Back in 1990, 1225 hadn't run at more than 30 MPH yet.  We were using a cheap Kentucky coal with around 11,000 BTU per pound, but a high ash fusion temperature.  We were scheduled to operate at the 1991 NRHS convention in West Virginia and so scheduled a main line test run from Owosso to Howell to Plymouth to Grand Rapids and back.  Try as we might, we couldn't keep steam up if we ran more than 40 MPH.  No problems with clinkers, just not enough heat released into the firebox.  We made sure we had better coal for the NRHS convention and subsequent operations.

765 had an incident with a free batch of coal recovered from a coal train wreck.  The coal was contaminated with limestone ballast.  In the firebox the limestone acted as a flux with the coal ash and created what is known as soft clinker.  Think stalactites dripping through and hanging from the grates.  They had to cool the engine, break the stuff away from the grates, shovel the bad coal from the tender and source replacement coal before they could continue their move.

I worry that in the relatively near future, coal burning locomotives will have to resort to burning metallurgical coal.  Met coal swells (cokes) and cuts off its own air flow as it heats up.  Firemen have to frequently use the slash bar to break it up in order to burn it successfully -- making a hard job even harder.

You should've titled this "491s partial oil burning conversion".

So Henry needing special coal before rearranging himself pulling the Flying Kipper wasn't just a plot device Rev Awdrey pulled out of thin air. 🤔

"The coal is wrong.  We've had a poor lot lately, and today it's worse."

"We can't make more than seven PSI." Me immediately right after hearing that: "Why is it always seven?"

Bad Coal
Bad Coal
Whacha gonna do?
Whacha gonna do when it comes for you?

Good grief… you know that was literal nightmare fuel for the shop crews of the steam era!

I had the good fortune to tour the engineering spaces of the SS Badger, the last coal fired commercial ship in the US, a few months back. The chief engineer giving us the tour said that awhile back they had a massive clinker form while the firebed was producing heat for an idling boiler, and ended up cutting a massive circular hole in the grates, oxy torch style, and dropped the whole shebang into the ash pan. Sounds like something out of nightmares for sure.

On the Valley Railroad, we've definitely had some.. interesting incidents caused by bad coal, including #40, the old girl she is, getting so stuffed up that she quite-literally sneezed up her stack and covered me and a bunch of the other guys around us in.. God knows what. Took two days to clean her out. I was still training back in that era, so I had no idea what was going on until much later. I swear #40 still gets uppity when we bring up her sneezing on us.

491: Dad my tummy hurt 🥺

Clinker is the bane if my existance. I volunteer on a heritage railway and we got this iddy biddy 04-0 well tank with smaller drivers than 491's pilot wheels and on a grate thats about 12sqft it can sometimes take 45 minutes to break up the clinker because we don't have access to real coal - we use smokeless coal and get around losing our draft by having a firebar removed 😂

OMG, Mark I can’t even imagine how awful it must have to been to remove all that oily gunk. I’m still mentally processing the solidified mass you had to practically jack hammer out of the grates! So enjoyed your excellent shop story illustrating coal quality and type. Absolutely ultra-cool that the CRRM coal still comes from the historic mine that originally supplied the railroad! Living history for sure! Professor, many thanks for yet another fabulous learning moment, and looking forward to the next episode. As always Mark cheers to you!

I remember reading a story in Classic Trains Magazine about a head-end crew on, I think, the L&N, that was given a very bad coal load by the roundhouse foreman (lots of rocks and twigs in the load), who didn't like the engineer. The locomotive had a terrible time keeping up steam on the road and was about to die. The fireman called the roundhouse or Division HQ from a lineside call box, if I remember correctly, and was threatened with dire consequences along with the engineer if the train didn't get to its proper destination in a timely manner. The engineer remembered that there was a junkyard nearby with a load of salvaged tires, and when they reached the junkyard had the whole crew load junked tires into the tender. The locomotive steamed fantastically and made its destination and back; but, of course, engineer and fireman were hauled on the carpet and suspended after the roundhouse crew complained about the horrible mess the burned tires made on the grates and the terrible time they had in cleaning it up. Not sure if engineer implicated the roundhouse foreman, but, oh well. . . damned if you do, damned if you don't. . .

One old narrow guage fireman told of being stopped somewhere next to a pile of Gilsonite. The crew wanted to see of it burned at all. It burned real qell, but when they tried to shake the grates at the end of their run, they found the stuff solidified and had to be hammered out. Roundhouse foreman was not happy at all.

Did some volunteer work in a heritage railway a few years ago in Spain, and we had the same thing happen to us the “clinker” forming on the fire bed after we had used incredibly bad quality German that had been shipped to us by mistake and we didn’t realise till the day after wed used it.

We tried hammering the bastard but it would break in large chunks that couldn’t go through the grates. Now at the shop we had a small compressed air impact rivet hammer, the face had been worn out and we ordered a replacement so it was not being used, I got an idea and asked one of the guys who knew welding if he could weld a chisel that is used to break up concrete onto the worn down head.

He agreed and I got the rivet hammer the long chisel that I found laying around (we use a few of them to manually break up coal chunks or even ice) he cut the tip welded it to the worn face and I took it back to the footplate. We connected it and it was compact enough that I could use it inside the firebox.

By god have I not been more proud of an idea I had. It worked great, we didn’t use it to break everything as we didn’t want to damage the greats, but we were able to cause it to crack into small enough peaces that a few minutes of hammering made it all fall through.

You know graphite is technically in the coal family and can burn in extreme circumstances I wonder what that would be like.

This reminds me of when I was servicing a waste oil furnace at an auto shop. They had used so much synthetic oil that it created a huge soot-log, filling the entire burner chamber. It took hours of chiseling to get that thing out.

Check in with Carlos, he’s told me horrible stories about bad coal at C&TS.

Misdirected and/or mislabeled coal shipments could have been a major industrial sabotage method!

Yeah, oil burners have a different story, most of the steam locomotives in my area run on reused deep fryer oil, one time Santa Cruz Portland Cement number 2 accidentally fired WINDSHIELD WASHER FLUID and the whole place smelled like a broken car