There is a lot of time lag between throwing more coal into the firebox and having the steam pressure rise as a result. It’s very difficult to design an automated control for a system like that. (Even with computer controls, it’s not a trivial thing to tune correctly. I’m speaking from experience.)
As far as I know, all mechanical stokers were manually controlled. The reason this fireman wasn’t holding the shovel himself was because one person couldn’t keep up. This page says some of the largest locomotives built before the development of mechanical stokers required 2 firemen.
Even oil-fired locomotives like the Southern Pacific cab-forward had a fireman aboard, presumably to act as an assistant engineer and control the oil burners.
It’s an interesting legend. The contest between man and machine is the key part to it, and that could have only occurred in a brief timespan, and the legend appears to arise right then, not some story that someone’s grandfather told them. There may have been such a contest, but as you say there’s no definitive record of it. The ending typically has him winning the contest but dying as a result, which seems more allegorical than real, marking the last stand of man against machine in a pyrrhic victory. And it does come across somewhat better than a coal shoveling man beating the coal screw.
Is that why Clapham Junction sometimes looks as though a giant child got bored with his train set and didn’t bother to pack it away?
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Remember that even by the early 20[sup]th[/sup] century the Titanic was still using manual coal stokers. I remember the first time I saw the film and was reminded of this it made it seem like even though the ship was the culmination of the industrial revolution’s high tech it still ultimately depended on a form of ‘rowing galley slave’ for propulsion…
As mentioned, coal stoking systems in widespread use on locomotives were only ever partly mechanized (auger to deliver coal from tender to loco), and never fully automated. Nor as you mention was oil firing automated per se on oil fired steam locomotives, though it was mechanized (a fuel pump, not a guy throwing it on with cups or buckets ).
This had to do with the size of locomotives, smaller than ships or land based power plants, and the fact that steam locomotives disappeared in developed countries fairly rapidly after mid-20th century. Fully mechanized coal delivery became common on merchant ships in the interwar period, as well as industrial and power generating coal fired boilers to today. And even fully automating the control of such systems is feasible with today’s technology.
Also consider that a locomotive’s fireman was in shipboard terms a fireman, ‘crew’ of stokers and water tender. At one time each ship’s boiler effectively had its own a crew of several, already locomotives had fewer, they were smaller. In (oil fired steam turbine) merchant ships I sailed on built in the late 50’s/early 60’s the water tender function was automated but there was still a fireman per two boilers besides an oiler and a licensed engineer. The change in steam ships built as the 60’s went on (and many later modified) was automation to replace the fireman. And when coal fired ships made a minor comeback in the wake of the second oil shock (early 80’s), they adapted mature shore side technologies to still have two people run a plant including mechanized system feeding coal to the boilers, licensed engineer and oiler, no absolute technical reason it had to be two rather than one, and automation did the job in steady state operation, mainly for coal, easily for oil. Starting up a steam plant without human intervention was and would still be challenging for automated systems, but now steam plants on ships have almost disappeared, and shoreside power plants are comparatively enormous: limited savings per unit output to try to further reduce staffing.
While not man versus machine, as a part of the demonstration of the Tom Thumb there was a race between a horse and a steam locomotive in 1830. It is possible that this event(or other similar events) served as inspiration for later fictional stories.
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Furthermore, as mentioned above, you’d like to control where on the fire the coal went - you don’t want it just a small fire in the center (or even just a large fire in the center). This is different from the institutional boilers I worked on: I think perhaps they just made them bigger and heavier and designed them work with just a large fire in the center. (They were feed by gravity from a large pile of coal).
Also, (which I don’t see mentioned above?) when you are running a smaller train and a smaller engine, you reduce your coal use by running the fire smaller on the flat, then bigger as you approach a hill. (Dunno how well that worked on American trains)
At least on some systems, engine crews were assessed (or paid) on how much oil and coal they used.
Firemen have plenty do besides shoveling coal. Even with a mechanical stoker the firemen has to operate the stoker and run it at a rate appropriate for steam pressure required, make sure the coal is evenly distributed across the grate, guarantee the water in the boiler is at a safe level, operate the feed water injectors at the right times, anticipate steam demands before they occur, watch out for track-side trouble on the left side of the loco, back up the reading of signals by the engineer and so on.
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