Charlie and His Puppy Bingo

by Helen Hill; Violet Maxwell

The fireman has to work very hard, but when he is not working he can talk if he wants to. This fireman was very kind, and, when he was not working, he explained everything to Charlie and his Daddy—but all the time he was ex-plain-ing he had to keep looking out of the window, too, in case he should see anything that the engineer did not see. There are a great many windows in the cab of an engine—it has windows all round, because it is so very important that the engineer and the fireman shall see all that there is to see.

Well, I will now tell you what the fireman was doing all the time that Charlie and his Daddy were riding on the engine with him.

In front of the fireman was the steam gauge, which is a round thing like a clock, and it has a hand like a clock hand, too, and the steam makes the hand move—so that you can see how much steam is coming out of the boiler. When the steam is getting low the hand drops, and when the hand of the gauge drops to 150 the fireman knows it is time to put more coal in the fire box.

Every time that the hand of the gauge dropped to 150 the fireman got up and opened a little door in the back of the cab, which opened right into the fire box, so that you could see the fire all red and glowing, and the fireman scooped a great shovel full of coal into it. The fireman told Charlie that it was very important how one shovels the coal into the fire box. It has to be shoveled very evenly, so that it is not all black with coal in one place and all red hot with embers in another place. Yes, the fireman told Charlie that it needs a lot of practice before one can shovel the coal in just ex-act-ly right.

Then the fireman also had to watch the water gauge, which shows how much water there is in the boiler.

When he saw by the water gauge that the water was getting low in the boiler, then the fireman had to turn a valve, which is a sort of handle that starts a pump working, and the pump pumps water into the boiler.

Charlie very much wanted to turn the valve himself, but the fireman said, “No,” that it needed a whole lot of practice before one could pump water into the tank—as it was very important just how much water to pump. If too much cold water is pumped into the boiler it might cool the water already in the boiler so that no more steam would come out—and then the train would stop!

Do you think that the fireman on an engine is a busy man? Indeed he is!

But that is not all that the fireman has to do. Oh, dear, no! The fireman has a lot more work to do.

When the train is coming to a steep place—and there were a lot of steep places on the railroad that Charlie was traveling on—the fireman has to make the fire red hot, so that lots and lots of steam can come out of the boiler. He makes the fire get hotter and hotter until the steam gets so strong that the “safety valve” pops off—and this shows the engineer that there is enough steam to push the train up the steep place. Yes, you can see that it would need a lot of extra steam to push a train up a steep, high hill.