Any good steam train driving/firing tutorials?

[Brickrail782]

I kind of stink at driving theme and about all of the tutorials I have found are for British steam engines, which behave a bit differently than ours do. Also, I'm not sure this is the right place for this question, but I wasn't sure where else to look.

[buzz456]

Are you using the auto fireman or are you using expert mode. Answer that and I can give you some guidelines.

[Brickrail782]

Currently using the manual fireman, was goofing off with 844's whistle and I had to turn auto-fireman off in order to use the engine.

[buzz456]

In general you need to keep the firebox level above 70% and not above 80%. Keep water levels between 90-95%. Start out at power bar at 100% and whatever you need to get things going on the throttle. Move the throttle up to 100% and when you go by around 5mph start bringing the power bar back to 50% or even less if acceleration continues. Watch the steam pressure. If it starts dropping a lot pull the power bar back. As speed increase gradually pull the throttle back to about 82% which is where you should be at cruise. Power bar should be your speed control. If you have a heavy load this should be set at whatever it takes to maintain steam pressure. These beasts weren't like diesels. You can't just slam everything forward and see what power they produce. They will run at whatever speed they will at max steam pressure so that is the key. Goes seriously in the red pull back on the power bar until you see recovery. Many of the locos need lower power bar setting while adding coal or water to stay in the green.
Have fun.

[Brickrail782]

What about cutoff management? Is that anything I need to worry about?

[buzz456]

What about cutoff management? Is that anything I need to worry about?

That's what I was talking about when I used the turn power bar.

[Brickrail782]

Oh, I thought that power bar meant throttle. My brain must have been half asleep.

[trev123]

There is really no difference to driving a British steam loco to a US one as they both work on the same principals. I drive both.

[Brickrail782]

I followed your guide to the letter and everything was going fine until I started up the grade just outside of Cheyenne. The train speed dropped to 30-ish and the steam pressure fell to the point where no matter what I did, there wasn't enough pressure to make the train accelerate any more than that. If this is important, the train I was hauling was the Cheyenne Frontier Days consist, lead by UP 3985, 2 water tenders, a boxcar, and an extra baggage car.

[CArailroader]

When driving up grades it's important to put your reverser (cutoff) lever more forward (higher percentage) and increase the throttle a bit. It all depends on the grade, tonnage, and specific engine. You will either need to read the manual for the specific engine or play around with it to learn it's ins-and-outs as not all engines are the same. I personally recommend practicing with one engine until you get the hang of it, then apply what you have learned to another engine and so on so forth.

[Brickrail782]

I figured it out already, thanks anyway for the reply I discovered that keeping the water level between 55-60% does a pretty good job at keeping pressure up.