Richmond 4-4-0 wood load

[sedfred]

I got a richmond  4-4-0 today, it is southern railway and is green. I want to change the coal load to a wood load (the one that came in the box) But how do i do this? i can't figure out what to do to remove the current coal load and install the wood one. Does anyone know how to do this?

[Trainman203]

You may have to remove the tender shell and work from below. But. That particular 4-4-0 is very modern for a 4-4-0.  An engine that new probably never burned wood on the SR.  As neat as the wood load looks, I myself would leave the engine alone as s coal burner.

Engines of that vintage did occasionally burn wood, but they often belonged to lumber companies and burned scrap from cutting operations and from the mill.  Google Live Oak, Perry and Gulf, and the Mississippi & Alabama, and see what you get. Get an undec one if you can, letter it for a lumber company, put the wood load on, and go!  The 52" driver 4-6-0 is a good candidate too.

[bbmiroku]

At a glance you should be able to tell what kind of fuel a locomotive burned.  The tender shape and smokestack type give it away.

For early engines, you just glance at the smokestack.  If it doesn't look like a straight tube, it burns wood.  The spark arrester was fitted inside the smokestack so that the embers the logs would throw off didn't catch the land on fire, which gives it the characteristic funnel shape.  Coal burned hotter and didn't throw off as many embers, so the spark arrester wasn't needed.

On later engines, the tender would tell you what kind of furl it burned.  A straight-sided tender was probably filled with coal and water.  A curved-sided tender was probably filled with oil and water.

Now, there are some exceptions to this, just like any rule of thumb, but for the most part, these little tips ran true for most engine types and railroads.

[Trainman203]

I recall several shortlines and lumber companies down here in the Gulf South that ran wood burners with straight shotgun stacks and regular rectangular tenders.  It would take a long time to dig them all up since I lost my archives in a flood, but the ones that immediately come to mind were the Mississippi & Alabama, a lumber company in Brewton AL whose name escapes me, and a  Crosby operation near Logtown, MS.  There were others of course.  Of course there were many with cabbage stacks too; the Live Oak, Perry and Gulf over in North Florida maybe being the best known.

My main thought was that the Southern Rwy. no longer burned wood as a fuel by the time the prototype of the Richmond 4-4-0 was built.

[Trainman203]

http://hawkinsrails.net/shortlines/ma/ma.htm

The Lucius Beebe description of the wood burner approaching is priceless. 😱😂

[Searsport]

Others must advise you about the Southern, but I did a note here a while ago about the history of the Seaboard 4-4-0s represented in the Spectrum range. It is still around, so I will not repeat it, but the essential points for you are that:

- by the early 20th century technology had moved the spark arrester process from the chimney to the smokebox so a wood burning engine had no obvious external differences, except sometimes a slightly longer smokebox;

- the SAL inherited a lot of old wood-burning 4-4-0s in Florida from absorbed lines as wood was cheaper and easier to source there than coal, and as these engines were retired the SAL drafted coal burning 4-4-0s south to replace them and converted them to burn wood when it did so. That info comes from the authoritative book "Seaboard Air Line Railway – Steam Boats, Locomotives, and History" by Richard E Prince, and so cannot be challenged by mortals;

- wood burners did not disappear from the SAL in Florida until after WW1, but in the early 1920s the SAL embarked on a big program of converting locos of all types in Florida to burn oil, apparently following lawsuits from farmers whose crops were set on fire by sparks and an incident in which sparks from a SAL loco burnt down a SAL depot.

Hope that helps,
Bill.

[bbmiroku]

As I said, exceptions to the rule-of-thumb.

And Trainman203, as for his description of what could only come from pine knot fire, he's right.
As an Assistant Scoutmaster, I have the dubious honor of making the fire in the cabin wood stove when we go camping in the winter.  Occasionally, a pine knot will find its way in the mix, and I can always tell as the ire starts to snap and crackle much more vigorously.  When I go outside to see if I've caught the woods on fire (not yet), a large amount of 'fireflies' come streaming out of the stovepipe.  Great fun to watch as they shoot up, hit the rain deflector, and spray downwards before rising upwards once more.
As an aside, and nothing to do with railroading, you should not burn pine in a wood stove.  It is the major cause of clinker buildup on the pipes.  And you're gonna have a bad day if that thing gets clogged.

[Searsport]

I have realized that no one has actually fully answered your "how to" question. If you look at the parts diagram with the model or on this website http://www.bachmanntrains.com/home-usa/dwg/dwgs/H834X-IS001.PDF you will see that the coal load or oil load for the tender are secured by four round plastic pegs at the corners, which are a press-fit into holes in the tender top. The pegs are prone to snap off if you try to lever the coal load off from above (it happened to me with the small Baldwin tender) so the best way to remove the coal is to take the tender top off the chassis and gently push each peg from below a bit at a time with a suitable tool like a small round file until the coal is free. The wood load is then secured using different holes - there are four projections from the metal rails surrounding the wood load which fit into four slots on the tender top, then the "wood" sits between them. The wood casting is heavy, so you might want to secure it with a drop of something sticky but not permanent underneath, such as Copydex latex adhesive, so that the "wood" does not fall out if / whenever you turn the tender over.

The wood load looks very nice, but one problem is that it has a very distinctive appearance so if you operate two locos with the wood load on your RR at the same time it is obvious that their logs are exactly the same, so you are best with just one "on scene" at a time, unless you want to do a bit of carving and painting.

Hope this helps,
Bill.