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A couple of somewhat random points, as a lot of issues have been covered well here. 1. The use of wood as boiler fuel became more and more a moot issue as the commercial lumber industry developed. Keep in mind that for any of these commodities, use as fuel has about the lowest economic value as one can conceive. Notwitholding the obvious disadvantages over bituminous and even sub-bituminous of low density, low BTU value and high moisture content, wood is also highly labor-intensive and could sell for a much higher price per board foot as construction product or even paper mill feedstock. 2. A good example of the breakdown wood vis-a-vis coal is in heavily wooded east Texas (lots of conifer and deciduous/evergreen hardwood forest) where the underlaying lignite had been mined since the mid-1800's--first underground and then by stripping (still do--used for steam coal in power plants all over east and south Texas). Even though the stuff is essentially refined dirt (about 6500 BTU) it still paid the MP/IGN to develop a fleet of lignite-fired locomotives in the early 20th century that used local lignite on the divisions around Palestine and Longview on the old Eagle Route, if for no other reason than it could be handled so much more cheaply than wood, both on-board and on the ground. But if you want to get some idea of what a high-tonnage wood-fired locomotive might have looked like, take a gander at some of the IGN lignite fired power from that time period--BIIIIIIIG Boilers and lots of tare for substantially lower horsepower output and shorter range. Needless to say, when oil became available the switch was made. 3. Regarding oil, it has the highest BTU content, is the easiest to handle and store at the point of use, requires the least amount of fixed facilities (no tipples, just a pipe, no fires to drop, grates to clean, a***o convey and clog tubes, or clinkers), transports the easiest, burns the cleanest (everybody won on that one), results in the least maintenance requirements (and the longest boiler/firebox maintenance cycles--not a minor issue even in the days of inexpensive RR labor), and was cheapest, even when not local--e.g., in the early 1900's the Katy started out burning imported Mexican oil long before it used Texas and Oklahoma oil. Where oil was readily available, there was no question which commodity won based on economics. Also not readily apparent to the layman is that coal could not be fractionated easily, and thus you bought coal based on its material properties for specific applications, resulting in tightly defined markets and the issue I cited above--relative value with respect to price and application with steam coal being at the bottom of the barrel (bad pun--sorry!!). Oil, on the other hand, had this wonderful ability to be refined, so that the high dollar products came out of the same run as the waste, which just happened to be ideally suited for use as locomotive and power plant fuel stock. The same was true for natural gas at the other end of the spectrum--there was so much of it that for a long time they gave it away, either practically or actually, and for power generation that exactly fits the bill. Texaco alone flared trillions of cubic feet of perfectly usable excess natural gas in the 1920's and 30's because, unlike the liquid fractions coming out of the well/refinery, there was no infrastructure to transport it and store it economically! The relative uniformity of oils made steam locomotive fireboxes a perfectly desirable destination because the boiler didn't have to be sized to a specific range of coals (see lignite above) and because it really didn't care which fractions it burned. The same oil-fired steam locomotive that burned residual, crude or bunker C when it was part of a vast fleet now just as happily burns #1 or #2 heating oil or diesel as an operating museum piece today. That gave the RRs a lot of flexibility as to what they bought, which was generally all by-products anyway.
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