Coal and British Steam Loco's

[Guilford Guy]

Thick Black smoke comes from a bad firing technique. If there's not enough draft through the firebox grate, the coal cannot be burned thoroughly, thus the unburned carbon escapes up the stack. This is what I gathered from a week at Steamtown talking to a No Hope & Disneyland Engineer/Fireman.

[pdlethbridge]

I worked on boilers in the late 60's and any time we smoked black it was because the forced draft blowers needed to be running faster. Nothing worse than a cloud of black smoke rolling over a flight deck when a plane was trying to land.

[Ozzie21]

Dunsten, most of the coal fired in English locomotives came from northern or Welsh pits. Most of this coal was hard black coal called Anthracite. In the days of the the "Big Four" the railway companies had coal mines they sourced their coal from. When BR came into being in 1948 they broke the system up into regions. In the begining the coal was sourced from the same pits but as mines started to close coal was sourced from other mines and from overseas.
Depending on the firebox the coal was generally in 2" to 4" lumps. Later as the coal quality decreased more processed coal was used in the form of oviods and bricquettes. Bricquettes were the worst as this was coal slack formed in cubes. These broke up easily and was usually formed from high ash, high sulpher content coal.

Nearly all English locos were hand fired using the little and often method. Generally you tossed an couple of shovelfuls into each corner, a shovelfull along the edges, two under the door and a couple in the midlle and left the door open about a quarter. This method generally worked well with the BR standards with locos from the big four you had to adjust this method to suit.  Only a couple of locos had trials with stokers. Berkley mechanical stokers were fitted to three class 9F 2-10-0's in 1958. Wether it was because steam was on the wane or due to the fireman's inexperience with such devices they were removed from the locos in 1962. Steam finished in the UK on August 14th 1968.

Charles Emerson
Queensland
Australia

What kind of coal do English engines burn? Do they burn a soft or hard coal? I have noticed that most of the engines I see on youtube have a beautiful clean white smoke.  I wonder if it is the coal you are burning or your firing technique.
Thanks
Dusten

[Johnson Bar Jeff]

Dunsten, most of the coal fired in English locomotives came from northern or Welsh pits. Most of this coal was hard black coal called Anthracite.

Of course, this reminds us that in the U.S., the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad promoted the clean-burning qualities of anthracite ("hard") coal as part of its advertizing. The Lackawanna used the fictional Miss Phoebe Snow as the symbol for its passenger service. The Lackawanna burned anthracite in its locomotives, and Miss Phoebe was able to keep her dress clean and white because she traveled on the Lackawanna, "the road of anthracite," instead of on a road that used bituminous, or "soft" coal, which, the Lackawanna implied, was dirtier, producing more soot than its own anthracite-burning engines.

[grumpy]

Phoebe  Snow is not a fictional character. She is a well known singer in jazz and pop. Look her up on the internet.
Don

[Woody Elmore]

Phoebe Snow the singer may lifted her name from the fictional Phoebe Snow who was portrayed wearing white and carrying a white parasol. The idea being that if you travel on the DL&W you'll keep clean because they burned anthracite. The Lackawanna ads were around long before the jazz singer Phoebe Snow was born.

There was talk at one time that Conrail, as the successor company to the Lackawanna, was going to sue her for copyright infringement since Conrail owned the name. The lawsuit went nowhere (like some of the Conrail lines.)