Diesel engine fire extinguishers....
 

Do all engines have potable fire extinguishers or do they have some sort of plumbed in system??

I would suggest all locomotives, certainly these days, will be required to carry a form of user-operated fire extinguisher, as do all carriages / DMUs.

All BR mainline diesels carried fire extinquishers in both cabs and most had an automatic system fitted in the engine room.

All the DMU's at The EVR carry fire extinguishers slung on the frame. All Diesel locos carry them in the cab.

Best wishes,

John H-T.

Yes all diesel loco's have them in the cabs on Britains railways and all up until the Class 66's and Class 67's had big fire bottles for extinguishing engine room fires. The policy with the latter loco's though is that they might as well let it burn itself out because there's still going to be extensive damage to the loco even if the fire is extinguished, so why waste money on a system that has little or no value.

There is surely a health and safety value?

Better to stop it quickly rather than letting it spread to the OHLE, station canopies, rolling stock etc.?

Cost cutting if you ask me!

Yes its obviously cost cutting. Having said that, the loco's have been running about on the British railway network for over ten years and as far as I know, none of them have been on fire yet so the question of safety has never been raised. Obviously the powers that be are happy about the situation.

I remember in the late 70's, a Class 46 was on fire in Darlington station with a rake of coaches on. The traincrew couldn't get the engine room fire extinguishers to work and the loco was merrily smoldering away until the fire brigade arrived.. When they got to the train, a few of the firemen went into the engine room armed with extinguishers to tackle the blaze. While they were doing that, another fireman had a look at the loco's fire equipment lever to see what went wrong and pulled it and made it work. All the firemen suddenly came hurrying out of the engine room in a gushing cloud of CO2 vapour. :D

Due to vandalism many TOCs have removed fire extinguishers from inside the coaches. There is no requirement to provide them. At my company ASLEF carried out an investigation into how many instances a fire had been fought by carriage fire extinguishers - and there were none.

So now our EMUs have 2 large AFFF extinguishers in each cab, and none in the saloons (which is probably just as well since we wouldn't want any passengers squirting foam near the 25Kv equiment).

Modern safety policy dictates that a fire on a train should be considered as an Emergency Evacuation. Human life is most important - OHLE and stations can be rebuilt.

FP

Cheers for the information guys.....had good read there........

Last time i was up on the Llangollen railway,i noticed that the class 33 engine had Green portable fire extinguishers in the cab?? what type are these?? they had Bcf on the labels....

BCF ? Read this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromochlorodifluoromethane

interesting read cheers for the info........:D

Holy cow. BCF should not be used in an enclosed space (like an engine compartment) whilst people are in there....as it can be poisonous.

AFAIAA we don't use BCF/Halon on the Mainline railway anymore for that reason. Nowadays our extinguishers are CO2 (black band), Powder (blue band) and AFFF, which is short for Aqueous Film Forming Foam (cream band)

It seems to me that perhaps the Llangollen Railway are leaving themselves wide open for a charge of manslaughter if anyone tries to use that extinguisher on the engine. :eek:

Yer it looks that way..........lol..

The 66s don't have an engine room fire system, as there are sensors all around the engine room that shut it down if a problem occurs. There is an AFFF portable extinguiser in each cab.

Aren't green the long-since obsolete Halon extinguishers? I thought they'd been outlawed about 10 - 15 years ago. Certainly they must be very long in the tooth!! (A bit like me!) ;D

Edit: Sorry, didn't scroll down far enough to see the rest of the thread!

Slightly different tack
Can't remember whether it was 47's or 33's, if the batteries were flat and the
Fire Alarm Test
button was pressed, the engine room CO2 extinguishers discharged :eek:

thats not good...............:(

Certainly all the ex-BR DMU stock I come into contact with is fitted with automatic 'fire bottles' which will deploy and soak the underframe if the fire warning system is activated, or can be manually operated by hitting a switch in the cabs. Plus the usual AFFF foam extinguishers on board. I hadn't realised that saloon extinguishers weren't a requirement, that's very suprising. A further improvement would be to also stow the emergecy tool cupboard contents in the cabs too!

Read this some were.........:)...

For the most part Halon is illegal, infact most of the basic fire training courses I have been on have denied Halon ever existed. It was indeed colour coded green and was fitted to 59/0 and 59/1 locos (AFAIK). Halon features in the film Terminator 2, in the big computer lab building. It can still be found on aircraft (if you're gonna die anyway, it might aswell be done quickly).

The reason it was banned was not because it was just as likely to kill people as the fire itself, but because it is harmful to the enviroment.

I found an old Chubb halon fire extinguisher in the back of my shed at the weekend,but its empty......lol....the cylinder is green.....