greyhounds This is nostalgic. The house I grew up in had a coal room, right next to the furnace room. My mother was a teacher and she paid a woman to take care of me in my pre school days while she taught. So I clearly remember being picked up on her way home. The first thing we did in winter was go down the basement to the furnace where she'd shovel in some coal. Then the house got warm. The fire was banked at night and during the day. Niether parent was going to use coal to keep the house warm when nobody was home. Or when everybody was under some blankets. I also remember the conversion to propane. I know the house is still there and that coal room is also probably still there. Well before my birth the railroad (CP&St.L) would spot a gondola of coal on a siding in our small town. People would just take their wagon or truck to the gon and shovel in some coal. Then they'd go pay the agent. Hey, we stayed warm in the winter.
This is nostalgic.
The house I grew up in had a coal room, right next to the furnace room. My mother was a teacher and she paid a woman to take care of me in my pre school days while she taught.
So I clearly remember being picked up on her way home. The first thing we did in winter was go down the basement to the furnace where she'd shovel in some coal. Then the house got warm. The fire was banked at night and during the day. Niether parent was going to use coal to keep the house warm when nobody was home. Or when everybody was under some blankets.
I also remember the conversion to propane. I know the house is still there and that coal room is also probably still there.
Well before my birth the railroad (CP&St.L) would spot a gondola of coal on a siding in our small town. People would just take their wagon or truck to the gon and shovel in some coal. Then they'd go pay the agent. Hey, we stayed warm in the winter.
I recall it well also, but in the Chicago suburbs. My parents' house was built in 1924 and had a steel exterior door-equipped coal room next to the furnace, which had a a stoker (Iron Fireman) for easier regulation. Distribution of heat was gravity feed. Oil conversion came about 1950 with a change of ductwork to forced air. Natural gas just a few years later.
54light15But, what would a homeowner back then have paid for coal? How much would be delivered at a time? Anybody?
Coal as a heating fuel
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/clay-130415.pdf
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
You see coal hatches on older buildings here in Toronto, there was one that I looked in and the bin was full of pea-sized coal. I told the people there that live-steam modellers would take it away for nothing. I contacted the live steamers in Hamilton about it and that's what they did. In older apartments there are milkman doors in the hallways outside every apartment but those are all fastened shut.
I well recall the coal trucks on Long Island when I was a kid. They were filled at a spur track on the LIRR. Our boiler was a converted coal burner and we would find bits of coal in the yard. My brother, who was 8 and surely was correct, said that a big lump of coal (about the size of a melon) would be worth fifty dollars! My 6 year old self was excited, I couldn't wait to find a lump of coal that big. Then the old man said that fifty dollars worth of coal would be about 2 tons. Ah jeez!
But, what would a homeowner back then have paid for coal? How much would be delivered at a time? Anybody?
SD70Dude CSSHEGEWISCH Fuel oil lost to natural gas decades ago in the Chicago area. Coal is losing to natural gas for power plant generation for cost reasons. The fracking boom has made natural gas dirt-cheap, at times out here the spot price has trended negative! It's not just homeowners who love this, chemical companies and refineries out here use huge amounts of natural gas as feedstock, mainly for fertilizer & plastic production and as a hydrogen source for "cracking" the heavier hydrocarbons that make up a high percentage of oilsands bitumen. But this change is fairly recent, gas prices crashed about 10 years ago and were sky-high before that point, things were bad enough that several large plants considered switching to coal and one (Inland Cement in west Edmonton) actually did. They still burn coal today, and being upwind of the city this has made them very unpopular with the general public. Some folks still have coal furnaces in shops or barns, but they are getting to be rare now. Getting coal is made quite easy as Alberta law requires that all mines have to sell coal in "residential" quantities. This may change with the impending phase-out of coal-fired electricity here, which will see all the large mines close. The remaining small operations will be few and far between. And of course above all else gas is just easier and cleaner to use. No ash, oil tanks or trucking to deal with, to say nothing of power companies complaints over rail service...
CSSHEGEWISCH Fuel oil lost to natural gas decades ago in the Chicago area. Coal is losing to natural gas for power plant generation for cost reasons.
Fuel oil lost to natural gas decades ago in the Chicago area. Coal is losing to natural gas for power plant generation for cost reasons.
The fracking boom has made natural gas dirt-cheap, at times out here the spot price has trended negative! It's not just homeowners who love this, chemical companies and refineries out here use huge amounts of natural gas as feedstock, mainly for fertilizer & plastic production and as a hydrogen source for "cracking" the heavier hydrocarbons that make up a high percentage of oilsands bitumen.
But this change is fairly recent, gas prices crashed about 10 years ago and were sky-high before that point, things were bad enough that several large plants considered switching to coal and one (Inland Cement in west Edmonton) actually did. They still burn coal today, and being upwind of the city this has made them very unpopular with the general public.
Some folks still have coal furnaces in shops or barns, but they are getting to be rare now. Getting coal is made quite easy as Alberta law requires that all mines have to sell coal in "residential" quantities. This may change with the impending phase-out of coal-fired electricity here, which will see all the large mines close. The remaining small operations will be few and far between.
And of course above all else gas is just easier and cleaner to use. No ash, oil tanks or trucking to deal with, to say nothing of power companies complaints over rail service...
When my father got transferred to Garrett, IN in 1959 he rented a house that had been constructed for the President of the Creek Chub Bait Company - a manufacturer of fishing luers - the house had been constructed in the early 20's.
With Garrett being a railroad town, the house had been constructed with at least one bedroom at ground floor level with a window accessable for the 'Outdoor Crew Caller' to be able to knock on to notify personnel that they had been called to duty.
The house had also been constructed with a coal fired furnace and in the basement, adjacent to the furnace was a 8x10 foot bunker with exterior coal door for the delivery of fuel.
As a condition to renting the house, my father required that the furnace be converted to Natural Gas. The converted furnace was a gas hog.
The kitchen had a electric stove, that appeared to be in the place that the coal or wood fired stove previously occupied. The house still had a inbuilt 'Ice Box' that had been designed to use Ice for cooling - no electricity required - we used it as cupboard storage and use a electric refrigerator instead.
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
CandOforprogress2 A town that I did door to door sales in Cleveland had the first half of the burb N of the freeway built in the 1920s and most of them had Iron Coal door chutes and the S half of town houses built during the 1950s GI Vet Housing Bill did not have coal chutes but did have milk man doors https://goo.gl/images/JUf4pf
A town that I did door to door sales in Cleveland had the first half of the burb N of the freeway built in the 1920s and most of them had Iron Coal door chutes and the S half of town houses built during the 1950s GI Vet Housing Bill did not have coal chutes but did have milk man doors
https://goo.gl/images/JUf4pf
You can still see quite a few of those coal chute doors in the older neighborhoods here in Richmond, and on some of the 19th and early 20th Century commercial buildings that still survive.
Civil War buffs get a real kick out of the ones that have "Tredegar Iron Works" cast into them.
Coal was still used in some parts of Richmond for home heating until fairly recently. At my first job here 30 years ago I was looking out a front window and was amazed to see a coal truck rolling past. I brought it to a co-worker's attention and he told me there were a number of older homes that still had coal furnaces, not many, but enough to still make coal delivery trucks a common sight.
I would imagine most, if not all, have been converted to something else by now. I haven't seen a coal truck in years.
Oh, I forgot to mention I watched that four-minute video on the mine disaster, with the river pouring into the breach like water going down a bathtub drain.
What a horror. What a way to die. God rest those poor mens souls!
ROBERT WILLISON Fire lock hit it on the head, house holds and commercial accounts being transferred from coal to fuel oil all Thur out the north east, coal demand plumeted killed lots of the coal roads including the O&W and the east broad top.
Fire lock hit it on the head, house holds and commercial accounts being transferred from coal to fuel oil all Thur out the north east, coal demand plumeted killed lots of the coal roads including the O&W and the east broad top.
And now fuel oil loosing to natural gas
Firelock76 Not really. What killed the anthracite 'roads was the evaporating demand for anthracite coal after WW2 as fuel oil became the preferred fuel for home heating and industrial use. Loss of the anthracite traffic left those 'roads scrambling for new revenue sources and there just wasn't enough business to go around. There still is a market for anthracite coal, the Reading and Northern hauls quite a bit of it, but it's only a fraction of what the market once was. One 'road I know of that was badly hurt by a mine closing was the New York, Ontario & Western, but the mines they served closed in the 1920s, the mines were played out by that time. The "Old and Weary" managed to suvive for a few more decades by hauling bridge traffic, and WW2 caused them to pick up some business, but it was all over by 1957.
Not really. What killed the anthracite 'roads was the evaporating demand for anthracite coal after WW2 as fuel oil became the preferred fuel for home heating and industrial use. Loss of the anthracite traffic left those 'roads scrambling for new revenue sources and there just wasn't enough business to go around.
There still is a market for anthracite coal, the Reading and Northern hauls quite a bit of it, but it's only a fraction of what the market once was.
One 'road I know of that was badly hurt by a mine closing was the New York, Ontario & Western, but the mines they served closed in the 1920s, the mines were played out by that time. The "Old and Weary" managed to suvive for a few more decades by hauling bridge traffic, and WW2 caused them to pick up some business, but it was all over by 1957.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIfVx_kWsZU
Just read the artical is this months trains and was always told by Scraton locals that this killed mining in this region because most of the mines were inter-linked and got flooded out.
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