Carolina Power & Light 3
		         Fireless Steam Locomotive

This document from: http://www.salisburync.gov/nctrans/temp/new%20gifs/library%20(long%20term)/jackson's%20text/cpl3.txt

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.


Present Condition and Recommendations:
	In a September 4, 1980 memorandum, Allan Paul noted that Carolina
Power & Light 3 was "in mint condition" when received from CP&L (Allan
Paul to Jim Vaughn, September 4, 1980). That's no longer the case.
	One of the greatest concerns pertaining to this locomotive has
been the copious amounts of asbestos insulation which are more or less
encased beneath the sheet metal boiler jacket. In a surprise inspection
during 1994, the North Carolina Department of Health, Environment, and
Natural Resources formally expressed concern over the insulation which is
now seeping out from under the jacket at various points. It is
recommended that the offending material be sealed off by a professional
asbestos contractor before conducting any further restoration work to
this engine. 
	Romulus Hedgpeth indicates that the jacket was not removed during
the engine's stay at the Weatherspoon plant (Hedgpeth interview). Minor
dents and blemishes have appeared in the boiler jacket over the years.
However, given the locomotive's service life as a humble workhorse, the
appearance of these details provides a legitimate dimension to number 3's
character. The jacket should not be replaced merely to give the
locomotive a "new" appearance.
	Given the lack of available information on the locomotive's early
years, the engine naturally should be restored to a cosmetic appearance
reflectant of its years at the Weatherspoon plant. The utilitarian yellow
paint, red trim scheme (still extant on the engine today) was apparently
applied to the locomotive during its entire tenure in Lumberton. The only
distinguishing marks then on the engine (in addition to the cast number
plate on the front of the locomotive) were two decals, one applied
beneath the windows on each side of the cab. In addition to the company
name, the decals bore the likeness of Reddy Kilowatt, the nationwide
mascot of the electric utility industry dating from the 1940s. Reddy
Kilowatt has been zapped by CP&L (and most other power companies, for
that matter), and obtaining a fresh set of these decals may require
considerable leg work on the museum's part.
	Numerous gauges are now missing from the interior of the
locomotive cab; the  engine's shield-shaped builder's plate is also gone.
The engine bell was recently located in artifact storage at the museum,
but the location of the whistle is still elusive. It is strongly
suggested that a concerted effort be made by Julie Bledsoe, Don Wooten,
and Jerry Farley to locate these missing items, all removed by museum
staff or present on the locomotive when it arrived at the museum in 1980.
	The locomotive cab suffers from surface rust and peeling paint,
which should be addressed at once. Incidentally, paint applied to the
interior walls of the locomotive has evolved over the years; initial
layers of paint appear to be a shade of green, while later paint applied
is a shade of gray. Since the earliest paint applied to the cab hasn't
been dated (it could date from the engine's pre-CP&L period), it is
recommended that gray be the color restored to the cab interior.
	Another interesting change made to the locomotive apparently
occurred sometime during the 1970s. The locomotive's original cab steps
(at a ninety degree angle to the cab) were replaced by a series of
homemade, forty-five degree elevation, stairs along the back of the
engine cab. The clumsy newer stairs should be replaced and the
older-style steps reapplied.
	A number of other issues pertaining to CP&L 3 should be given
attention. One of them is the cracked cylinder head on the locomotive.
While repairing this flaw is a tantalizing solution, leaving it damaged
might provide a fertile field for interpretation. Accompanying text could
discuss these most interesting mechanical glitches, all too familiar to
steam-era shop men. Another issue requires a simple remedy. The
locomotive's side rods (removed prior to its move to the museum) should
be replaced. 
	The museum should leave the proverbial door open to further
research work on Carolina Power & Light 3. The records of the H.K. Porter
Company, if still in existence, have not been searched for data regarding
this locomotive. Such a search might well shed new light onto the history
of this wonderful part of the museum collection.




				     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.