This may be the most stupid question ever asked here, but did wood buring steam locos use any type or kind of wood available, or were certain types/kinds not used due to hard/softness, dead & cured/fresh cut & green, amount of ash when burnt, burn time/heat ratio, or pitch in the wood as in pine? Knowing Pine is not the best in a fireplace due to sap and creosote build up, was this a problem in steamers, or did sanding the flues correct this?
I have been clearing several acres of property of trees and this question just came to mind.
Rob Sundberg

In the real world what ever could be found nearby... (that couldn't be cut into lumber and sold for real money) In addition to variety, seasoning and moisture is very significant...

Dan Markoff of Eureka talks about different wood... He describes wood as (from best to worst) as:

1) Atomic wood... it will lift the safeties while working hard uphill
2) Uphill wood... basic good fire wood
3) Downhill wood... It will keep steam up when going downhill
4) Deadwood... It will kill a perfectly good fire

The Central Pacific and Virginia and Truckee mostly burned pine and fir. Many of the loggers burned "slab wood" the early cuts when sawing lumber which included bark and other imperfections. In the North West this is frequently called "hog fuel"

Dan has used sage brush when the wood was poor with good results, high quick heat, but it burns fast.

I have fired a wood burning steam tractor and frequently cook on a wood stove. Pine and other soft woods burn fast and raise heat quickly... hard woods (oak, maple, walnut) burn slower but more steady... for the tractor eucalyptus was our basic go to wood... hard, miserable to split, but burned hot. Generally, for wood with the same moisture content the heavier piece will give you more BTU's.

19th century photos of Colorado or other western states will show a landscape mostly lacking trees... the same vista today shows forests... in the 19th century we were cutting everything is sight for firewood. It is easy for us to underestimate the amount of effort that was required in a wood fueled world... At least one railroad, California's Bodie and Benton, was built primarily to haul firewood.

Second that comment about forest clearing. Look at old photos of Durango and Silverton and note the open hill sides. It is also interesting in areas of Connecticut to see stone field fences wandering through forest land. All of it was once cleared farmland.

At the Southern Forest Heritage Museum, Sherman Sumler, one of the last connections with the lumbering era once told me about when they used woodburners in the woods. The company had a whole crew that did nothing but go over the cut areas and pick up all of the wood that they could find, cut it to size, and haul it over to the railroad to be used as locomotive fuel. It did not matter what kind of wood it was, just so it would burn. They did this over and over again, every day that the railroad ran. As it turns out, it was mostly pine.

Sherman said that it was the lowest paying and worst job that the company had.
His comment about the last woodburner was " I hated that engine!".

When the engines made it to the mill, they were fueled again with what ever was left over: slabs, short ends, etc, etc. as long as it was large enough to make it worth burning.

An interesting article on land use history discusses the history of Harvard Forest from colonial times to the late 1960's. The illustrations document the clearing of fields and later re-forestation as changes in transportation infrastructure (mainly the Erie Canal) changed the economics of local Massachusetts farming versus transporting produce from other areas.

http://www.foresthistory.org/Publications/FHT/FHT1997/SandersonsFarm.pdf

Back in the 60's, my daughters and I got a cab ride in an 1891 Porter 0-4-0 12-ton woodburner. The girls still remember tossing scrap lumber, broken crate wood and old fence pickets into the firebox. The engine ran on the Rogue River Valley RR in southern Oregon, until it was replaced by a trolley car. The electric car is long gone, but at last report the engine is still operable.

Much of Norfolk Southern's South Carolina corporate retreat - Brosnan Forest - was acquired by an early predecessor, the South Carolina Railroad, to supply fuel (long leaf pine) for locomotives.

Alan Maples

I rode the wood-burning Climax at Clark's Trading Post in N.H. back in 1990 or so. I asked the engineer/fireman (yes, one guy) about the wood. "We get good firewood locally, worth what we pay for it," he said. "With good hardwood, I only have to chuck 2-3 pieces in the firebox while we're loading, and maybe another one or two at the other end of the line. If we had junk wood, we'd need another guy on here just to keep throwing the stuff in all trip. And I can't always find a railfan sucker like you to ride with me and do it for fun!" he said with a joking grin.

In the log woods, pretty much whatever was left over was what got burned. Hardwood is preferred, however. Several RRs in South Texas were run on mesquite-very hot.

My personal preference is for a trash wood called bois'd arc (orange osage to Yankees). It is a booger to cut and split, but once cured is hard as nails and will burn with a blue flame and no smoke whatsoever. You will have to close the dampers to keep from popping off. It also lays in a good bed of coals that radiate heat like mad, and produce little ash.

If we could get Texas A&M to genetically cross bois d' arc with Pine, there would be no need for wood treatment, or steel, for that matter.

Along these lines the Benguala Railway in Africa ran with modern, Giesle drafted Garretts on Eucalyptus. I seem to recall the builders planted it every so often and had a locals whose job it was to cut wood and tend the fuel pile. Apparently the trees grew pretty fast and made a nice, oily cordwood.

Now theres an answer to using biomass for transportation

At the Sumpter Valley we have used about every kind of wood that is available in the area in the WH Eccles Lbr. #3. The preferred fuel would be pine slabs. They burn hot and fast. They are probably what Mr. Markoff would refer to as atomic. We use wood cut to 4' length. In the times that I have fired, we have had a good deal of lodge pole pine also called "cariboo" around here. If it is dry and split in two with the hydraulic wood splitter one time, it is pretty good, but not as good as the slabs with lots of pitch under that bark. Rounds unslpit don't burn fast enough. One time we had some incredibly heavy red fir, that was probably 12-14" wide split in half and would barely go in the fire door and was so heavy I had to rest one end on the door opening and shove it in. I thought it was wet junk wood, but turned out to be atomic. We had just enough of that for one day I think. Wish it was available like that in the truck load. Some times when I fired we had some real crap in the wood yard like wet uncured cottonwood. Short chunks of that are great to plug the holes at the back of the fire. It just sits there not burning and keeps the holes plugged. As to sanding the flues, yes by all means with some of the wood with a lot of pitch in it, sanding once or twice a day makes quite a difference. One of the really bad things is to get irregular wood that is bent or has forks because it's hard to keep the holes in the fire plugged when the wood doesn't lay straight front to back.

The Merced Gold Mine Railroad was a California 2-footer that hauled gold ore and firewood to the mill. When firewood ran out and efforts to bring electricity to Coulterville failed, the mine shut down. Another gold mine railway hauled firewood - the 20" Sons of Gwalia railway in Australia. I believe a few other similar lines existed down under as well. A locomotive from each of the both the above operations survive.