Wood vs. Coal for Fueling Steam Engines

[Anonymous]

The south african condenser locomotives - Class 25C - were very succesful in technical terms. They could run up to 600 miles without the need of getting watered. The problem was that they were maintenence nightmares.

There was also an experiment with german class BR 52 with condensing tenders. Dunno however how many of them were built.

The another approach was Franc-Crosti system where exhaust steam was used to preheat feedwater - this also proved "right", but technically complex. Which didn't stop Italians from using many of such locos.

Overall however this "reuse" of exhaust steam often didn't justify the expense.

[Anonymous]

Not to worry. This Fish is not for baking.

[Anonymous]

Just as long as you're not planning to stick your head in the oven. There are hot-lines for that problem (bad pun fully intended).

OS

[Anonymous]

Thanks, OS, and that was also a much better response than mine on the City of LA.
I'm going to stick my hand in an oven tonight to bear out your claim.

[Anonymous]

lfish: The difference is that one had the ocean for a coolant, and the other the atmosphere. Think of the difference between sticking your hand into a 350 degree oven (safe if you don't touch metal) and into a pot of 212 degree boiling water (not safe!). The ability of air to absorb heat, compared to water, is immense, so the size of the condenser becomes huge in order to get enough surface area, and fluid flow (thinking of air as a fluid) to achieve the same amount of cooling that could be accomplished in a steamship with something between the size of a refrigerator and a small walk-in cooler. Steamships from a very early date were condensing, and if operating in saltwater also had evaporators to supply make-up water as well as potable water. As steamships age they develop leaks, losing pure water to the atmosphere, and then the ability of the evaporator to keep up with the demand for water becomes the key to keeping the boiler lit and having steam to turn the screw. Loosing the evaporator on a steamship with a heavy demand for makeup water can literally mean the death of the ship, if it happens to be in shoaling waters with an onshore wind at the moment the evaporator craps out. More than one large ship has been lost from want of makeup water.

Almost every railroad operating through desert regions had to treat boiler water to remove alkali, along with many other roads. UP, SP, Santa Fe, D&RGW, WP, and T&P all spent immense sums installing and operating water treatment plants, and washing and maintaining boilers to remove mineral deposits. They were all glad to be rid of that albatross when diesels arrived.

OS

[CopCarSS]

QUOTE: ....Wonder where they found coal out on the plains {Promontory area}, to refuel the engine....Tenders were quite small then so they most likely had to haul some additional cars with coal with them...

It was the UP. They just brought a unit train with a couple 90MAC's down from the Power River Basin! [:D]

Seriously, though, I've heard Powder River coal is pretty awful stuff to burn in a steam locomotive. I heard a story about the Mid-Continent Railway museum getting a free load from the CNW or UP awhile back. I guess it was hard to burn well enough to do much with it. Not quite the nice stuff that comes from the Appalacian mountains.

[Anonymous]

The water issue has always kind of baffled me, too. We all have a sense how much "new" water a steam locomotive required. But what about ocean-going ships in the age of steam? They clearly couldn't use sea water in the boilers. But think about how much water the Titanic needed aboard to make a crossing. The answer seems to be condensers. It is just a guess on my part that size/weight ruled that out for most steam locomotives.

[espeefoamer]

South African railways also experimented with condensing steam engines.They had enormous tenders.

[Anonymous]

Lets take a little different track (no pun intended) on consumables for steam locomotives. What about water? This can be a problem. In many places in the west an ample supply of water is limited and many times what is there was "bad water". The high mineral content of the bad water will foul the boiler and create problems. Several railroads had water conditioning plants to take some of the bad out of the bad water. I think some railroads in South America, in an attempt to cut down on water consumption, had condensers to condense the spent steam back into water and reuse it in the boiler.

[Anonymous]

Woof, I'm a hopeless amateur when it comes to boilers, but here's the extent of my knowledge:

Vanadium in conjunction with sodium is the primary source of slag in oil-fueled boilers. Most boilers are designed to run "dry" -- temperatures are not hot enough to melt the ash content of the fossil fuel they combust. Slag is bad in a dry boiler because it sticks to cool surfaces like tubes, clogging them. Vanadium pentoxide, the form vanadium will be in boilers, has a very low melting point, so it slags. Vanadium is a fairly widely distributed element in nature, so it is present in many crude oil stocks. Vanadium is present in many heavy residual oils. That's the kind of fuel you want to buy for a boiler, because it's cheap.

OS

[lonewoof]

OK, second time lately I've seen reference to vanadium in locomotive fuel being a bad thing. Why is it bad?

[Anonymous]

Makes perfectly good sense to me.

[Anonymous]

Now I seem to recall a Trains article back in the 70s about this -- might have been written by Charles Mizell. I never paid much attention to it back then, being a callow youth, but now I guess I'll have to find it and reread it.

This is what I saw in another forum in response to a question about overhaul intervals:

Jack Wheelihan said:
"At a really big back shop such as Altoona, West Burlington, Roanoke, Cheyenne, etc., it generally depended on the "class" of overhaul that an engine required. Such as a standard five year jacket & lagging ICC (now FRA) inspection, which also received new (or safe-ended) tubes, superheaters, running gear work, the time frame was only 1 to 2 weeks. A 15-year overhaul (10 years on an oil burning locomotive) would require a new fire box and possibly extensive boiler modifications/up-grades, and could take 3 to 4 weeks."

Rich Melvin elaborated:
"The thermal stresses in an oil burner's firebox are much greater than those in a coal burner. That big oil flame can be completely cut off instantly, which can allow the overall temperature in the firebox to change drastically in a very short period of time. By the same token, the flame can be brought back up to full intensity in a matter of seconds, raising the temperature quickly.

"On a coal burner, you have that bed of hot coals acting as a huge thermal sink and preventing any rapid changes in firebox temperature. Sure, you can stop the stoker and cut off the supply of coal to the fire, but that huge bed of burning coals acts to slow down any temperature drop and it happens very slowly. In an oil burner, the only thermal sink available is the firebrick around the firebox, and its mass and heat absorption value are nowhere near that of a hot bed of burning coal. Thus the thermal stresses set up in a coal burner's firebox are much less than those of an oil burner. This means fewer broken staybolts, cracked sheets, checks in knuckle sheets, etc."

dre, I would bet that in a central power station, the operators aren't so cavalier about turning the fuel flow on and off. Of course, on a railroad, the economic penalty for not doing this (extra fuel consumption) greatly outweighs the economic benefit (longer maintenance intervals).

OS

[Anonymous]

OS--

Hadn't ever heard that. Doesn't reflect that in large fixed boilers, although you burn gas when you can get it. The info I had generally regarded tube replacement, mechanical parts, etc. where oil was clearly superior (unless, of course it was loaded up with vanadium).

Interesting to hear about the NP equipment.

Yeah, eco and geo sure are fascinating.

The IGN lignite locos were good for a while, but can generally be regarded as a flop in the grand scheme of things. But the stuff is dirt cheap (another baaaaaaad pun) and the reclamation is generally outstanding since it starts out as pasture and ends back up that way. Needless to say, the IGN locomotives had to have large bunkers in their tenders and stopped often to refuel.

The area east and northeast of Austin is laced with old abandoned underground lignite mines. Not played out, just uneconomical. Somewhat OT but interesting: the only legal unlicensed lignite mine in the state is a brick operation where the lignite seam (fairly good stuff >6000) is overburden on the brick clay that they strip mine. They've tried all kinds of avenues of selling it for years but the quantities are not high enough.

Bottom line--you burn the fuel you can get the cheapest.

[Anonymous]

Excellent post! I wasn't aware the IGN used lignite. I had thought the only western road to delve into sub-bituminous or lignite in a big way was Northern Pacific, burning Rosebud sub-bituminous with a BTU of around 8,800 BTU/lb. As an aside, this coal was unfortunately called "lignite" at the time, instead of sub-bitumininous which has misled a lot of people since then.

Aren't economics and geography fascinating? I can learn about this stuff all day.

I was just told that oil-fired locomotives on one major road usually had a 10-year heavy overhaul cycle while its similar-sized coal-fired locomotives had a 15-year heavy overhaul cycle, because the locomotives that were oil fired had greater thermal shock cycles in their fireboxes, which tore them apart faster.

OS

[Anonymous]

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.

[miniwyo]

Sagebrush?? In Wyoming??? Never!!!

[dldance]

QUOTE: Originally posted by wrwatkins

I think that President Lincoln had a great part in choosing the route for the transcontinental railroad. Coal at Carbon Wyoming was found on the surface by the UP locating engineers, however, they would have not been surveying in this area if another route had been designated. Yes, the Sunset Route had better grades and not prone to snow that plagued the overland route. However, at that time we were engaged in the C civil War and Lincoln did not want to build a railroad that could possibly fall into the hands of the Confederacy.

The Wyoming coal was known of before the UP locating engineers. My ancesters crossed Wyoming for the first time in 1847 - headed for Salt Lake. There is record of them both seeing and using coal for blacksmithing - repairs to wagon tires, etc. I know its not very good coal for that but it beats sagebrush and cottonwood. And your other points are also very true.

dd

[oltmannd]

Not all the Eastern RRs were so lucky. NYC had to build out to get WV coal and then haul it all over their system to fuel the locomotives. That long branch down into WV is still in service as part of NS now - was Conrail's WV secondary.

The NYC steam locomotive tenders devoted a lot more space to coal than water as a consequence.

[Anonymous]

I think that President Lincoln had a great part in choosing the route for the transcontinental railroad. Coal at Carbon Wyoming was found on the surface by the UP locating engineers, however, they would have not been surveying in this area if another route had been designated. Yes, the Sunset Route had better grades and not prone to snow that plagued the overland route. However, at that time we were engaged in the C civil War and Lincoln did not want to build a railroad that could possibly fall into the hands of the Confederacy.

[dldance]

Just a trivia note - the two replica steam engines at the Golden Spike National Monument were originally oil fired - buring used engine oil from Hill Air Force Base in Ogden. However, in a effort to improve authenticity, the UP replica was converted to burn coal and the CP replica now burns wood.

dd

[Anonymous]

Coal is a great, although polluting without cleanup, fuel. Coal was a local consumption commodity that really did not become a significant source of fuel in the US until about 1880. Coal had been found in many localities, however, without a means of transport it to market economically it could not compete with wood that could be chopped down anywhere there were trees. In the days of building the transcon railroad (1860-1869) roads were primitive and the haulage costs of the coal by oxcart would be uneconomical especially when you consided the volumes the railroads use. The eastern US railroads were in a better situation due to the extensive infrastructure and mines all over Applachia. Unless the mine was adjacent to a rail line it would not be a viable source of fuel for the railroads. Consider the transportation cost to haul the Power River Basin coal to market if the railroads were not there. I doubt that the PRB would have been developed without the UP and BNSF being there, except for a limited local consumption.

This was the case in the west before the advent of the railroads. Yes, coal had been discovered in many places in the west. The coal in Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, etc would only be mined in small quantities to satisfy the local market, which at the time of building the transcom was very limited. The advent of the railroads made coal a competitive fuel in America. UP was fortunate enough to have coal at Carbon Wyoming which they exploited for their fuel as it was trackside. The CP was devoid of coal along their line from Sacramento so they had to use wood. Fortunately there was considerable abundance of trees in the high Sierras to fuel their trains although through Nevada trees were scarce. Due to Union Oil's testing of fuel oil in a SP steam engine in the '20s the SP found a source of local fuel for their California operations. If the oil experiment did not work today there might not be a tree in the high Sierras.

W R Watkins, P.E. Engineer of Mines degree from West Virginia University '63

[Anonymous]

Good point, dd.

[dldance]

Remeber that the first coal in Wyoming was found lying at the surface - so the UP survey teams knew where it was and how important it was to route the railroad that way. Of course, mining the coal in earnest did not begin until the railroad got there. That coal played into the decision to use the Wyoming route for the transcon rather than the southern route (now the Sunset route). Both were considered as early as 1840's.

dd

[Anonymous]

That's about right on the dates for Sweetwater County. Nothing happened until the railroad arrived. Carbon was founded in 1868 and abandoned in 1902 when the railroad bypassed it to eliminate mileage and a helper grade -- and by that time the Sweetwater County and Hanna mines had come into their own. Carbon's mines were gassy and troublesome, but the town did grow to 3,000 at its peak. It's a ghost town now, nothing there but a cemetery and some old waste dumps, and a baffling maze of roads.

Wyoming is indeed the largest producer of coal and trona in the U.S. It produced 35% of all U.S. coal in 2003, or 376,270,000 tons. No. 2 coal state in 2003 was West Virginia at 139,711,000 tons. As far as trona (natural soda ash), Wyoming produced 10.6 million tons in 2003, compared to a world total of 37.8 million tons of natural and synthetic soda ash, combined. The only other mines are at Parachute, Colo. (mothballed in 2003) and Searles, Calif. The Searles Mine is nameplated at about 15% of total U.S. capacity, but most of the mines are operating well below capacity.

OS

[miniwyo]

O.S. I may be mistaken but about 1869 - 1870 is when the coal mines started popping up here in sweetwater county. let me do some research and I will come back with some facts.

Coal mines and the railroad built this town and mining and oil (more oil than mining nowadays) are also what is keeping this town and even this county alive. And I also believe that I saw somewhere that the State of Wyoming was the country's largest coal and trona producing state.

[Anonymous]

Fuel oil is in the range of 18,300 BTU per lb. Coal, bituminous, 10,200-14,600 BTU per lb. Oil loads into a container such as tender without entrained voids, whereas coal can have a lot of voids (it depends on how finely it's crushed). Efficiency of conversion into useful heat in the firebox isn't going to be a lot different, but I'm no expert on steam locomotive firebox combustion characteristics.

OS

[Anonymous]

just how much power do they get from Oil instead of Coal, and can they go much farther with it? Thanks,
Brad

[Anonymous]

Well, how could there be any coal mining in the West in 1869? There were no people in the West in 1869, save for 100,000 or so in California!

But I think you're completely overlooking the fact that the first objective of every railroad in the West was a source of coal for its locomotives and to supply traffic to its on-line communities, if that was at all possible. UP built straight to Carbon as quickly as they could. D&RG built straight to the Canon City coal fields and stopped for some time. The D&RGW in Utah was built specifically to break the UP monopoly on coal transportation to the smelters, mines, and towns of the Salt Lake Valley. Santa Fe built to the Raton field long before it turned its attention toward the silver boom at Leadville, or any transcontinental aspirations. The EP&SW built all the way to Dawson, New Mexico, hundreds of miles away from its owner's copper smelters, specifically to obtain coal.

And, you're overlooking that the preponderance of tonnage on the UP from the day it was completed at Promontory until the late 1880s was coal. The preponderance of traffic on the D&RG and C&S was ALWAYS coal, and still is. British Columbia and Washington State supplied large tonnages of coal into the coastwise trades and to Hawaii by the 1870s. Coal was a big business in the West by the 1870s, and grew as fast as the population would consume it. Go back into the Keystone Coal Manuals and look at the production figures. Go into Coal Age and look at the news and articles. The East had no monopoly on coal. That said, almost all of the expertise in the West came from the East -- the engineers and managers moved back and forth from East to West on frequent basis, chasing the salary.

OS