Indeed they do not have incidents filling all their time, but have to a great deal of training and are involved in community and fire safety work, testing equipment and many other mundane tasks - most of which support their operational effectiveness. Gyms on stations are required as the Ff has to maintain a high level of fitness, during work time. The 'sleep on duty' i because many night shifts are in excess of 12 hours and so they have to be allowed to take a sleep rest - by law. However many FRS no longer have beds and have rest chairs instead. There is, of course, not a lot of practical training, fire safety etc that can be done at 01:00 to 06:00......
Only 8% of 999 calls go to the FRS? True, or not, this is not a statistic of any value. If I point out that many of the highly intelligent public ring the Police to report a Fire, which Police then forward to the FRS and people often ring Police and Ambulance to report/ask for the most ridiculous things (such as my pizza hasn't been delivered) and the FRS rarely get such calls then the number of calls by percentage makes even less point!
On the point of people with 'preserved' fire engines, yes they could do this, but they would have to have entered into a licence agreement with the water company to extract water from town's hydrants. The FRS have this already and are legitimate enterprises for the purposes of issuing invoices.
In conclusion I should say that filling a steam loco's tender/tank is not something that a public service should be doing, unless paid to do so. Around £500 is the likely amount, as someone has already stated. I value this as a way of keeping a crew available, watch out you are about to lose 25% of your FRS if cuts go ahead, so bring on these loco needs.
