Steam engines are very different beasts to drive than Diesels or Electrics. Before you start, it's important to get some idea of how they work - what components there are and how they interact - some of this might seem basic and you'll be tempted to skip it and move on but I would encourage you to read carefully.

There are two fuels needed to make a Steam Engine work - Coal and Water. Coal is used to make fire, fire is used to turn water in to Steam and Steam pushes the cylinders that drive the wheels.

Let's split it in to four bits - Fire, Steam, Going and Stopping.

Your goal here is to create a fire that will provide the right amount of steam at the right time. That's the key here, it's not simply a case of "as much as possible all the time", but let's get to that detail as we go, to start with if you can get it creating as much as possible then the worst that happens is you're continually blowing the safety valves and that's just noisy and a waste of steam. As you get more proficient you'll learn to cut back your steam generation at the right times.

Creating a Fire - Train Simulator offers a number of controls here, these are:

Stoking
Blower
Damper

Stoking - this really is the simple act of adding more coal to the fire. This controls the "fire mass". In a real steam engine there is a fine art to loading on coal such as what size of coal lumps and where on the fire to put it. In Train Simulator it's a simple fire mass value, as you stoke it goes up and as you run the engine it goes down. That's complex enough for us at the moment. The fire mass has an "ideal" value, at this ideal value the fire is most effective, if you are above or below it the fire becomes less effective. What does effective mean - it means steam generation. How do you know what the ideal value is? The techie way is to look at the engine blueprint, it's in there. The non-techie way is to experiment. I usually go with whatever the *starting* value is, so on the coal button it says "2.5 tons, 66%" - the 2.5 tons is how much is in the bunker / tender, the 66% is the size of your fire mass. If the fire starts at 66% then I will usually go with running the fire from say 62% to 70%. As far as I can tell, there is no "cost" to you for stoking at any point so you can simple keep an eye on the fire mass percentage and stoke up if you need to at any point.

Blower - When the blower is turned on it will force air up the chimney, this has the effect of drawing air up from the fire and feeding it. Starting this will give you a steam generation boost.

Damper - Below the fire there is a grate, and below that there is a door (or two as in the case of the J94). Opening the Damper allows air to flow up from underneath the fire and through it - which is obviously a great benefit to feeding the fire. If the damper(s) are open then you will get a steam generation boost.

That's basically the fire covered. When you want to be clever, you can learn to turn off blowers and dampers and cut back your steam generation rate to allow the boiler to decrease in pressure as you come in to stations - nobody likes it when the safety valves kick off in a platform

It starts out as water and we need to convert it in to Steam. Water starts in the tank (or the tender) and we use something called an Injector to take water at normal atmospheric pressure and inject it in to the very high pressure environment inside the boiler. Injectors work by using Steam to force the water in - there's lots of info on the web about how they work. The key is - you need Steam. For info, at low boiler pressures when you have no steam to use, real steam engines have mechanical pumps to get water in, then they use injectors once steam is available. In Train Simulator you never get that low (hopefully) and mechnical pumps aren't generally implemented.

If we start out with a boiler with plenty of boiling hot steam in it and we start injecting cold water, this condenses the steam and the boiler pressure is reduced - this is something to be very aware of as you proceed.

There are two kinds of Injector generally. LIVE steam injectors use LIVE steam from the boiler. This is steam that's available all the time but it will cost you boiler pressure. EXHAUST steam injectors make use of the exhaust steam after you've run it through the cylinders, which is great as it wasn't going to do anything else anyway except chuff out the chimney - but of course this is only available once you're running at enough speed to actually have exhaust steam. There are four controls - two for each injector. One set of controls turns on the steam, and the other turns on the water. Therefore, to inject water in via the Live Steam Injector you'd start the live steam injector and then start the live water feed.

If you are manually firing using the cab controls or the keyboard you have full control over the four controls covering the two kinds of injectors, if you're using the hud you've just got a single simple button that does it all for you and it works out the best way to proceed.

On the HUD, you have a value at the top indicating how much water is in the tank / tender, and a value at the bottom indicating how much there is in the boiler itself.

Note that in a real steam engine there are real consequences for over filling the boiler (it's called Priming and results in water getting in to the cylinders - very bad) but these are generally not simulated in steam engines in Train Simulator. The 56xx however does simulate it. Similarly, if you let the boiler water level get too low then the "fusable plugs" get uncovered, melt and the steam in the boiler evacuates rapidly out of the boiler to stop the engine from exploding. The effects are generally not modelled but the game will terminate if you let the boiler water level get too low. The other important effect that is not simulated is the gradient - if you imagine the side view of the boiler with water at some given level and then imagine the same boiler going up a hill or down a hill you can see that the water level apparently in the tank might be seen to change and indeed in a real engine if you fill up to an apparently sensible level on a flat and then start going up a steep up hill gradient you might find yourself suddenly priming. Not to worry, the simulator doesn't currently worry about this so you can just focus on keeping it filled up. Unlike the fire mass, there is no "ideal" value - just keep water in the tank.

We've got a fire, we've got steam - now we need to do something with it.

The steam is held in the boiler by the regulator. As you open the regulator it lets steam out in to the cylinders at the front of the loco, if your brakes are off you will soon be moving.

While you're standing, condensation will build up in the cylinders. Water is the absolute enemy of cylinders because it can't be compressed like Steam. If it gets bad enough and you move off you could seriously damage the cylinders and take the loco out of action (in many cases TS engines don't simulate this behaviour, the 56xx again does). Open the cylinder ♥♥♥♥♥ for the first few wheel rotations to allow the steam to blow any water out and then close them again to preserve your steam.

Note: in the description below i'm going to use the name "cut-off" but you can interchange it reasonably with "reverser" in the context of the simulator, it's the W/S keys.

Start with the cut-off in full forwards position. As you accelerate you want to start fairly quickly drawing the reverse back towards the center. Without getting in to diagrams of how the cylinders work (there are many on the web) i'll just explain this by saying it controls how LONG you are letting steam in to the cylinders for each cycle. As the train speeds up you will find it is a) losing boiler pressure rapidly and b) stops accelerating and seems to plateau unable to go any faster. This is because you've reached a balance point and the effort required to evacuate the cylinders from the steam in the last half cycle is as much as is being put in this time. The solution - put it in for less of the cycle by bringing the cut-off back.

How you move the cut-off is entirely different per engine and not just per class, it's different on each engine because of the wear and tear on it. This one is really where you will want to practice and learn to feel the engine.

Don't bring the cut-off in past 15% minimum, you might find the different loco's have different minimums below which they are no longer able to put enough steam in to do anything useful.

In the J94 - I usually start off at 50% and then at 10mph i'm in 25%. If i'm on a steep incline then i'll start at 75% and quickly drop it back to 50% as soon as I can. For a larger engine like the black 5 or B1 you'll find those values are different. Also, some engines use a "notched" cut-off lever where you need to press one lever (with the E key) to release a catch so you can move it where others use a wheel type handle to move it (this is how the Black 5 works). On a notched cut-off you must remember to drop your regulator off to zero (or at least below about 10%) before you release the catch or the steam pressure from the regulator will cause the cut-off lever to fly forwards all the way (in the sim it's just inconvenient, in the real thing it can be very bad and cause damage).

Don't forget that the same logic applies in reverse. Start at -75% and bring it back towards -15% as you accelerate.

Finally, as you slow down up a steep gradient (for example, in 25% forwards, the j94 might not be able to maintain a 1:33 gradient depending on the train weight) remember the appropriate times to move the cut-off back out again. So as i'm going up the 1:40 gradient, i'm slowing down, once I get to about 7 or 8 mph I put it back out to 50% cut-off and then the train is able to maintain its speed more easily - balance the regulator appropriately and you should find you're able to maintain your speed without losing (too much) boiler pressure, if you keep trying to push as hard as you can in 50% you'll quickly find you're plateau'd out (remember you already found out you can't go up this hill at 25%!) - but worse, your boiler pressure is plummeting and before long you won't have enough left to keep going. When this happens you need to stop and let it come back up again before continuing. The problem is that some times you might find yourself unable to start again on the gradient and will need to go all the way back down to try again - so focus on keeping going, even if you're going slower than you'd like.

Finally, don't forget it's ok to lose boiler pressure if you need to - know your gradient and work out whether losing boiler pressure now to maintain speed is a wise thing or whether you're best letting it drop speed to keep boiler pressure up (perhaps because it's about to get even worse ).

Ok so we're moving. Now we need to stop, but first when we started off I assumed the brakes were off so let's fix that and go back to the beginning again because you most likely started out with the brakes ON.

For this i'm going to focus on the main Vacuum and Air brakes most locomotives have. Locomotive brakes are different again and i'll cover those later.

Brakes have three main stages - RELEASE, RUNNING and APPLY.

Some times you'll find there's no RUNNING, sometimes you'll find running called SELF LAPPED. but the ideas are the same.

Vacuum and Air brakes work differently to how the brakes on your car might work, or how they work on most diesel or electric locos. On a car, bike or diesel loco, you are using automatically lapped brakes, set it to 20% and it'll just sit there slowing down gently at the same rate. Brakes on a steam engine are MANUALLY lapped.

RELEASE makes the brakes come off.
RUNNING holds the brakes where they are.
APPLY makes them go on.

If you set it to APPLY 20% it will gradually apply the brakes more and more until they are fully on and you're screeching to a halt.

STARTING
Move the brakes to RELEASE and watch the brake gauge go up. When it's at 0 your brakes are on completely. When it's at 21 your brakes are OFF completely. That value may differ among steam engines but you'll be able work it out pretty quickly. Most UK steam engines are either 21 or 25 (inches of mercury).

Once the brakes are off, move them back to RUNNING. If you don't have a running state, you can probably put them to the most minimal Apply setting, just make sure the brake gauge isn't going down. Why do this? Because releasing brakes uses some more of that precious steam from the boiler - so while they're in releasing you're losing more steam. Put it in running and that hole is sealed up.

This is the single biggest mistake most users make when operating a steam engine.

STOPPING
Move the brakes to apply, drop the value down to say 12 and then move back to RUNNING to hold it there. Now the speed will drop steadily and evenly. This requires practice - and trust. It's too easy to brake too hard and then stop short. Once you learn the loco and how it behaves on the track with the load behind it, you'll learn to trust what to set it to and that it will stop at the right point. This really is just practice.

If you find you're stopping too short, move it to release and then back to running again when it's at the new value (say 18) and you'll slow down less quickly. If you aren't slowing down enough, move to apply and then back to running when you're at a lower value, say 6.

If you want to be absolutely perfect - the best drivers stop on a "rising needle" for the most comfortable stop, this means that as the train comes to a stop you are releasing the brake pipe (and the needle in the cab is rising, hence the name). Do this in your car - put your foot on the brake to stop and keep it at the same point all the time and you'll get a bit jerk as you finally stop. Now try it by gently lifting off the brake as you stop and you'll find it far smoother. This requires a LOT of practice though.

Steam engines are hard to drive, but they are tremendously fun and a great challenge.

Add to all the fun above the fact that as both driver and fireman you need to learn the route itself, learn the gradients and learn the signals and speed limits - all this helps you to make the right decisions at the right times. For example, you're coming up a hill to a reduction in speed limit - why use your brakes, ease off on the throttle and let gravity help you out. You're going along a level bit and approaching an up hill stretch, it's tempting to get up as much speed as possible and lose boiler pressure - but instead you might be better off preserving boiler pressure rather than gaining speed and then when you hit the hill you'll have the power to get up it.