Trains & Locomotives Gallery 10

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In the beginning most American locomotives burned wood. It was inexpensive and easily obtained in most sections of the country. In the early 1800s trees were considered primarily an impediment to agriculture, and railroads constituted a good market for a by-product of clearing the land. As land was cleared, railroads had to go farther and farther for fuel. and some railroads in the Northeast resorted to buying timberland in the South and bringing in wood by ship. The price of wood rose but it was still cheaper than coal. Railroads turned to coal only after it became readily available.

As late as 1950 woodburning locomotives could still be found on a few short lines and lumber-mill and logging railroads in Florida, where wood was plentiful and close at hand. Wood was clean-burning and left little residue, but the great quantities of sparks it produced required complex spark arrestors inside the oversize stacks. Wood had to be loaded into the tender by hand, and a wood fire required constant attention from the fireman. The heat content of wood varied greatly. depending on the kind of wood and how d-v it was. Wood was bulky for the amount of heat it contained. It took 5,000 pounds of wood to equal 2,000 pounds of coal. and even then it was not as good a fuel. An average 4-4-0 of the 1860s would have produced about 400 horsepower as a wood burner and 500 with bituminous coal as the fuel. By 1870 about half the locomotives in the U.S. still burned wood, but coal was rapidly becoming the norm.

Coal

That's what you think of when you think of steam locomotives. It's not that simple. though. You can't just dig it out of the ground and put it in the tender. Lumps must be between I and 4 inches in size and the coal must be washed to remove rocks. dirt. and other impurities. Moreover. there are several varieties of coal.

Anthracite or hard coal. which is found primarily in eastern Pennsylvania, was the only type of coal mined in any quantity before 1840. Railroads hadn't reached the bituminous-coal areas of the country and without railroads to transport the coal, mining wasn't an economic proposition. The earliest coal-burning locomotives used anthracite, and not particularly well - it burns slowly. A wide, shallow fire was necessary to produce enough heat to power a locomotive. The narrow, deep firebox of 19th-century locomotives wasn't suitable for anthracite; it required a grate with two to three times the usual area. Since the distance a fireman could fling coal through the firedoor limited, the firebox had to be wider, not longer.

Anthracite was considered the best coal for home heating. For that use it was cleaned and graded so the pieces were all the same size. The demand for anthracite soon made it an expensive locomotive fuel. Culm, the material left over from the grading process, eventually found use as a locomotive fuel, but it required the wide Wootten firebox.

Bituminous, or soft coal is the most common form of the mineral. Bituminous fueled the majority of modern North American steam loco-motives because its deposits were widespread. Sometimes railroads burned a mixture of coal or would use different grades for different services. For instance. the Central Railroad of New Jersey coal dock at Jersey City had separate bins and chutes for bituminous coal for Baltimore & Ohio locomotives and anthracite for Reading and CNJ engines.

Lignite, sometimes called brown coal, is a low-grade coal of rela-tively recent origin. It contains high proportions of volatile matter and moisture. It is light, and can be lifted off the grate easily by the draft, so special grates are necessary. Because lignite emits sparks, extra net-ting was needed in the smokebox. and therefore the smokebox had to be longer; ashpan openings also had to be screened. Railroads that burned lignite - for example, the Burlington and the Chicago & North Western on their lines west of Omaha - did so because it was near at hand.

The phrase "burned what they hauled" is often used to explain why coal-carrying railroads were late converts to the diesel locomotive. "Burned what was nearby" is a more accurate way of putting it. Part cost of fuel is the cost of transportation. Railroads that had to bring in coal from a distance - those in New England, for example - among the first to dieselize.