A Water treatment was, and is, an important part of steam locomotive service for both short-term and long-term boiler care. Treatment was added to the tenders when the firemen filled the tanks. Railroads tested water along their routes and issued treatment chemicals to engine crews. Water treatment was necessary to keep unnecessary scale from coating the boiler shell and attaching itself to boiler tubes.
The use of such chemical treatments in the tenders of steam locomotives was meant to remediate and mitigate impurities in the water before it reached the boiler. Some chemicals were designed to break down sludge and scale in the boiler so it could be removed with regular blowdowns.
Boiler water treatment chemicals primarily focus on avoiding scale, corrosion due to oxygen content, and foaming. A number of different chemicals are used to treat each of these conditions. They include sodium sulfites that act as oxygen scavengers, phosphates to combat sludge, and sodium carbonates to prevent scale buildup. All together, they make up a powerful combination for boiler health. – Martin E. Hansen
Mister Ross:
Boiler compound, my boy, boiler compound. Feedwater for nuclear reactors on ships is distilled from seawater and is ideally purer than a newborn baby’s thoughts. Even at that is is ionized water and this often is mitigated by a deionizing column. Temperatures and pressures are restricted information but it is known that oxygen blisters are possible so the water is then doped with various forms of boiler compound to keep down the free oxygen, hold in check the ionization in the water, and keep the pH within certain fairly narrow limits.
We fondly like to think of these systems as closed-loop systems, and for a shipboard nuclear plant we can come close – there is a cold shoe available which is not available, for example, for a steam locomotive (which runs open loop). But there is always leakage, removal from and replacement of primary and secondary loop fluid, and a makeup supply is required. I could tell you more but then I’d have to kill you.
The above comments are general in nature and do not form the basis for an attorney/client relationship. They do not constitute legal advice. I am not your attorney. Find your own damn lawyer.
I assume that the expense of water treatment caused those railroads in “bad water” districts to order both yard and road diesels for those districts.
Ed Burns
Retired Clerk from Northtown.
Water treatments are needed even today for excursion steam locos. UP crews on 844,3985, and eventually the 4014 big boy will still have to treat the water they use with chemicals because those boilers need to be as protected as humanly possible. “Bad water” districts may have helped bring the diesel locos online sooner, but the passenger cars that they pulled still needed steam heat which they got from boilers carried on board diesel locos or in boilers mounted in “power supply cars”. Whenever and wherever steam is generated for power or heat or cooking, water treatments of some kind will be needed. Even our “nuclear” Navy has to treat water because ships are powered by steam turbines which use water heated by the nuclear reactors on board.