Any ideas on what fraction of coal consumption (compared to total coal output) was attributable to railroad use? 10%… 50%…etc?
I recall an article on the (ill fated) effort in the 1950’s to develop a coal fired gas turbine locomotive stating that one out of six tons of coal mined in the U.S. was burned in locomotive grates.
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I am sure it was less than 10%. Probably much less.
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Coal was used for everything, almost all buildings had boilers. Most houses were heated by coal or wood.
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Industries all used steam power. Steel mills devoured the stuff. Electrical generation was probably 75% coal at least.
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-Kevin
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In a book I have on carloadings at specific stations on a particular railroad, coal loadings were separated from all other freight loadings. Yes, this was important business! Besides all of the uses mentioned, a lot of coal was heated up for the manufacture of cooking gas. Nearly every community of any size had gas works, with at least one of those large expanding tanks, filled with gas prepared in ovens by cooking (and coking) the coal and preserving the gas.
Think I read that 1948 was the year that decreasing US railroad coal consumption equalled the increasing consumption by electric power plants.
Atlanta had one or more of those tanks until the early 1960s located near Terminal station in what is now called the gulch.
You see those expanding tanks all over London, but I don’t think any of them are in use. They call them “gasometers” for some reason.
The ICC annual report says in 1929 US Class I steam locomotives consumed 113.9 million tons of bituminous, 1.6 million tons anthracite, 2.6 billion gallons fuel oil – and 19499 cords of hard wood and 52815 cords of soft wood. What Class I would that be?
In 1929, US produced 535 million tons of bituminous coal.
There were trains still using a lot of wood for fuel in 1929?
Yeah, wonder what Class I burned any wood.
Looks like the Minerals Yearbook is the place to look for coal numbers
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435031187982;view=1up;seq=782
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015019917478;view=1up;seq=338
In the second link, anyway, note that the RR consumption given is total, not just by locomotives.
Maybe they used wood to start coal fires.
Review the procedure for firing up boilers from cold. You did not dump a burning oil-soaked rag on a pile of bituminous coal and wait for the heat and smoke to convect their way out the stack.
I do have a suspicion that in 1929 there were some Class Is – Southern comes promptly to mind – that might still be using woodburning locomotives on things like accommodation trains.
They are called that because they are not just ‘reservoirs’ for gas storage; they provide the required service pressure independent of what may have been involved in gas generation and transfer pressure. In so doing, they provide positive-displacement volumetric delivery measurement (as well as a relatively easy-to-read visual guide of the volume of gas available in the system). When producer gas (instead of natural gas) is being used, it doesn’t pay to make a large volume of gas merely to store it; supply should lead demand, but only ‘just’ net of all prediction and production delays.
(And if you wonder, as I did when I was small in a house with a gas oven, why the cartoon suicide trope was ‘putting one’s head in the oven’ – review the composition of most city gas as provided in these systems…)
Thus, roughly 23% of the bituminous coal was used by the Class I railroads in that year.
Also, some long forgotten transportation like coal-burning ships, ferries, fishing boat and ocean liners which were built before RMS Aquitania of 1913, and SS Vaterland of 1913 were all fed with coal.
Renowned transatlantic liner like RMS Mauretania consumes about 5000 to 6,000 tons of coal in a single trip, enough to fill up 214 UP 4-8-8-4 Big Boy tenders. But many transatlantic liners converted to oil-burning since the 1920s.
It is believed that Titanic sailed from England with a fire in her coal bunkers.
And this weakened the critical bulkhead into that last fireroom…
Perhaps even more to the point, coal bunkerage ‘done wrong’ is likely a proximate cause of the rapid sinking of both Lusitania and Britannic.
Coal was a very, very dumb liner fuel.
Dumb compared to…what other fuel that was readily available?
Plus, attributing the loss of those three liners to coal-related incidents drifts heavily into paraphrasing Pickett’s and saying “I’ve always thought the torpedoes had something to do with it.”
I like this video model of the Titanic engine room. I don’t know if the sound is accurate, but it sounds convincing. The boiler room complex is amazing. Working in it must have been quite an experience. Boiler rooms can be intimidating.
Well, this thing called ‘naft’ that occurs in the Crimea and some other places. Known to work really well for steam generation by the early 1880s. Perhaps the only workable fuel for torpedo boats.
I am thankful to you for pointing out that Titanic and Britannic were sunk by torpedo … I guess I learn something new on forums nearly every day.
Do you really think that one obsolete torpedo could sink a ship the size of Lusitania in that short a time … absent a secondary explosion of such magnitude as to lead generations to think there had to be substantial secret armaments aboard? (Or that a mine hit on the bow would sink a ship the size of Britannic in the time it did?)
In both cases, the shock of the munition explosion caused levitation of the coal dust in the bunker structure and probably provided a prompt ignition source for a critical-mixture deflagration or worse to propagate around the ship, knocking riveted seams loose with pressure and shock. Yes, the explosives had ‘something to do with it’ but likely far less in both mass and action than the fuel-related explosions. And this before we take up the issue of prompt IR detonation in carbon powder (as at Flixborough, where some of the propagation likely took place at a fair proportion of lightspeed…)
Any problems in/with the coal bunkers on the Titanic may have exacerbated the problems, but I suspect the gash left by the iceberg was the primary issue.
While the cause of the explosion that sunk the Britannic remains unknown (possibly a mine), it’s said that the flooding that occurred thereafter was actually worse than that on the Titanic, despite the fact that changes were made in the design after the Titanic sunk.
The second explosion on the Lusitania has been possibly laid to the boilers exploding, although it has been reported that there were over 100 tons of munitions on board.