>>1289632>romanticising a job that was essentially just shovelling coal into a firebox whenever the driver told you to>romanticising the soot and coal dust a fireman would be covered in, while forgetting all the dust and soot which would also be inhaledFace it, being a fireman was basically a shit job. The only good part of it was the fact that you were travelling around places you maybe didn't have the income to do so in your free time. You would probably die of lung disease thanks to the soot and coal dust, that's assuming you didn't smoke (which you probably did, because it was the early 20th century) and die earlier because of the effects of smoking. Then there's the severe exhaustion that many firemen would have and the dehydration they would suffer from due to being close to the firebox and the heavy, manual labour.
Most, if not all steam locomotives for mainline use switched to mechanical stokers, and the German locomotives in the GDR were converted to run on bunker fuel, as the Soviet Union took away electrified lines as "war reparations" and also took away many electric and diesel locomotives. The GDR ran steam locomotives running on bunker fuel until the 1970s when diesels started replacing them.
