A new version of the firetube model is developed to describe hadron-hadron collisions at ultrarelativistic energies. Several improvements are introduced in order to include the longitudinal expansion of intermediate fireballs, which remedies the overestimates of the transverse momenta in the previous version. It is found that, within a wide range of incident energies, the model describes well the experimental data for the single-particle rapidity distribution, two-body correlations in pseudorapidity, transverse momentum spectra of pions and kaons, the leading particle spectra, and the $\frac{K}{\ensuremath{\pi}}$ ratio.