (CP&L), an electric utility serving customers all across the state, had placed the first unit of its Lumberton steam plant in service several years before, on September 30, 1949 (Riley, 253). The plant was innovative by its very design, according to Jack Riley, author of Carolina Power & Light Company: 1908-1958: "The Lumberton plant introduced a new style in industrial architecture. It is known as an 'outdoor plant,' the first outdoor-type generating station burning coal ever to be built. . . .The conventional building is lacking. Instead, the individual components are weatherproofed. The huge boilers are suspended within the spiderwork of steel superstructure and sit exposed to the elements. The generators sit atop concrete pedestals, without conventional housing," (Riley, 253). The 60,000-horsepower generator dedicated in 1949 was joined by another 60,000-horsepower unit on June 7, 1950, less than a year later. And a little over two years after that (on September 21, 1952), an 100,000-horsepower generator was placed on line at the Lumberton plant; it could, initially, run from either coal or natural gas (Hedgpeth interview; Riley, 254). On September 10, 1958, the Lumberton steam plant would acquire the name by which it is today known. By a unanimous vote of CP&L's board of directors, it would be decided to change the name of the Lumberton plant to honor the company's then-vice president and general counsel, W.H. Weatherspoon, a Durham County native and 1907 graduate of Wake Forest College (Riley, 261). Hedgpeth's first assignment at what would become the Weatherspoon plant was that of a helper in the fuel handling department (Hedgpeth interview). Just like railroad workers, new hires at power plants like the one in Lumberton had to begin their careers at the bottom of the organizational chart (as helpers) and work their way up. Workers in the fuel handling department helped to switch loaded railroad coal cars received from either of the two railroads serving the plant (the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and the Virginia, Carolina, & Southern) into the power station. As a helper, Hedgpeth was required to perform many of the same tasks as the regular fuel handlers (such as "knocking"-- opening-- the doors of the coal cars), albeit at a lower rate of pay. Carolina Power & Light number 3 was the very basis of the railroad operation at the Lumberton plant. The fireless engine was essentially a large thermos bottle, its driving wheels powered by steam stored within a large cylindrical boiler of sorts. Number 3 had been completed in February 1937 by the H.K. Porter Company, a locomotive builder which specialized in the manufacture of small, industrial steam locomotives (Conrad, 104). By the late 1940s, Porter was running a total of four manufacturing plants, one each at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Blairsville, Pennsylvania; Newark, New Jersey; and New Brunswick, New Jersey (H.K. Porter Co., 1). Its locomotives could be found in service in thirty-seven countries around the globe (H.K. Porter Co., 53). The early history of this locomotive remains relatively vague. It was apparently built for a North Carolina paper mill, not for CP&L (Hedgpeth interview). Later, it may have been assigned to CP&L's Cape Fear generating station before coming to the Lumberton plant (Hedgpeth interview). Typically, fireless engines were used at industries where ready sources of steam were available. The advantages of using fireless engines instead of conventional, firebox-equipped steam locomotives were several fold. Lacking a firebox and a true boiler meant that fireless engines generally required less maintenance than their conventional counterparts; they were also cheaper to insure. The steam generated at paper mills and power plants as part of regular operating processes could readily be used to power fireless steam locomotives. The cost of producing the "fuel" for fireless engines was, therefore, negligible. And at certain manufacturing facilities (ammunition factories, for instance), the locomotives' lack of a firebox was an important plus in favor of safety. Excess steam (and not smoldering cinders) was the only thing exhausted from a fireless locomotive's stack. At the Weatherspoon plant, number 3 could be recharged with steam at one of four places: D superheater on unit 3; the high pressure heater on unit 3; the top of the steam drum on unit 2; or the top of the steam drum on unit 1 (Hedgpeth interview). A swiveling pipe and fitting could be attached to a plug on the locomotive. In Hedgpeth's words: "We had what they called a 'steam station.' It was just a. . . .Where they had the valves and all in there. . . .We had a swing-out line with knuckle joints on the pipe where we could make it fit right and seal off," (Hedgpeth interview). Number 3 typically stayed hooked up to one of the steam stations when not in use (at night, for instance). The amount of steam in the engine was kept at safe levels by the engine's safety valve; the locomotive was considered to have a full head of steam with internal pressure at 250 pounds per square inch; the safety valve released excess pressure when the internal pressure reached 255 pounds per square inch (Hedgpeth interview). What was a typical day like for number 3 and her crew? Hedgpeth and the others from the fuel handling department assigned to Weatherspoon's railroad operation began their workday at 7:00 A.M. each morning. "When they were running a good load on the plant, they were hollering for coal when we came into work," Hedgpeth says (Hedgpeth interview). The fuel handlers would be joined by a utility operator before the switching of railroad cars began; a single utility operator was assigned to work with the fuel handlers each day. The utility operator would lubricate the engine and disconnect number 3 from the steam station. And away they would go. The railroad tracks within the Weatherspoon plant itself consisted of two side tracks and a main. Number 3 ventured outside the plant to pick up loaded coal cars (the coal had come largely from coal fields in West Virginia) which could be temporarily deposited on either of the two side tracks or the main; up to thirty-five loaded cars could be moved into the plant at one time (Hedgpeth interview). The coal cars were subsequently separated into cuts of ten cars each. Number 3 would then shunt the string of cars to the coal pit, where each would be unloaded. Coal was discharged from the loaded freight cars one at a time. Each coal hopper car is set up with a series of bottom-discharge doors underneath the car body itself; one by one, the coal cars were spotted over the pit and their doors opened. To facilitate the unloading process, a special device (known as a coal shaker) would descend from above and be placed at the top of each car. The coal shaker would literally shake the freight car, causing the coal to drop to the pit below. The process could take anywhere from one to thirty minutes per car. "If it was real [sic] cold weather or kind of. . . .sorry coal. . . .it would take a good little bit to shake the car clean," Hedgpeth says (Hedgpeth interview). Indeed, freezing temperatures rendered havoc to this setup. Moisture in the untreated coal could freeze, making the coal rather reluctant to leave the railroad cars. Poor quality coal would also tend to stick to the car, rather than to fall obediently into the coal pit. Although the Weatherspoon plant stayed on-line twenty-four hours per day during the decades of the fifties, sixties, and much of the seventies, the railroad coal cars were most often unloaded solely on the first shift (from 7:00 A.M. to 3:30 P.M.). At times, when loaded coal cars were backing up just outside the plant gates, the fuel handlers would work overtime or, more rarely, would work a second shift (Hedgpeth interview). If an overtime stint was imminent, the utility operator would reconnect number 3 to one of the steam stations to recharge during a lunch break. At other times, the crew took a 15-minute break would be made by the crew would be made for this purpose. Handling a train with number 3 was more involved than handling an over-the-road freight train. The little fireless engine had steam-activated mechanical brakes, rather than air brakes, as it was without any means of generating pressure for air brake-equipped freight cars (Hedgpeth interview). If brake force was needed above that which could be provided by the brakes on the locomotive itself, the hand brake on the front coal hopper (operated by turning a brake wheel located near the top of the freight car) was engaged. This haphazard braking system turned emergency brake applications into an athletic challenge for Hedgpeth and the other fuel handlers: "One particular time, we were coming in (and I was not running the engine, but I was in the front [cab] of the engine). . . .We were pulling probably twenty-five cars (loaded). I happened to look back. . . .About the fourth car, I noticed, was jumping up and down, swinging from side to side. I told the operator: 'You'd better shut him down and throw your brakes on, we've got problems!" (Hedgpeth interview). Hedgpeth jumped off the locomotive and dashed back to the derailing train. He ran frantically from one coal car to the next, hurriedly applying the hand brake on each one. By the time the train had stopped, Hedgpeth had tightened the brake wheels of the first four hoppers. A worn wheel flange on one of the coal cars (apparently overlooked by one of the railroad car inspectors) had broken a track switch; by the time number 3 and its train stopped, seven or eight of the cars had left the tracks. The Weatherspoon plant was soon back to business as usual (the cars were ultimately re-railed by crews of one of the freight railroads serving the plant), but the memories of that day are still vivid in Hedgpeth's mind, and justifiably so. By the middle-to-late 1970s, operating the number 3 had become a cumbersome affair. In number 3's early years with the Lumberton plant, the Virginia & Carolina Southern actually handled repair work on the locomotive; V&CS was no longer in existence. To make matters worse, the engine was breaking down more and more often, placing ever greater demands on the time of CP&L's employees. Protracted out-of-service periods became commonplace because parts for the locomotive were no longer commercially available. For instance, the locomotive's cylinder heads kept cracking, which necessitated the expensive and time-consuming process of machining replacements by hand (Hedgpeth interview). By this time, too, other factors affecting the viability of number 3 had come into play. More efficient power plants had come on line in the Carolina Power & Light network during the 1960s and 1970s, making Weatherspoon somewhat obsolete. The newer plants relegated the Lumberton facility to a standby status. Newer CP&L plants could provide 900 megawatts of electrical power from each of their units; 180 megawatts, by comparison, was Weatherspoon's entire capacity (when all three units were operating at full load) (Hedgpeth interview). The units at the Weatherspoon plant operated only during periods of peak demand for electricity, usually in the coldest parts of the winter and the hottest parts of the summer. And when all three of the power plant's units were off-line (as was becoming the norm), there was no steam pressure for number 3. The fuel handlers were forced to rely upon an improvised switch engine to move railroad hopper cars: a bulldozer with a pulling cable (Hedgpeth interview). Something had to be done. In the latter portion of 1979, Hedgpeth (by then a foreman at the plant) began to compile options for replacing number 3. A leading possibility was to lease a diesel-electric from Seaboard Coast Line, the railroad which had taken over from both Seaboard and the V&CS. Carolina Power & Light management liked the idea, with one modification. The leased engine, it was decided, would be sent to the company's Asheville plant, which had grades on its plant railroad which necessitated a larger locomotive than the one that they were then using. In turn, the Weatherspoon plant was to receive Asheville's old diesel switcher (Hedgpeth interview). In the spring of 1980, Asheville's tiny, 65-ton General Electric diesel switcher arrived at the Lumberton facility. Number 3, which had suffered another cracked cylinder head some weeks before, was replaced permanently (it last operated in April 1980) (Hedgpeth interview; Allan Paul to Jim Vaughn, September 4, 1980). H. Allan Paul, the project coordinator then developing Spencer Shops into a North Carolina state historic site, requested that Carolina Power & Light donate number 3 to the North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Happily, the electric utility agreed. Shortly after the donation was made, Historic Sites employees Jerry Farley and Don Wooten ventured to Lumberton to remove the locomotive's bell and whistle to prevent them from being stolen by souvenir hunters the engine might encounter on its way to Spencer. After some negotiation, Seaboard Coast Line agreed to move the locomotive from the Weatherspoon plant on its own wheels (Allan Paul to Nancy Bailey, October 1, 1980). It arrived at the museum in October of that year. ----------------- Selected Bibliography Conrad, J. David. The Steam Locomotive Directory of North America. Polo. IL: Transportation Trails, 1988. Romulus Hedgpeth Interview. Interviewed by Jackson McQuigg, September 17, 1995. Allan Paul to Nancy Bailey, October 1, 1980; letter in Carolina Power & Light steam locomotive 3 artifact file. Allan Paul to Jim Vaughn, September 4, 1980; letter in Carolina Power & Light steam locomotive 3 artifact file. H.K. Porter Company, Inc. Porter Steam Locomotives. Pittsburgh: H.K. Porter Co., nd [1940s]. Riley, Jack. Carolina Power & Light Company: 1908-1958. Raleigh, NC: Jack Riley, 1958. ----------------- From work compiled by Jackson McQuigg for the North Carolina Transportation Museum Foundation, 1994 - 1995. Copyright 1995, North Carolina Transportation Museum Foundation. All rights reserved. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------