I’m guessing it was from 1880 to 1890 when railroads switched from wood to coal. Was wood the dominant fuel initially or was coal used right from the start with wood only where it was easily accessible?
IIRC, the switch to coal started earlier than 1880, the UP engine at Promontory was coal fired. OTOH, wood burners were apparently still common on the Espee in Oregon about the turn of the century.
On the Southern Pacific Railroad in California - I believe this is correct. I know that they had a dock near Santa Monica where coal was unloaded from ships for their locomotives.
"Date: 08/30/13 17:36
Re: Wood to coal on SP?
Author: ppcx032
I stand corrected, I went back into my library and did a little research. Coal replaced wood for the most part starting in 1870 and lasted until 1900 - 1910. SP experimented with oil starting about 1900 and made full conversion to it around 1910, except on the Rio Grand division. Hope that helps."
Switch from wood to coal was earlier. Remember that the East Coast was covered with forest that had to be cleared, so there was plenty of wood; meanwhile the technical methods of ‘consume-its-own-smoke’ coke or anthracite combustion were long in coming with many false starts. Only with the development of a bituminous coal industry was there cost-effective fuel in necessary quantity; I suspect the value of railroads in transporting coal was related in a number of ways to coal’s increasing adoption as locomotive fuel.
Note also the repeated attempts to burn slack, culm, and other low-grade or by-products of coal, and “improve thermodynamics” to allow money-saving on fuel cost.
They used wood burners on the Houston and Texas Central from construction in 1850’s to (guessing) around 1890-1900. The line ran from Galveston & Houston up to the Red River (border with OK) in Dennison. H&TC I think came under SP control in 1883 but they did not officially roll it into T&NO until 1927 I think.
I can’t give exact dates, but I believe the B&O was using coal well before the Civil War, and I’m sure other Eastern roads did the same. As in just about everything else, railroads were and are in a money making game. The cost must be reasonable in relation to the benefits achieved. If coal is locally available at a reasonable cost, as it was on many Eastern roads, then the decision to convert was a no-brainer.
Wood was scarce out on the Great Plains, and what existed was often poor quality Cottonwood. A lot of wood was needed for ties and bridges, so it was wasteful to put too much of that limited resource into the firebox. Union Pacific operated many coal burners in the early years, especially after reaching Wyoming where mines were developed.
Tom
Tom’s post hit the proverbial nail on the head. The B&O converted to coal when they first encountered it at Cumberland MD about 1844. The PRR did also as soon as they had access to coal. It was all a matter of cost and availability. Coal provides lots more heat per pound, which means more boiler HP for any given firebox size, and is not the spark spreader that wood fired engines were.
Mac
And yet, looking at the far side of a rather wide ocean, there were wood burners operating in the Cenbtral Japan Alps until the late 1950s - on the 2’6" gauge Kiso Forest Railway. Their replacements were four wheel diesel ‘critters.’
Even more recently, there was at least one sugar cane railway in the Philippines that was still running bagasse-burning steam (including a 2-6-6-2 used as the main plant steam generator) in 1976. Bagasse is what’s left after sugar cane is crushed and squeezed dry, roughly equivalent to straw.
Chuck
Steam trains in Thailand burned bamboo.
E. M. Frimbo said he inhaled Eucalyptus from the wood that was burned in loco fireboxes and dining car stoves somewhere in the Far East. I’m not sure, but it might have been Malaysia.
Tom
I went into the archives here at the Fortress Firelock knowing I’d read of Mr. Frimbo’s eucalyptus trip, and lo and behold, found it. It was in Africa in then-Portugese Angola, on the Benguela Railway, and the locomotive was a Garratt. And according to Mr. Frimbo, that eucalyptus burned HOT! The shower of sparks was incredible!
I should add concerning the railroad’s switch from wood to coal that it happened at exactly the right time. By the mid-19th Century the Eastern Seaboard of the US was, well not completely deforested but darn near close to it, all that timber going for fuel, construction, export to a lumber-starved Europe (there were ships at the time called “timber droughers” that were built for one-way timber shipments, the cargo AND the ship being sold at the end of the voyage), and for land-clearing for agricultural purposes. Firewood for locomotives was getting hard to come by and getting expensive. Bituminous coal showed up just when it was needed.
Interestingly, anthracite coal had been tried earlier, but it only worked well in vertical boilered locomotives which became obsolete fairly quickly. Anthracite’s turn would come later.
A personal observation: Touring the Civil War battlefields here in the Richmond VA area and seeing the surviving trenches and fieldworks snaking through the woods I thought to myself “Man! It must have been rough building those fieldworks with all these trees in the way, and with hand tools no less!” And then it dawned on me, when those fieldworks were built those trees weren’t there! The woods are all second and third growth trees, the area had been completely deforested by the 1860’s.
Irrespective of the trees - digging those fortifications by hand, marching a couple of hundred miles to Gettysburg (or wherever else) in all kinds of weahter, fighting, dieing or worse getting wounded getting operated on by the Doctors of the day without the concept of gems being known or understood. Today’s men???
Amazing how a society can be turned to hate - both North & South - in the name of prejudice. Each side doing their best to inflame their own to hate beyond hate the other.
The real key to successful coal use was the development of the firebrick arch. Early coal burners like most of B&O’s designs, and Winan’s Camels, tried to use the same basic firebox used in wood burners. The firebrick arch improved the air and fire flow inside the firebox, allowing full combustion of bituminous coal. Coal burning also required the use of better iron (later steel) and especially iron or steel firetubes, since fly ash from coal gave copper firetubes a very short life.
What is “Today’s men” supposed to mean? More recent wars, at least from the U.S. standpoint, have involved privation and sacrifice by an ever smaller portion of our young men (and today, young women). The medical care keeps getting better by some standards. But the privation and pain endured by our modern soldiers, yes, they don’t have to endure anesthetic-free limb amputations, but I am told there are some mighty painful front-line procedures for wound treatment that I won’t get into here.
That many fewer of our people need to fight has to do in part with the kind of expensive-in-money expeditionary wars that are the source of many complaints here about how the money could be better spent on high-speed passenger trains. The theory behind that is that it is better to fight “over there” rather than giving each able bodied male a rifle and marching them against defended positions “over here”, Civil War style. Are you saying “men aren’t what they once were” as when we fought the Civil War?
And are you drawing a moral equivalency between North and South? I was accused of drawing a m
I think Balt may have been speaking rhetorically when he used the phrase “todays men.” There’s certainly not a damn thing wrong with those kids out there on the firing line now that are dressed up like soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
And the “dressed up like…” phrase I just used? Ask any veteran, they’ll understand.
And the hate during the Civil War? It certainly was there after the draftees showed up, post-Gettysburg. That’s when the war really got nasty. All those conscripted men who had to leave familys, homes, farms, businesses, North and South, had quite a bit of rage to take out on someone.
"Nuff said. We can’t understand the Civil War the way those who lived through it understood it, if even they did.
Well modern medicine has improved but to answer your question, yes, most of that is still done today. Expectation today is 25 miles a day on foot but they will push it to 35 miles or more in a real emergency. I had to dig fighting positions to armpit level (with deeper grenade sumps) more than once but typically that is not done more than once a year but included with a road march, very exhausting. However the nice thing as back then as is now, they let you take cat naps and sleep when you can reasonably…you still get some sleep and recuperation.
On average 12-18 mile road march once a quarter untimed. 12 miler once a year timed and you better finish in 3 hours or less.
Agree, Civil War uniforms sucked and didn’t hold up as todays uniforms do same with the boots…though one could make an argument with the boot issue for Afghanistan and subsequent boot issues, Pentagon working on that still. I was not a Veteran of that war but I heard stories on the terrain takes it’s toll on the boots and you go through three pairs in a year’s deployment to Afghanistan…that combined with the constant up and down of the Mountains would be enough to seriously turn me into a grumpy person.
The most recent DoD issue of boots for Afghanistan have a special rubber moulding between the sole and the boot to hold them together better from what I observed Soldiers wearing in the airports…it’s the third attempt to get the boot construction right for Afghanistan’s terrain.
BaltACD is right about the medicine and medevac. Far superior today then it has ever been in any past war. All Army Soldiers are trained to administer IV’s to help stabilize the wounded now as well as recite 9 line Medevac procedure over the radio (change from the 1980’s when only Medics were trained in that). Most are trained in setup of a LZ for Medevac Choppers.
From the guy that posted that SDI doesn’t work…and your concerned people take him seriously on National Security issues??? Anyway that whole thread should not even brought up Japan or Hitler it was about Gander, Newfoundland.
'CM, your comment on Civil War uniforms reminded me of something I read on a military history forum…
Question: How could ANYBODY fight in a wool uniform?
Answer: By pulling the trigger.
Hey, you do the best with what you’ve got.
There’s a great story from the end of the Civil War. A confederate POW was speaking with a Union cavalryman and said…
“Gee, your uniform looks so nice, your boots look so comfortable, your horse looks so healthy, and you look like your bowels is SO regular!”
I seriously doubt if you have any understanding of the moral issues involved, much less the geopolitical ones. Your inability to understand others’ writings that differ with your views and communicate clearly without distortions and tangential rambing is seen not only when you post here but apparently in your classes, judging by student reviews.