My experiance of Bio fuels in steam locomotives is positive. The difrences between mineral diesel and the bio are minimal. In all instances the combustion system and the condition of the boiler are the limiting factors of such work. The discription above of another locomotive using Bio are typical of any traditional burner and draughted boiler. The use of a good burner, the firebox set up, super heated atomising steam for atomising, correct pipe work, reasnable boiler proportions, good boiler construction, proper water treatment to prevent scaling of water serfaces, Correct air flow through the firepan and a good front end, a free low resistance exhaust steam passage system are all esential to the vialbility of any liquid fire system. Amongst these you can find the reasons as to the sucsses and failures of all that I did while I was over there. The failure of one of these items is enough to make the difrence between a sucsses and failure.

In other resent topics relating to modifications I would like to comment that I will always encourage people to experiment and modernise the steam locomotive. Please refer to the Red Devil book for the best discription of a starting point and what to aim for. What ever you do it will always create coments from others both good and bad. It is vital yet again to understand that modifing locomotives is harder to achive a good result than starting from a blank page. You will always have to make compramises to the old design which later you will regret that you may or may not have been able to deal with at the begining and resulted in a compramised result.

Back to Bio, The only problem I found which did not matter to much with cog operation was the formation of fat deposits in the burner after about 4 or five hours or 5 minutes cleaning every day or two. Other wise the loco went well on what ever mix was put in the tank and that was dependent on the ambiant temprature which I had plans to deal with.

In designing my ultimate steam locomotive the design is to burn Bio as number one fuel followed by GPCS and Biomass.