[Traindude]

This is a replacement firebox loop sound that is intended for coal-fired US steam locomotives after 1910 or so, which used a pneumatic (air) fire door. Most coal burning locomotives were equipped (or retrofitted) with pneumatic fire doors so that the fireman didn't have to manually swing the door shut after each shovel full of coal--he simply depressed a foot pedal to open the door, tossed the coal in, and released the pedal to close it.

I originally made this file for use with my experimental Challenger, but it can be used for any locomotive with a pneumatic fire door. I made it after following the blog of the restoration of the Chicago & Northwestern 1385 at the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in Wisconsin. In one of their posts, they had a video file of testing the rebuilt pneumatic "butterfly" fire door. I couldn't let this opportunity to get the "cleanest" sound of a pneumatic door (air hiss and all) go to waste, so I downloaded the video and intermixed it with a stock fire sound from Freesound.org with Audacity and added cue points in Goldwave.

It's obviously not perfect--we currently don't have any way to "momentarily" open the fire door or have closing the fire door deplete the main reservoir pressure--but it sounds convincing enough. (Although I could use the opinion of some fresh ears to confirm this for me!) It can be downloaded Here via Google Drive. (I may later upload it to the ET file library based on feedback I get here.) Simply drag and drop the file into the SOUND folder of the loco of your choice, and then edit the "Cab.sms" file of that locomotive and look for the existing firebox loop--it should have the filename of either "fs_fboxopen.wav" or "a380_fboxopen.wav" (or something along those lines), and use discrete triggers 40 and 41. Replace whatever the file name that's listed there with the filename for my sound and hear the results!

I'd love to get feedback from you guys on how it sounds!

[Weter]

Hello.
Thanks for effort, inspiration and sharing.

Quote

any way to "momentarily" open the fire door

How about editing fire door control's third number and num notches?

[Traindude]

Weter, on 02 June 2023 - 07:53 PM, said:

How about editing fire door control's third number and num notches?

Just to clarify, by "momentary action" I mean something analogous to the foot pedal control I described earlier. Something along the lines of "press and hold the F key to open, release the F key to close." Not sure if that's possible in ORTS (I've tried it once before but was unsuccessful, although I did edit the controls of a locomotive to make it open and close faster, and I'm sorry to say, if there are notches in the control definition and the second value of each notch is set to "0", the firebox loop sound WILL NOT WORK).

[Weter]

Oh, I see now.
For MSTS cab controls this mode was called "while pressed" and I've doubts too, will it currently work for fire doors: it's for so-called "two state" controls, like buttons.
I didn't mean multiple notches. Opposite, I thought about 1 or even 0 notches instead. Second number in Notch () definition obviously should be 1 for fire door, because 0 defines stepped action, while we need smooth only.

Controls (
...
    FireDoor ( 0 1 0,1 or greater 0
        NumNotches (0) or
        NumNotches (1
            Notch (0   1 dummy)
        )
    )
...
)