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....