Rolling coal...

[Truckman]

Here's a brief explanation, though certainly not complete, by UP concerning the conversion of Big Boy 4014 to burning oil...And a link to their channel......Ben

[UTAH]

Interesting, I didn't know how much thought went into Stoking,

Wifey came from a coal county (Carbon County) and a coal town (Price, Utah). She graduated from Carbon High School, and their sports mascot was a dinosaur. She was raised in a house that was built with a coal chute that went down into the basement. All of the fireplaces were built with heat-resistant bricks/mortar that could handle coal's higher heat output.

Hunter

[Dave Grubb]

Very interesting.

In the early 70's I converted two coal fired boilers at Continental Can Co in Chicago from traveling grate coal power burners to propane. I won't go into the details but about a year latter the "great oil shortage" occurred and Continental called and asked us to quote on converting them back to coal. The request could not be honored, all the hardware required for the grate system was cast iron and scrapped. The original boilers had been built by Riley Stoker Co., now a part of Babcock Power (formally Babcock and Wilcox). Not only did we toss the tons of parts---Riley had scrapped all the patterns to make the parts

[UTAH]

I like where this thread has gone.

Looking online, there were a handful of sites that listed 4014's schedule. Shoulda, woulda, coulda...

Hunter

[Sandman]

Wifey came from a coal county (Carbon County) and a coal town (Price, Utah)… Hunter

Have a camping buddy (now in early 80s) who was raised in Helper Utah.. tells stories of a small town in the middle of nowhere..

Grandma had a coal Shute.. shovel coal into a hopper and there was a worm drive into the furnace, would run all night..

[Dave Grubb]

We heated with coal at home, hard (Anthracite) coal. The mines began about 40 miles north of us and we would take our farm truck to a "bootleg" mine and get 6 tons at a time. This was a mine that had been closed but was being robbed by cutting the columns left to hold up the ceiling. The original mining removed as much coal as the mining engineers determined was safe---the bootleggers bet they were overly conservative. Sometimes the bootleggers won, sometimes they lost. The first bootleggers mostly won, but then less experienced and more greedy ones followed and they were the ones most commonly buried. The first bootleggers had "self proclaimed rights", those that followed were squatters on those rights and that picking order often resulted in fights and sabotage.

Also common when I was a kid, was to see women and children going along the RR tracks with burlap bags picking up chunks of coal that fell off the tenders.

At the cottage we have coal seams starting at about 60' below the surface---with methane "perched" over the coal seams. The gas drillers have no mineral rights above 2000' below the surface, so we still own the coal and methane.

[UTAH]

...to see women and children going along the RR tracks with burlap bags picking up chunks of coal that fell off the tenders.

Yep, that's gotta be a coal town, Dave. In my wife's hometown, there literally was coal everywhere. And with more and more industries moving away from coal, towns like Price Utah are dying. There's the Rust Belt and now there's the Coal Belt.

Hunter

[Sandman]

We grew up hearing the stories of how grandfather would walk the tracks and pick up coal.. Fast forward 100 years.. newspapers have been digitized and are now on line.. 1915 newspaper from the farming village of Astoria Queens New York reports that my same grandfather has been remanded to court for picking up coal on the Long Island Railroad right of way, after he pushed said coal off of railroad cars.. this was just before grandfather "ran away" and joined the Marine Corps.

Helper Utah, (Helper is where the “helper” locomotives were added to the coal trains to help them over the mountain) my buddy grew up in the age of steam.. Tells of the town being the wild west in the early/mid 1950s.. full of Bars and Cat Houses for the railroad crews and Churches for the owners of the Bars and Cat Houses.. he graduated high school and joined the Navy.. he did go back to visit.. he became an accomplished outdoorsman, he and his brothers were not allowed to wander or play in town (rail yards and “adult” neighborhoods) so they headed into the desert and foot hills making their own play ground..

On edit: abandoned coal mines.. friend spent his professional life in the tank truck business.. chemicals mostly.. when a load is “tainted “ the tank line must dispose of the valuable load that is now toxic waste.. one of the disposal firms was caught dumping the chemicals down an abandoned coal mine in NE Pennsylvania.. always wonder how much dumping happened that wasn’t caught.. the story that filtered back to the truck line is that there was a hole drilled to test or vent the old mine, the hole became the “filler neck” for the toxins..

[Dave Grubb]

I hate to say it but that little venture took many millions to clean up, and to litigate. Other deep pockets with Knoll were Air Products and Bethlehem Steel. We had no idea that was going on until the EPA and State DER came knocking.

[Dave Grubb]

More to that disaster, the receiver was licensed and permitted to transport, treat and dispose of those materials. The companies entrusting the waste to them did so in good faith.

Those facts, however, did not excuse the generators of liability and we had to pay the clean up costs.

[UTAH]

Yeah, unfortunately, some once-leading industries were heavy polluters.

I've spent some time in Helper, Utah. There's a restaurant there called Hanging Rock wifey and I like. And, a photo and tribute to her Mining Engineer father is in the Mining Museum there. Like some coal miners, her father died from emphysema.

Hunter