Used motor oil ends up with levels of heavy metals, various volatile aromatic compounds, lots of bad stuff you don't want your crew or the general public breathing in. At the very least, in addition to testing for nasty chemicals, the waste oil NEEDS to be processed for removal of heavy metals.

Years ago I dealt with a recycling company out of atlanta. In addition to taking WASTE oil they also collected NEW fuel and lubricating oils which have become contaminated with water/another petroleum product or those which had to be be pumped out of a leaking tank.

Someone had previously mentioned the idea of getting HWY department diesel. In addition to this, the National Guard is required to keep XXX,XXX to X,XXX,XXX gallons (depending on state) of diesel fuel on hand "just in case". It is then replenished with new (at the least it was in 1998) on a yearly basis. We, at the Southeastern Railway Museum, could have had FREE (for cost of transport or about $500) tanker trucks full of diesel fuel. Why "could" you ask? Well, they would not load out or transport less than a modern day size/capacity tanker..... The dolts whom held the purse strings would not shell out a few thousand for a good used tank car.


Cheers, Jason

I would say either are routes worth looking into.

Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) is being used as a fuel by Disney in their locomotives with the mix of 98% WVO 2% diesel. The WVO or used cooking oil is collected from their many food service places and then filtered to a fuel grade. Grand Canon Railway has also set 4960 up to run on WVO. The thing about WVO is that it leaves a carbon neutral footprint. St. Johns County Florida uses WVO as a fuel for their diesel trucks in the county fleet for that reason.

In the research that I have done on WVO as a fuel the one thing that comes up is the consistency of the product. My search lead me to a supplier in Florida that can provide fuel grade WVO in large quantities. They ship large quantities to Europe as home heating oil. They told me that with the use of a tank heater from the cooling system and a diesel starting and warm up diesel tank, that a diesel locomotive can run on WVO. At the time that I was looking into this the cost of WVO was about 55cents less than the cost of gasoline at the pump.

The main advantage to use it as a fuel was the impact to the environment. Yes using waste motor oil may be a less expensive way to go, when you start talking about "don't ask don't tell" should raise a red flag. Many times waste motor oil is contaminated by heavy metals. Burning it does not make those go away. They go out the stack into the air we all breathe, end up inside the combustion parts of the boiler and settle on the ground. While this may not appear to be an issue the cumulative effects with long term use can be. The use of WVO over waste motor oil looks to be a much cleaner option.

Used motor oil is a toxic, hazardous waste. The only thing to do with it, is take it 5, 10 quarts at a time to O'Reilly or your local community recycling center if they support oil.

Used vegetable oil is a commercially useful material. There have always been renderers who pick it up from restaurants and turn it into useful products. For example, the grease in dry dog food is that stuff. Gross huh?

Now around here - and this is probably true in any college town - the renderers who pick it up are colliding headlong into the homebrew biodiesel crowd, who has been going around to restaurants, getting handshake agreements to take it, possibly from a low level busboy, and the renderers are finding their usual haunts picked clean. This fight has turned the rendering business on its head as they fight nasty for the right to charge to take away a product lots of people want.

The wildcard that works in your favor is the dilemma faced by the amateur turkey fryer. The average consumer doesn't have a haul-away contract with a renderer. It's not toxic, it's food, but anything in large quantity is a disposal problem. It's a fire hazard and a vermin hazard and here's what doesn't work.
- It can't go in regular trash, the can will bust open in the garbage truck.
- Mixing it with kitty litter just makes even more of a mess.
- It can't go in recycling because your recycler is only equipped to handle certain things.
- It can't go with used motor oil because that stuff is remade into other products.
- It can't go down the drain or it'll congeal with water and clog pipes or disrupt the sewage plant.
- The local restaurant doesn't want to add it to their waste since they pay to have it hauled away, and/or can't just suddenly handle 100 extra gallons after Thanksgiving.
- It CAN go in composting, but you can overwhelm and kill your compost pile.
- You can never find a biodiesel geek when you need one.
Confusion reigns, and newspaper reporters have misrecommended every one of the above. Everyone craves an answer and there just isn't one.

Enter you: "Please give it to us to run our steam engine!" You could make a major media blitz out of it, and you'd get tons of oil not to mention tons of new riders and volunteers!!!

Also, while I'm not sure it is entirely a result of using UVO but the Disney engines have almost no visible smoke exhaust, to the point that crews have to argue the fact with riders that it is indeed a real steam engine and not a overgrown C.P. Huntington.

If you have NIMBYs who don't like your smokey turn of the century motive power, reducing visible exhaust by changing fuel can only help.

thanks. all these posts are very informative as we explore our options whereby we need to keep our operating costs down to the minimum while retaining a reliable source of fuel.

The issue of smoke is, in my view one that is within the purview of the engineer to control. I have seen Leviathan 63 operrating with stack exhaust totally black to nearly invisible firing on waste oil. You can see what they look like from the numerous clips that are posted on youtube.

I'm hopeful that Nigel will provide more information on his waste oil characteristics and reliability. The biggest problem I've had with trying to burn it most efficiently and completely is its variability is wide, and it isn't possible to fine tune a burner for it as is possible with other fuels of known and less variable characteristics. Perhaps there's more control over how waste oil is collected and recycled down under.

Heavy metals probably aren't as bad as we think....I am old enough to have spent formative years in Pittsburgh when steel was king and you could see the air you were breathing, and still don't completely trust the invisible variety. Airborne "natural" pollens and other allergens cause me much more trouble than products of combustion ever did.

dave

I took a "tender ride" the last time I was at Disneyland. The operators (both having been at Disney for a long time) loved the firing charcteristics of the "french fry oil". They both said it certainly smelled better!

When I took the behind the scenes tour of the Walt Disney World Railroad in the Fall of 2010, they had returned to using home heating oil after trying recycled vegatable oil. The reasons? Well, their fuel distributer lost his licence to haul veg oil. Plus the fire burned hotter and the firemen were finding it hard to control. And I think the guide mentioned it clogged some pipes and valves.

The smoke problems of an oil burner are to do with the draughting and that is due to the presure in the fire box from the atomising steam. The solution is the use aof a Lempor or better to get the required air flow for complete combustion.

Vegtable oil is probrably my favorate fuel. Its high temprature is not the issue as you put the right sized burner in for the heat output.( what ever the fuel the system must be designed correctly right through the combustion and draughting) I found it just as good control wise as diesel type fuels. I do not know what type of burners they use at Disney but that may be thier issue ? The number one problem is the fats in the oil can clog the burner. The Cog one had its top cone cleaned from the firebox door each morning. The wier burners at the GCR are much cruder so are less problamatic. Proper filtration was the main item which must be done. When we did the GCR we did things progresivly. The draughting and the air flow. The fuel change was almost a secondry thought and done after I left the USA. So with the weir burners they use and everything in place it wa simply empty the tank of diesel and fill with Bio. Remember that if its cold it must be heated as it will turn to a lump of wax in the cold. I was not allowed to use a tank heater in the cog so had to cut it with Diesel durring the cold times.

Waste oil. Its dirty stuff at best. Its not my favorate fuel. The burners need to be cleaned almost everyother day from dirty heavy carbon and other stuff. The fireboxes get a greasy layer of this on it and it all has to be cleaned regularly. All the burners have to be regapped for this fuel so if you went back to the other fuels then you have to change burner parts. The burners are ushaly cruder than with diesel Its only since WCWR got the redraughted locos that the smoke has gone. They will burn with a clean stack now. The other beinifit of the draughting is that the locos can do thier work efortlessly now where they where extremly loud and roared at the chimney.

I asked the fuel supplier for info on the fuel and other than it being around 41 MJ / Letre could not tell me much more. There is no concisency in actualy whats in it. You dont have control on contents. In some places you simply cant burn it because of the H&S conciderations. I am aware of some guys from the Festiniog who where around waste oil burners and they never had a long life but I cant say that it was purly down to that. In either way they where forced to change fuel from waste oil.

Thanks to all for the sound comments. My conclusion: If you have only have a single locomotive and are running four trips per day on a published timetable, you have neither the time nor can you take the risk of your train not leaving the station. Furthermore, burner replacements will offset some of the savings expected from waste oil compared to diesel or home heating oil.

While the issue of using WVO is intrigueing, the issue here is developing a reliable supply of quality, refined product.

What ever you decide is ok by me. We have discussed the merrits of the difrent fuels not the difrence between liquid fuels and solid fuels. I only wish to point out that its offten the case that out side issues like fire risk or local enviromental concerns and many other factors which decide which fuel is burnt. Coal has its down side like reliable quality of suppy and so on.
There can be no hard and fast rule as which is best.

If what we are talking about is a replica of a Standard Woodburner, why not burn wood, if reliable supplies can be had? Its cheaper than oil, cleaner than coal, and carbon neutral if tree huggers are involved. btw this is speaking from experience, not theory.

Yes it is carbon neutral, but pop quiz, just as a little point that 99.9% of people have NO idea where their oxygen comes from (which means they have no idea what their own body's carbon cycle is).

So, where does the oxygen you breathe come from, in the carbon cycle?

Hint-you learned all you need to know in your OWN carbon cycle in grade school, but they also probably told you the wrong answer, too.

My point being, it's hard to point out the carbon cycle to people who don't have a clue what it is, but can smell smoke!

Robert

I've found the information being posted on this thread to be very interesting. I'd like to comment on several points that have been made, if I may, since we have been burning recycled fuel oil (waste oil that has been properly treated by a licensed collector/distributor) for 30 years now.

As I mentioned, we get our fuel oil from a licensed distributor. This not only ensures that the oil meets the State's environmental requirements, but also that the oil we receive is of a constant quality. Generally speaking, we are pretty confident that the oil we purchase is free of water, antifreeze, and any synthetic hydraulic fluids that would impede combustion.

Even though we can experience temperatures down below 20 degrees during the winter months, we have not had a need to pre-heat waste oil in order for it to burn properly. In fact, since our locomotives are only equipped with direct-style heaters in the fuel bunkers, heating the oil only serves to introduce water into the bunker. Our locomotives also have line heaters, which are used on rare occasions when the outside temperature is very low and the fuel oil in the line has gotten rather heavy. Heating the fuel oil too much can have adverse effects, too. We have tried heavier fuel oils, such as PS300 (Bunker B), which certainly do require pre-heating just to get them to flow properly to the burner. We also have burned diesel fuel oil when necessary. In any case, we have never had to change or modify any of the Ingles/Von Boden burners in our locomotives in order to atomize and burn the different fuel oils. Of course, that may not be the case for burners of other designs.

I'm intrigued by the notion that you have to have a Lempur-type exhaust arrangement in the smokebox in order to have proper draft. While this design certainly can improve the situation, we have found that there is nothing wrong with the builder's (Baldwin, ALCO, Lima, Heisler, Climax, Willamette, etc.) design as long as it is properly installed for the type of service that locomotive boiler is expected to perform. That being said, boiler designs certainly differ from one make to another, so even though the front end might be set up properly, the boiler may not draft very well on its own (requiring the aid of the blower). For example, our 70-ton Baldwin 2-8-2 drafts extremely well all by itself. On the other hand, our three-truck Willamette requires a small amount of blower to help move the air along, especially during cold start-ups. One is saturated and the other is superheated, which may or may not be a factor (the saturated boiler is longer and has far more 2" tubes than the superheated boiler).

The other part of the equation for proper draft is having the firebox set up to allow the proper amount of air to enter. Even if the front end is correct, if you don't have enough air coming in through the damper, you're not going to burn your fuel very effectively.

Brian Wise
General Manager
Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad

That's been my experience as well Brian, but I've not had the good fortune with reliable fuels that you have enjoyed. Hence a previous thread about working out a central burner for small tank engines that would handle the wide variations in fuel as well as a Van Boden.

I think having adequate draft is the issue - whether it come from a Lempor, Lemprex, or any design - and everything we do to further refine the systems is helping pay us back in increased eficiency, reliability, and lower cost and emissions.

dave