A non-railfan friend asked me to explain why some roads burned anthracite while most used bituminous. Some answers are easy. Anthracite is clean. (Phoebe Snow) If your online shippers mine anthracite, you patronize them. Some answers are more elusive. Assume you build your locomotives with Wooten fireboxes, does anthracite work as well, is it cheaper or more expensive than bituminous, burn hotter, wear out the firebox faster, etc? Reserves of bituminous greater than those of anthracite?

Anthracite burns differently than bituminous. It is hotter once you get it lit, but it takes more to start burning. And it needs draft constantly - even if you're sitting with the safeties lifting you need to keep the blower going at least a little, otherwise your fire will go out. I think you'll find that the roads that burned anthracite owned anthracite mines. They basically burned what they couldn't sell. Jersey Central burned anthracite when they were owned by the Reading; once they gained some independence they switched to a mix of hard and soft coal, by the end of steam they were pretty much using just soft coal.

Since anthracite burns cleaner, the Long Island Rail Road, in the first quarter of the 20th century, burned anthracite West of Jamaica, in the New York City areas of Queens and Kings Boroughs, and bituminous East of Jamaica, in what were then rural areas. LIRR designed steam, up to the G53sd's and C51's, had semi-Wooten fireboxes that could burn either. This was during the period when the City banned all steam from the Borough of Manhattan and threatened a citywide ban.

Some industrial lokies in Anthracite country were fired up from a coal (anthracite) pile on the ground, and ran for a long time with no tender or bunker apart from a small coal pile on the cab floor. I think Pioneer Coal Mine in Ashland, PA still operates this way. I've often thought that this coal combined with GPCS and a very well controlled combustion air system could be very clean burning and economical.

dave

The anthracite roads generally weaned themselves off a-coal, but continued building wide or semi-wide fireboxes since they could burn any crap thrown in them. The CNJ's last years of steam were spent burning spilled a-coal dredged out of the Lehigh Canal. Look at color photos of engines at Bethlehem around 1955 and the coal is superfine and muddy.

The Reading T-1s retained the wide fireboxes of their I-10 donors, though burning anthracite was not a goal apparently by the late date they were built.

I'd love to hear about other roads outside the anty coal regions that burned anty, or mixed it with bitty.

Rob

Not specifically locomotive-based, but this might provide some interesting reading:

http://nepacrossroads.com/

Some elevated lines also used anthricite during the steam era on elevated railways in New York, Brooklyn (which was independet until about 1899), and Chicago. This was entirely because it burned cleaner and they wanted to avoid smoke as much as possible.

Ron Goldfeder
St. Louis

It was my understanding that Anthracite was harder and harder to get as it was being mined out. I always thought that this was one of the main reasons for the railroads switching over to soft coal.

Rob, I see what you mean about the CNJ Bethlehem coal. Apparently the terminals at Cranford and Dunellen fared better, being in the commuter district.

Another factor to consider:

No railroad wants to haul around any of their own fuel. Transportation was, and remains, a major factor in fuel choice, or at least where you're purchasing it today--remember how BN was running fuel tender tank cars in the 1980s so they wouldn't have to top off transcon trains in expensive states? Note that in steam days the Santa Fe and SP even had to run trainloads of WATER for the steam boilers in some parts of the Arizona and New Mexico deserts!

Anthracite was, and remains, a pretty premium product--a lot of what is still mined today is mined more for petrochemical uses (titanium for paint, for example) than as fuel. Today's premium fuel coal is the low-sulphur Powder River Basin coal from Wyoming. Reading, DL&W, etc. were burning cheaper waste anthracite from local tailings.

Only in modern steam excursion days have loco operators been choosy enough to pick exactly what mine vein's coal to put in their tenders, as Rowland reportedly selected for 2101 and 614.

My forum was mentioned above which is how I arrived here. :)

I can shed some light on anthracite. The BTU content is about the same as Bit. coal, in some cases the bit coal is higher. As mentioned it's a premium product, no soot or smoke. This makes it ideal for residential or commercial heating which is and has been it's primary use for over a century. It's also used for water filtration due to the way it fractures, anthracite water filters have a greater lifespan because of that.

As far as the steam locomotives go from some of the members on my own forum who are "Rail Fans" anthracite is simply not as suitable as bit coal for this purpose. From my understanding the same is true for blacksmithing. I'd also imagine since the only place it's mined is Northeastern Pennsylvania that would play a major factor as well.

If you wanted to make an analogy anthracite is like a nice piece of seasoned hardwood and bit. coal is like a seasoned piece of pine. You can really get pine going really hot fast whereas the oak requires a long time to get burning but will maintain a nice even fire for many hours. It's not a perfect analogy because as I already mentioned they are about equal in BTU content.

As far as supply there's estimated 6 billion tons of recoverable reserves left so that is not an issue. Anthracite peaked in the 20's and has declined since because of competition from other fuels like oil and bituminous coal which is easier to mine and much more plentiful. There's other factors as well such as the Knox mine disaster in 1959 which pretty much put the final nail in deep mining in the Wyoming Valley. That was followed by Hurricane Agnes in 1972, although it didn't directly effect mining many of the people with homes that heated with coal switched to oil. Having said that the future of anthracite is looking pretty rosy because of the lower emissions.

Why did a hurricane cause people to change from coal to oil home heat?

Large numbers of homes in the North Branch Susquehanna Valley, particularly around Wilkes-Barre (true anthracite country and the site of a levee failure), had basement coal furnaces. After flooding that reached the second floor of many houses, refitting was usually mandated at the minimum, and by then oil, gas, etc. were less labor-intensive options. (Anyone that went through it calls it "The '72 Flood," or maybe "Agnes.")

Federal housing regulations at the time did not allow for coal furnaces, so any homes rehabilitated using federal funds were required to change their heating source to oil or natural gas. In 1976, my in-laws sold their old company house, heated by a coal convection furnace, and were required to install baseboard hot water heat with a gas furnace before the buyer could get a Veterans Administration loan. They could heat the house for the whole winter on 5 tons of coal, at $75 a ton. I wonder how much the gas bill was?

The reason is as mentioned, they simply switched to something else. When Agnes hit it was epic disaster affecting hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of homes. The home I'm in right now had water almost onto the first floor, it only missed by a few inches. Other homes had it as high as the second floor or even in the attic if they were in the lowest lying areas.

That is the first I've heard of regulations forbidding it but nonetheless even if the regulations permitted it I doubt it would have been any different.



Sounds a little high. LOL... it's only about $160 per ton delivered locally now up from about $110 in 2000. We were charging about $80 per ton early 90's. 5 ton will heat about a 2000 sq. ft home.