I had to find my copy of The Reading Railroad's T-1 Class Steam Locomotives 1944-1958 by Robert Gottshcall, Jr.

On page 33, where some events of early 1946 are described, the book says, "Even a fifteen to twenty percent amount of anthracite in the bituminuous coal could cause low steam conditions. The Reading Company had a diagram made showing the arrangement of loading coal into a tender. There was a bottom layer of soft coal, then a middle layer of hard coal, followed by soft coal top layer."

I may be misremembering, but I think I've seen that diagram somewhere. It would be interesting to see the relative sizes and shapes of the layers. The first sentence of the quote seems to contradict the rest of the quote. If 15-20% anthracite could cause problems, why would they deliberately mix them?

On page 42, there's info about T-1 2111 using all bituminous coal in January, 1948. It was having firing problems, possibly due to poor quality coal.

If you have an interest in the Reading T-1, I recommend the book.

-Mark

Courtesy of Bob Gottschall, an official Reading Company document delineating the mixes and their use.

I'm surprised at the size of the A coal given. Rice is used in home auto feed stoves and its about the size of raisins. Buckwheat and Barley size must be smaller???
I run a little larger than rice anthracite in my 3/4" live steamers!

Bob D.

Coal dealer's website with grading sizes, for those unfamiliar with the terminology:

http://www.kpdorancoalsales.com/id2.html

Small coal sizes and culm were the bread and butter of Wooten and other wide fire boxes meant to burn A coal. It's ironic to think that the bigger box was for the smaller coal. From Mike's chart it seems the use of small pieces continued to the era when only a little bit of anthracite was in the mix. Very interesting.

I'd stil like to understand if it is true the Reading went all B coal at the very end of the steam era.

Rob

As a separate thought, I am impressed thinking about the caliber of admin talent available in those days to generate such a crisp looking document in an era before Microsoft. Type setting or type writer; either way the mental strain necessary to make that chart must have been something else.

Getting the vertical strokes right, making sure you have the tabs set correctly, making the line breaks look right...yeah, that was one part of the past I don't miss at all!

The secretary who laid that out was also most likely typing on a stencil, and those were unforgiving of mistakes. It's possible to fix a mistyped stencil. It's just...not fun. At all. As in, you'd rather rip out nose hairs with pliers. Ditto sheets were supposed the be easier, but they weren't really.