mbinsewi Our local lumber yard sold coal until well into the 60's. They had 2 concrete silos, and the coal was brought in by rail. Right next to the lumber yard was a fuel oil dealer, with a couple of big tanks, also supplied by rail. The coal silos were finally demolished in the 80's to make way for more lumber storage, and when the owner of the fuel dealer died, the business closed, tanks were removed in the 70's. Mike.
Our local lumber yard sold coal until well into the 60's. They had 2 concrete silos, and the coal was brought in by rail.
Right next to the lumber yard was a fuel oil dealer, with a couple of big tanks, also supplied by rail.
The coal silos were finally demolished in the 80's to make way for more lumber storage, and when the owner of the fuel dealer died, the business closed, tanks were removed in the 70's.
Mike.
I got around to reading your reply last. I probably should have read it first. I find this interesting because I have a fuel oil dealer right next to my lumber yard. The spur off the mainline forks with one track going to the lumber yard and the other track goes past the lumberyard to the fuel oil dealer. If I were to add a coal operation to the lumberyard, I would probably have another spur off the one that leads to the fuel oil dealer. That would put the coal bin behind the lumberyard. It will be a tight squeeze but I think I can make it look plausible.
SPSOT fan This is kind of thing really comes down to how much are you willing to stretch plausibility. But from what it sound like based of responses of others, you may not really be stretching it much or at all... The thing is, your likely not modeling a specific industry, so your not 100% accurate anyway (an realistly can’t be). So what does it matter if you strench era a tiny bit. Perhaps you could build a coal and lumber yard, but build it so the coal part is clearly in decline. Bring less cars in if coal than lumber, make the coal part less full of figures than the lumber part. Honestly I think it would be quite fun to model the yard that way!
This is kind of thing really comes down to how much are you willing to stretch plausibility. But from what it sound like based of responses of others, you may not really be stretching it much or at all...
The thing is, your likely not modeling a specific industry, so your not 100% accurate anyway (an realistly can’t be). So what does it matter if you strench era a tiny bit.
Perhaps you could build a coal and lumber yard, but build it so the coal part is clearly in decline. Bring less cars in if coal than lumber, make the coal part less full of figures than the lumber part. Honestly I think it would be quite fun to model the yard that way!
I am a freelancer so I have quite a bit of leeway. However, I choose not to put too many oddball things on my layout. I want it to seem as plausible as possible. I suspect that somewhere there were lumberyards that still sold retail coal but based on the replies I've read, I'm guessing it would have been rare. I do remember when I was very young my Dad would head to a lumberyard each spring to get fresh sand for our sandbox. This would have been during the time frame I am modeling. I don't recall seeing coal for sale there but I doubt I would have noticed it.
The lumberyard is fully built so it's a question of whether to squeeze in a coal bin and a second spur. It's not practical to use the same spur as the lumber. I'm still keeping this open as an option but unless I can figure out that it was not uncommon for lumberyards to still be selling coal, I think I'll hold off.
wjstix I suspect it would depend on the area you're modeling - not just what part of the country, but when the buildings on your layout were built. Very few if any suburban homes built after WW2 would have been heated by coal or oil - natural gas or electricity would have been the norm. But in the older parts of town, built in the 1890's-1920's, you'd probably still have coal-fired heat. FWIW re lumber yards selling coal, I've heard it was often the other way around - coal (or heating oil) was a seasonal commodity, so they would sell lumber in the warmer weather when there was little call for coal or heating oil. Apparently true for some Midwestern grain elevators too.
I suspect it would depend on the area you're modeling - not just what part of the country, but when the buildings on your layout were built. Very few if any suburban homes built after WW2 would have been heated by coal or oil - natural gas or electricity would have been the norm. But in the older parts of town, built in the 1890's-1920's, you'd probably still have coal-fired heat.
FWIW re lumber yards selling coal, I've heard it was often the other way around - coal (or heating oil) was a seasonal commodity, so they would sell lumber in the warmer weather when there was little call for coal or heating oil. Apparently true for some Midwestern grain elevators too.
I worked one summer at an ice house. It was Murray City Coal and Ice Co. in Columbus, Oh. Actually, it might have been Grandview. Not sure where the boundary line was. This was 1970. By then their business was almost exclusively ice and cold storage although I remember seeing a hopper car on the spur track so maybe they still did sell a little bit of coal. That would fit the seasonal theme you described.
Coal and ice dealers were part of the reason for choosing to set my layout's era in the late '30s, as both commodities were still in demand....
...and both generate rail traffic.As a child, I lived in a neighbourhood where pretty-well all of the houses were heated by coal, although I think that ice for refrigeration had mostly faded by that time.Three or four years ago, I was visiting friends in Pennsylvania. It was October, with lots of vivid leaves still on the trees, so on my trip home, I opted to avoid the highways, instead wending my way back to Ontario on the less busy backroads.As I crested a hill, a small community came into view, and at the same time, the distinct scent of burning coal became apparent. I immediately down-shifted and opened the car's windows, taken back in an instant to those days when that same scent filled the neighbourhood of my youth.I was probably the slowest-driving tourist those folks had ever seen.
Wayne
A little late to this thread..........
We had a grocery store in Chicago from 48 thru 58. We had a coal furnace until 1954 (55?). My earliest memories was the truck would dump a pile at the curb and a very big man would wheelburrow it to the opening at the side of the building. Later on, the coal was delivered in canvas bags - which the same big man would heft to the opening in the side of the building.
In the basement, the coal ended up a boarded up area and would be carried in a bucket to the furnace, which of course heated water to make steam for the radiators. Obviously all of this was labor intensive and dirty.
In 55, we got two big kerosine stoves, one for the back of the store and the other for our apartment behind it. We had 4 - 55 gallon drums on a rack in the basement and by then I was strong enough to bring up 5 gallon containers of kerosine to feed the stoves. It was all a more reliable system, cleaner, but still labor intensive (mainly me).
During all that time, in the spring break (called clean-up week) we would rub down the walls with wallpaper cleaner. It came in cans and you would start with a fresh pink handful and as you rubbed it would turn black. It was work, but the results were obvious.
To the best of my recall, our coal came from a coal dealer, and the kerosine from a heating oil dealer. Neither was connected to lumber yards. Of course this was the "big city", and I do know that in the small town like Anna in southern Illinois the coal dealer was also a heating oil dealer and had a lumber yard connected to it.
ENJOY !
Mobilman44
Living in southeast Texas, formerly modeling the "postwar" Santa Fe and Illinois Central
Wow, Play Doh was invented to clean coal dirt off wallpaper? I had no idea. And Wiki backs you up on that. And repurposing it as a toy is a great end to the story. My mom used to make the stuff for us when I was a kid. Her mom made it, my grandmother, and I don;t doubt the old coal furnace was the reason.
Article about coal and listing some dealers that sell coal in a number of States 10/4/2018
https://firstquarterfinance.com/where-to-buy-coal-near-me/
Some dealers on the Net
http://www.cornwallcoal.com/
https://www.blaschakcoal.com/
https://mandmcoal.com/
http://cicoal.in/
I tried to sell my two cents worth, but no one would give me a plug nickel for it.
I don't have a leg to stand on.
Mom was home with younger kids! Dad was less worried about a little coal dust.
The house I stayed in Nashville while I was in college still had coal in the basement, but no coal furnace. I don't know how long it had been there.
.
None of that coal was there when I left.
-Kevin
Living the dream.
My grandparent's house in Utah was burning coal for heat well into the mid- 1960's. I don't think it got rare until the 1970's.
rws1225Lots of coal left in the basement bin for young model RRs to fill HO hoppers with.
Playing in the coal bin? I remember thinking that would be a good idea. Unfortunately Mom had other thoughts as she was hosing me off.
peahrensThe home had some wallpaper and each summer they had to clean it with a PlayDoh type material.
My aunt and stepuncle lived in Chicago. We would go down from central Wisconsin to visit and for my dad to work through Aunt Frances' list (her "honey" wasn't able to do much of the honey-do stuff). I remember that one year dad had to clean the wallpaper withthat stuff. It worked well. After coal firing died out, the cleaner manufacturer struggled to figure out what to do with their product, and eventually marketed it as Play-Doh, and the business took off from there.
NVSRRBack in 2010 i was on a bridge rebuild just north of Reading PA. I was very surprised to see a coal delivery to a house using a very modern truck that had the sissirs lift mechanism to lift the body to dump coal.
Jordan made an HO coal truck with that scissors mechanism - an old Mack truck as I recall. Coal trucks tended to last a long time so one could put a somewhat more modern truck front on that model - say 1940s era - and it would have been plausible into the 1960s.
Selling coal for residential and business heating (as opposed to for electricity generation) would of course be seasonal so it stands to reason that coal dealers would do something else - lumber as indicated, but in my recollection, more commonly "ice and coal" companies, many of which probably were making their real money selling fuel oil even as they kept that "ice and coal" name. There were several such "ice and coal" companies in the Milwaukee area into the 1960s.
My dad told me that the customers in the 1920s and 30s had a two-sided cardboard placard for the window - one side indicated you needed ice, the other side indicated you needed coal. The way you turned it indicated how much you needed.
Here in Milwaukee the last big dealer in residential heating coal, Schneider, finally called it quits in, I think, the late 1980s. In the mid 1980s I moved to a quiet and someone old fashioned residential neighborhood and I could tell from taking my nightly walks in the fall and winter that more than a few of my neighbors were unmistakably burning coal in their furnace. From time to time I could also tell that some of those neighbors also had incinerators for garbage - another unmistakable aroma.
It was probably more practical to be a hold out and still have a coal furnace into the 1960s to 1980s than it would have been to have a true icebox instead of a refrigerator.
Dave Nelson
Just to add to the discussion, my grandmothers house in Detroit was heated by coal into the mid 1960s. My dad and uncle had her convert to gas but the old system wasn't very efficient, she complained the the gas bill was too high! Lots of coal left in the basement bin for young model RRs to fill HO hoppers with.
Who's to say that the residential structures on and around your layout are no longer heated by coal? If you want to add coal sales to your lumber yard, it's your choice.
Hornblower
EnzoampsGas will just not stay in a stocking.
Really? What type of gas are you speaking of, natural gas or propane? One of my acquaintances can fill a room with natural gas and it seems to stay there for hours.
TSC carries coal stoves and bagged coal so,coal stoves is still is being used.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
Lansing Ice & Fuel - my oil supplier - sold coal for a long time. I doubt many customers, at least in this area. Only users I knew were guys with oil barrel furnaces, in like a garage, using coal. In Brunswick, MD, along the B&O, my grandmother's house heated with coal until maybe 1955. No shortage of coal on the B&O. I used to watch the guy load coal through the chute on the side of the house.
Not only did the coal furnace need its fire tended, but you had a big washtub of a thing UNDER the furnce, with a sloping ramp in the floor slab. She had to use a long hook to grab the handle on the tub and haul the ashes up from under the furnace, then slide an empty bucket back under. Someone had to take the ashes out.
Local University MSU had a coal power plant. Fluidized bed. Great huge piles of coal, several tracks for coal cars, and even a small switcher to push them around. Then they converted to gas, no more coal pile, pulled up the tracks, and no more switcher. I used to sneak over there at night and snatch a couple hunks of coal for gag Xmas stocking stuffers. Gas will just not stay in a stocking.
John-NYBWBy the 1950s, heating with coal would have been rare
Well, no, not really. Even if peak consumption happened earlier and the majority were heated another way, that was the largely a function of new construction and regional population shifts. There were large numbers of coal heated houses into the 90s and beyond. I still catch a whiff of coal in West Pennsylvania and it'll be the 2020s soon.
The 50's would have been the last years of most coal heated homes at least in my area. My families oil business started in 1931. It grew and grew until WW2. The goverment put a stop to any coal/oil conversions until the war was over. After WW2 we had our largest customer growth ever with people waiting in line at our office to get a oil conversion done. That lasted until the Korean War and slowed down a bit with goverment intervention again till that conflicy ended in 53. Our business area which is the western suburbs of Philadelphia Pa. the local gas utility had few lines back then so gas conversions were not that big a deal. Gas conversions started growing after lines had been run and the 1973 Gulf war.
There was a lumber yard across the tracks from our business on the PRR Main Line called Fritz's. They started as a coal dealer back in the late 1800's and remained so until the early 60's. There were a number of lumber/coal dealers on the PRR main line . Some lumber dealers in our area did also offer fuel oil but most did not.
My mother worked for Ackerman Coal in Toledo, OH they were about the largest coal supplier in Toledo. Many of the older homes had gas conversions done to the old coal burning furnaces in the late 50's and 60's. They were out of the coal business by about 1970 and were now fulling invested in their other businesses of Asphalt Paving and supplying Asphalt for their own work and for other companies.
Rick Jesionowski
Rule 1: This is my railroad.
Rule 2: I make the rules.
Rule 3: Illuminating discussion of prototype history, equipment and operating practices is always welcome, but in the event of visitor-perceived anacronisms, detail descrepancies or operating errors, consult RULE 1!
the house i live in now [was my grandparents] was built in 1953, and was heated with coal ... we had the coal chute and everything ... by 1963 it was replaced with a natural gas furnace, as the lumber yard was getting out of coal storage, as it was now a very small item of their business ..
Regards, Isaac
I model my railroad and you model yours! I model my way and you model yours!
Back in 2010 i was on a bridge rebuild just north of Reading PA. I was very surprised to see a coal delivery to a house using a very modern truck that had the sissirs lift mechanism to lift the body to dump coal. I forget the company. Would it be possible to see a modern coal dealer served by rail. Potential is there. Reading and Northern would be the most likely rail seeing as it was most likely local mined.
A coal dealer doesnt have to be just coal. They can be any source of fuel and supplies. More variation the more likely to survive any one area downturn. Right below me used to be a huge fuel and ice dealer. Oil coal ice. if they were around today, propane and LNG aswell. Today the site is under the schulkyll expressway (ancient indian name. Means permanent long line of perpetual stopped traffic. You $&&((&). I want to build a modual of it since it was rather interesting
Wolfie
A pessimist sees a dark tunnel
An optimist sees the light at the end of the tunnel
A realist sees a frieght train
An engineer sees three idiots standing on the tracks stairing blankly in space
John-NYBWI read a while back that lumber yards used to sell coal for home heating and was thinking of adding that to my lumberyard on my layout set in 1956. However, further research has told me that coal as a home heating fuel peaked around WWI and fuel oil and later natural gas and electric began replacing coal as a heating source. By the 1950s, heating with coal would have been rare so I'm wondering how common it would be for a lumber yard to be selling coal in 1956.
From what I've seen, it's one of those "It depends" answers, and what it depends on most is a ready supply of coal. If you're modeling a coal-producing region, especially in the East, there would probably have been enough customers to support a lumberyard-type coal distribution business through the '60s.
Part of the reason two-bay hoppers disappeared is because they were popular for making deliveries to coal dealers, who didn't need huge shipments. Most two-bay hoppers were gone by the early '70s.
Eric
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