Reply to post: Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

Fixing a printer ended with a dozen fire engines in the car park

Lord Kipper III

Re: Re:Victorian railways had a few exploding boiler incidents

As a young boiler maintenance engineer at Didcot Power Station in the early 1990s,the coal fired boilers had several safety relief valves dotted around the boiler operating at various pressures. Sometimes the valves would just begin to pass steam at normal operating pressure and make a noise which would put us in breach of our noise limits so we would have to drop load. Less MW generated meant less £ so especially in the winter we were encouraged to fit a device called a gag that would force the valve stem down onto the seat to stop the valve passing. This of course meant that the valve could no longer serve its intended function but as we had sufficient other valves and a repair would be immediately scheduled. One evening I was asked to install the gag on one especially noisy simmering valve but having applied the recommended force to the gag the valve was still passing steam noisily. I phoned the Charge Engineer (shift manager) reporting failure and that I was giving up and going home for my tea to be told to try a little more force as this evening, MW were really quite expensive and the suits in HQ would be quite disappointed that load would have to be reduced. I tried a little harder, still no success and was joined by a colleague offering a large spanner to apply more force to the gag. At this point I concluded that I did not wish my life to end in a sudden bang and steam whiteout due to the safety valve body splitting apart due to the use of unreasonable force, invented some Engineering Directive (a bit like Space Corps Directives but less funny) about the use of gags and went home.

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