My father was one of the founding members of the Hocking Valley Scenic Railroad that runs out of Nelsonville, Ohio. For the first 3 or 4 years of it's existence, my father would go down almost every weekend to work on the railroad, usually dragging me or my older brother along. He often times fired and sometimes hostled the locomotive, which was a very heavy 2-8-0 built by Baldwin in 1916. The locomotive was previously owned by the LS&I (currently owned and being restored by the Ohio Central (
http://www.ocsteam.com/33/index.html) ). It was a big, ugly, rough riding brute of a locomotive, but the cab rides were always fun.
I was about 10 years old or so when the railroad started, so I got a big kick out of sitting on the fireman's seat box, ringing the bell as we would exit / enter the station.
train97 (sorry, that smiley was just too obvious...)
It was a chaotic symphony of sounds - bell (sometimes with the air bell ringer psssup-psssop as background), whistle, automatic firedoor pssss - CLANKing open and closed (the stoker was rarely used), the rythmic PSSH PSSH PSSH PSSH of the steam exhausting from the cylinder cocks, rods clank-clonking heavily, injector being primed and opened, dynamo whirring, airpump foom-POOMing away and miscellaneous creaking, groaning and scraping sounds. Not a whole lot of stack talk as 6 coaches didn't do much to stress a former ore-hauling locomotive.
The smells are still with me - coal smoke grease and fresh and oily steam are the most memorable.
The view from the cab seat was very cool, whether sighting through the door to the walk along the boiler, or leaning out a little ways to watch the rods circling - reciprocating around, with the eccentric crank and rod doing that curious little off-beat dance. I knew what the eccentric did in the big picture, but hadn't quite figured out
why it moved the way it did at that age. I can still picture a lot of the backhead, and probably by the time I was 12 could name what many of the parts / appliances were or did, but unfortunately never got to operate anything but the bell and the automatic fire door opener. Dad was always doing something interesting, whether simply shoveling coal (Fire the bright spots, Matt!), leaning out the cab window to determine when the injector was primed, working the stoker valves on the rare times that it was used. They used the feedwater heater off and on, but to this day, I couldn't tell you what knobs operated that hunk of hardware. I'll have to ask him.
Wow, this is fun - I could go on and on remembering stuff I didn't realize I still had up there. Never mind all the places around, between and inside of that locomotive I've been while "helping" with maintenance. Want to get dirty fast, help clean out the smokebox! Want to potentially suffer from lung cancer caused by asbestos? Mix and apply asbestos "mud" to the cylinders (used under the cylinder jacket for insulation).
No wonder I like steam! Thanks for indulging me guys, sorry for the long post!
ops:
). I'm assuming one of the staybolts must have been leaking. 
