My mom had an aunt who lived in Pennsylvania in some valley. There were tracks coming out of the valley in two directions. Not sure where. When she visited the aunt she said the aunt was especially vigilant for the sound of locomotives on wash days, as what ever was on the clothesline needed to be taken in before the train came by or the whites would all become gray. I don't think the house was next to the tracks, but it wasn't very far away either. Apparently washing was difficult because there were quite a few trains coming through town. When they went up the hill, there would be a LOT of smoke.
In general, a fireman running a dirty stack burns more fuel than one who runs a clean stack. More fuel burned equals more money. Railroads hated spending money, hence firemen who used lots of fuel might get talked to about it. Several steam engineers I knew when I participated in the PRPA (the crew that maintains the SP&S 700 here in Portland, OR) said a fireman who couldn't keep a clean stack most of the time was likely to be fired. On the other hand, these guys were running oil fired steam locomotives rather than coal let alone wood fired ones. The fireman's job is/was difficult. Got to keep adding water to the boiler to match the water boiled away, but don't add too much at once or the boiler cools off and loses steam pressure. They had to anticipate when the engineer would need steam and get the fire going ahead of time. Once the throttle was opened wide was too late to stoke up the fire. But don't get the fire too hot, too much steam and the safeties are lifting and steam and fuel are wasted. In the days of wood burning 4-4-0's the fireman adjusted the fire by throwing logs into the firebox. Often the process consisted of chucking in logs as fast as they could grab them. I suspect that for heavy trains or when on an upgrade two firemen would be needed to throw the logs in fast enough to keep up steam pressure. Coal improved matters by having more heat in a shovelful than in a log. But coal produces much nastier soot than wood. When oil fired locomotives came into being, the soot became oily. When I was PRPA I spent some time in the firebox of the 700 drilling staybolts. The firebox on this locomotive is big enough to hold a mid-size car. The staybolts run between the walls of the firebox and the outside of the boiler. Their purpose is to keep the boiler pressure from distending the steel plates in the firebox and the boiler. Periodically these bolts can fracture. If enough fracture a boiler explosion can result. To determine whether they've fracture the bolts are hollow. If there is a fracture than steam leaks out. But the hollows plug up with glaze (like a potter's glaze - the soot, when super heated becomes hard and shiny). Hence the need to drill this stuff out every year. You haven't been dirty until you've done something like this. I'd get home and have to wash my hair five times before the rinse water would run clean!
[back in the day, this stack would likely have gotten a fireman fired... in this case they sanded the flue to make extra smoke for me, the photographer - note this loco was built in the '30s, some 60+ years after the Jupiter and burns oil, not logs - btw is there a model of this loco, SP&S 700 online?]
Case in point about soot, when I moved to the Portland area in '96 it wasn't unusual for the SP&S 700 and SP 4449 to exercise on the Portland & Western tracks out through Tigard, Beaverton, and Aloha to the wye in Hillsboro. There are a several car dealers near (and next to) the tracks. The dealers complained bitterly when the locomotives ran because they'd have to re-wash every car on the lot. Of course by that time there were no professional steam locomotive firemen around so fire management wasn't the best. Also, firemen loved to show off for the steam-fan photographers who would flock to the tracks to take pictures, so there was a lot more smoke than there would have been back in the '30s when these locomotives were the pride of the fleet...
An exception to the need for a clean stack, was when heavy trains needed to climb a grade. At that point it was feed the fire as fast as possible to maintain steam pressure and heck with the smoke.
In the early days of the transcon railroad, tracks were not perfect. They were built in a terrible hurry because the CP and UP were racing each other to get the most miles from the transcon route because the government was giving them land for each mile of track laid. It wasn't until a while later (but not a long while) they went back and reworked tracks.
My impression is that in the early days tie plates weren't used and rails were spiked directly to the ties. However, the railroads, being cheap, realized that ties wore out very quickly, and since it cost money to replace ties they looked for a remedy and tie plates were born (at least in the north american continent). I'm not sure whether the original transcon tracks were laid with or without tie plates. Some of the 3' narrow gauge railroads ran several years without tie plates (South Pacific Coast RR in the San Francisco Bay Area is an example and that railroad didn't complete its main line until 1883 iirc).
Locomotive engineers were the rock stars of their day. The boys in town would be in awe of the man at the throttle of the trains. I believe the engineers took great pride in the appearance of their engines and he, his fireman, and front end brakeman (did they have front end brakemen in the 1860's?) spent time wiping their loco to keep it clean.
Just the brass and paint schemes of the locos of that vintage suggests they were intended to make a statement. Letting the brass tarnish and the paint get dirty was unthinkable for the engineers.
Sometime in the 1880's the fancy paint started to go away. Railroads being cheap decided the cost of maintaining the paint jobs (which showed soot like crazy) was too high. Black paint doesn't show soot as much. The smoke boxes at the front of the engine were often silver (as were the fireboxes) because they had much higher temperatures than the boiler which had steam, not fire or exhaust gasses in them. The black paint would blister with so much heat The silver paint stuck and lasted longer.
The film clip posted of the old time steam locomotive has little bearing on USA prototype locomotives as all the equipment in it is European and it was shot in Spain iirc.
Early locomotives didn't last as long as later models because the metallurgy of the day wasn't as good. Nevertheless, fixing existing locomotives was generally cheaper than buying new ones, at least for the first couple of decades. Without knowing for sure, I'd guess that locos would be repaired until the boiler wasn't "safe" (not that railroads cared much about safe in those days). Everything else could be fixed in-house by a crew with big machine tools (they had to be as locomotive companies didn't keep stashes of spare parts on hand that could be overnight shipped to where ever they were needed. The big wear points would be side road bearings, the seals on the piston, the inside of the cylinders, the slide valves, the bearings of the valve gear, and the tires (the steel or iron in the early days rims of the tires). All this stuff could be worked on or replaced at the railroad's shops.
Thanks for the photos Mr. Cartoon Character!!!!
HF