I'm working on some operations activities for model trains, and I'm interested in learning about volumes of wood typically consumed in wood burning steam locos.
I have some data on coal burning (~14 tons of coal to steam 10,000 gallons of water, with water stops ranging from 6 miles in old locos, and 25-100 miles in modern steam locos).
Does anyone have any ideas on what volume of wood might be required to convert a certain volume of water to steam? Is wood volume usually measured in cords for this purpose? Is there any data on volumes of wood typically carried?
Separate question: I would imagine steam locos would carry plenty of coal (or plenty of wood) and most often just be stopping for water - correct? How often might a loco require more coal/wood?
Thanks very much. Newbie on this type of info.
Hoo boy, it was a lot harder to find any information on this than I thought it was going to be.
Best I can come up with is it took about 5,000 pounds of wood to evaporate the same amount of water as 2,000 pounds of coal. Tender capacity of a typical mid-19th Century steam locomotive, which is usually what we think of when we think of wood burners, was 2,000 gallons of water. I couldn't find anything concrete on how many cords of wood a tender could hold, but a cord is 4X4X8 feet.
Stops were made for wood and water about every 25 miles in those days.
After 1870 railroads started switching to coal as a fuel, it was much more efficient and increased the ratio of stops to two stops for water for every one stop for fuel. As the 19th Century wore on and locomotives and tenders got bigger the milage between stops increased.
This is why when I run my O gauge 4-4-0's I don't even think of any prototypical fuels stops, I just set 'em up and watch 'em go 'round and 'round.
Hope this helps.
Makes me think of Buster Keaton in "The General." But it occurs to me, all the western movies I've seen and I've seen many, lots have wood-burning 4-4-0s and I don't recall a single pile of wood for them. Water towers, yes, but no wood piles. Funny that and here I thought John Ford was a stickler for accuracy.
In 1980 I purchased a book in Pennsylvania about logging railroads in the Warren and Potter County areas. The book offered this factoid: In just one year before the Civil War (late 1850's, I imagine), the railroads of Pennsylvania consumed some 40 million cords of wood.
No wonder the state lost nearly all of its old growth forest. Also, by 1897 the sighting of just one (!) deer in that area was exciting enough to be noted in a newspaper story.
Hey, how many times do you see anyone reloading the guns in those old Western "shoot-em-ups?"
Talk about "load it on Sunday and shoot all week!"
And NKP Guy, it wasn't just Pennsylvania, by 1870 just about the whole eastern seaboard from Virginia northward had been deforested for fuel and building material. It got so bad that railroads were importing wood fuel from the South just about the time the switch to bituminous coal became feasable.
A personal note: Here in the Richmond VA area quite a few Civil War earthworks are still to be found. I was following a Confederate trench line through some woods and was thinking "Man! It must have been rough digging those trenches with all these trees around!" Then it hit me, when those trenches were dug the trees weren't there!
Go from Cheyne, WY to Ogden, UT. How many cords of wood would it take to run a Union Pacific "Big Boy" pulling what was an average freight train it handled in the late 1940's.
At one point in the 19th Century to augment wood shortages - at least on the East Coast - mummies(I kid you not) were imported to fire locomotives! Tens of thousands of these carcasses from Egypt were consumed. How does this compare with wood for evaporating water? Bituminus? Anthracite? I forgot why this practice was discontinued. Might be an interesting adjunct to modeling prototypical operations in the 1800's. I might have read this in an old Trains Magazine, but I haven't tried to look it up since we entered the computer age.
Mummies? Jeez! I'd heard of Egyptian railroads using mummies as fuel, but had no idea they were imported here for the same reason. Sounds too weird and creepy to be true. I can't imagine what the head-end crews had to say about it!
I can imagine why the practice was discontinued! May have had something to do with "Rule G" being adopted as well. And I can just hear those Irish railroaders...
"Jaysus, Mary and Joseph! They want us to burn WHAT?"
I did read in a Colin Garret book that the Finns used dried fish for fuel in their steam engines when wood was in short supply.
Oh yeah, they burned the mummies up until someone with enough clout realized that Egyptian heritage was being destroyed and put an end to the grave robbing. Nothing new. Napoleon shot the nose off the sphynx as artilery practice. Then they brought everything they could carry back to France so why not? People will do anything if they can get money.
Thais (Siam in the steam era) used sugar cane and bamboo for fuel.
Don't forget that wood is exactly like coal in that more dense woods will burn more slowly. So you'd need a median species to work from. I'd suggest pine or fir.
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Ugh, enough with the burning mummies! Can we dicusss a locomotive fuel that has a lower gross-out factor, like say, uh, buffalo chips?
I can't find any referrences to mummies being used as locomotive fuel in the US, but Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, claimed they were used on the line from Cairo to Alexandria.
I read a story, quite probably apocryphal, that an Egyption fireman was heard to say the mummies of commoners burned poorly, but those of royalty burned much better.
Speaking of Mark Twain, I'm thinking that it sounds like the origin of these tales about mummies could have been a Mark Twain prank.
_____________
"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Gentlemen, let's get a grip, shall we? Mummies as locomotive fuel? What's next, black helicopters from the Tri-Lateral Commission? What a load of hogwash.
First, only very special and exalted Egyptians were mummified. Non-royals or non-nobles were simply buried in the sand. So, are we to believe that tomb-raiding Egyptians were able to collect so many of these remains that they could be exported (or even used in Egypt) as fuel? Ridiculous.
Second, I have never read even one reference to ships being unloaded of mummies to be used as fuel in America. Have you? Ever? Where? Name the book.
Third, unless wanswheel can produce old photographs of longshoremen in Brooklyn unloading countless thousands of mummies there, as St. Thomas said, "I will not believe." And you shouldn't, either.
Sheesh. Some people will believe anything.
The fuel value of well dried wood (less than 20% moisture) is roughly 60% of the fuel value of coal. These figures apply to the quantity measured by weight.
The specific gravity of same wood may for common northern hemisphere forests be assumed to be somewhere between 0.5 to 0.7 depending on the tree species. The specific gravity (density) of coal ranges from 1.2 to 1.8, varying from location to location. If we assume a similar fraction of air between the coal pieces as between the firewood pieces (although haphazard tossing of firewood into the tender is likely to increase the fraction of air in the volume), the same tender volume capacity for fuel will provide 0.6 x 0.6 / 1.8 = 20% of fuel value and thus mileage from firewood compared with coal.
No wonder wood burners usually had an extended cage built on top of the tender to hold the required firewood!
Btw, some years ago I had the exquisite pleasure of operating a wood-fired steam engine at the railroad museum in Haapamäki, Finland. Recommended!!
Here's a lovely old poem I read in "Outdoor Life" magazine years ago. It's by Lady Celia Congreve and dates from around 1930, and it's called appropriately enough...
The Firewood Poem
Beechwood logs are bright and clear, if the logs are kept a year.
Chestnut's only good they say, if for logs it's laid away.
Make a fire of elder tree, DEATH within your house will be.
But ash wood new or ash wood old, is fit for a queen with a crown of gold.
Birch and fir logs burn too fast, blaze up bright and do not last.
It is by the Irish said hawthorn bakes the sweetest bread.
Elm wood burns like churchyard mould, even the very flames are cold.
But ash wood green or ash wood brown, is fit for a queen with a golden crown.
Poplar gives a bitter smoke, fills your eyes and makes you choke.
Apple wood will scent your room, pear wood smells like flowers in bloom.
Oaken logs if dry and old, keep away the winter's cold.
But ash wood wet or ash wood dry, a king shall warm his slippers by.
Isn't that nice? Beats the hell out of talking about mummies! Yuck!
It's a sort of urban legend, started largely by Twain's writings, and as most things go, partly true. Not the mummies themselves, but rather paper made from the wrappings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_paper Anecdotal at best.
Oh, and I can't remember if it's willow or cottonwood but one of them smells like an outhouse when you burn it! I noticed that was strangely omitted from the poem!
Looks like Lady Congreve was referring to English woods. I don't know if they have willows in the British Isles, but cottonwood is strictly American!
And I'm not about to try the outhouse experiment with either.
Firelock76: I really enjoyed the poem, not least because to this seasoned fireplace owner every word rang true.
One wood type not mentioned is my favorite: wild cherry. We have many, many wild cherry trees here in northern Ohio and I can state that when fire season starts and I put cherry logs on the fire, the entire backyard is perfumed with what can only be described as a scent similar to Cherry Blend tobacco. It's wonderful! It's also a pleasure to split with my maul.
But as the author said, elm is about useless for heating purposes and is most difficult to split.
Best kindling: kiln-dried pine that's been used in shipping pallets.
After this hot & humid summer I'm sure looking forward to sweaters and log fires this autumn.
I'm familiar with the pine used in shipping pallets. Many years ago, when my high school included a bonfire as part of the homecoming celebration, we would get shipping pallets and crate wood from the Ford plant to serve as tinder.
Glad you liked it NKP guy! As I said, I read it years ago in "Outdoor Life" and never forgot it.
I imagine Lady Congreve never had access to cherry wood or I'm sure she would have mentioned it. Like you, I'm looking forward to autumn, I am NOT a hot weather person by any means. Thought I was going to melt this summer.
Great poem Firelock, glad you posted it. I used to have a backyard smoker, a Red Dragon made in Beaumont, Texas. Looked kind of like a steam locomotive with a horizontal, cylindrical cooking area and an offset wood chamber at one end and a stack at the other, each end had dampers to adjust the rate. I used strips of pine to get the fire going and then apple wood from my friend's dead orchard. Sometimes I used cherry and a pork shoulder smoked for 8 hours on cherry wood is, hell I don't have to tell you how good it was! I would also go down to the lumberyard trim shop where they had dumpsters full of oak. I would use that for heat, and the apple or cherry for flavour. Made it more economical of the smoking wood. I should never have sold that thing!
You're making me hungry 54Light!
I saw one of those smokers a few years back. I thought about getting one myself, then hanging a bell on one end and installing a small boiler to supply steam for a whistle on the other, but passed on it in the end. I just didn't need something that big.
One aspect of converting from wood to coal firing in locomotives has been overlooked. In the classic wood burning era locomotive's fireboxes and flues were fashioned out of copper which was the best metal for conducting heat. Wood cinders and ash are soft so the copper stood up well. When coal was tried it was found that the resulting sharp cinders and fly ash cut into the copper and damaged the locomotives. Extensive use of coal required that locomotives be either retrofitted or built new with iron and/or steel fireboxes and flues. This delayed the changeover for a little while but the growing scarcity of wood was what drove the process, that and the fact that coal was a much more potent fuel.
JimValleOne aspect of converting from wood to coal firing in locomotives has been overlooked.
There are two things about this that make me wonder, though:
In America, the use of copper inner boxes was increasingly discontinued in the latter wood-burning era. White observed
A copper firebox (1,850 pounds) weighed nearly twice as much as an equivalent iron firebox (1,000 pounds) and cost nearly eight times as much ($540 versus $70).
In Britain, a land renowned for coal-fired locomotives, the copper firebox survived on most designs right to the end of steam, being supplanted more for reasons of cost, increased working pressure, and weight reduction than anything (at least, anything I've read) involving critically increased wear.
Reading more carefully, it appears that the increased wear problem was due to anthracite firing ... and looking at Sinclair's history of the 'locomotive engine' will give some pretty good ideas where the failures in early anthracite firing were to be found. Soft coal was not as much of a problem, but I do note that Zerah Colburn noted most new American fireboxes to be iron just before the Civil War.
(In my personal opinion, improvements in American ironmaking likely reduced the problem with blistering and delamination of iron firebox sheets at some point by the end of the 1830s -- fortunately we have an expert, in Rick Rowlands, in the history of ironmaking...)
So I think that the points made at the end, about scarcity of wood and higher available heat content from coals, are far more important and meaningful than the relative presence of copper in locomotive structure here.
Interestingly, anthracite firing was tried as early as the 1830's / 1840's, but was only effective in the vertical boilered "grasshopper" type locomotives.
As the "grasshopper" types were an evolutionary dead-end, and besides they weren't too popular with the head-end crews, anthracite firing was dropped, not to surface again for nearly 50 years.
Thank You.
Our community is FREE to join. To participate you must either login or register for an account.