Fascinated by the trackside retail heating coal facilities that used to be part of the general landscape. My earliest recollection of these was one on the B&M Watertown Branch opposite the depot. This one had some large wooden storage silos advertising the dealer’s name and “Famous Reading Anthracite”. There was a siding for spotting a coal hopper that would be dumped into a coal pocket below track level and an elevator to hoist the coal into the silo. New England consumed lots of anthracite and I remember the signs for “Blue Coal”, Old Company’s Lehigh", and “D&H Anthracite”, I also remember dealers selling “New England Coke” presumably a byproduct of coal gas production before natural gas was piped into the region. Beside the coal pockets some dealers had coal trestles to drop the product directly into bins below. There were many variations of these trackside facilities some very modest and other big city facilities that were very grandiose.
An interesting post! I can’t add much but I can remember vaguely there were retail coal dealers in the 1960s in New Jersey, my grandparents home in Tenafly had a coal furnace until it was converted to gas in (around) 1967.
I live in the Richmond VA area now and some homes in the Fan district still had coal furnaces as late as the 1980s.
**my wifes parents still heat with coal this is in NH **
When our family moved to Garrett, IN in 1959 the house my father was able to rent had a coal fire furnace - he rented the house on the condition that the furnace be converted to Natural Gas. The conversion worked but it was a gas hog. The house did contain a walled segment of the basement with a door to the outside that was a storage area for the coal to be delivered to. The basement wasn’t the cleanest of areas. Recent Google Earth views indicates that the house still exists.
Town I grew up in had at least five coal dealers in the fifties. We had a coal furnace until it was converted to oil in 1962. Remember well having to fill the hopper every night (and sometimes again in the morning) and removing the ashes and clinkers from the furnace.
My uncle owned an apartment building in Montana in which the furnace was originally coal fired but was retrofitted to burn gas. There was some “new” concrete in the basement floor that covered up where the stoker screw was placed.
Lennox was still cataloging coal furnaces in the 1970’s - the cutaway drawing showed where the dampers were located.