Coal wagon

“ Penetrating the roof of each arch is a capacious "spout," the upper mouth of which is open at the tailboard of a coal truck. The lower mouth of the spout is below in the arch where the coal wagons draw in to get their loads, and is guarded by a lid that is easily managed by means of a lever. Immediately beneath this lid are the scales on which the coal is weighed. An empty sack is held upright on the scale, the lid which guards the fully charged spout is shifted aside and when the sack is filled, which is the work of not more than half a minute, the lid is thrust back and the stream shut off. ”

“ They are to be found in the facilities conferred by the railway companies, and the great changes that, as the direct result thereof, have taken place in the coal trade itself. Not only are most of the collieries in communication with the railways, but the coal waggons are generally so arranged alongside the mouth of each pit that the coal, as raised, can be tipped into them direct from the screens. Coal trains, thus made up, are next brought to certain sidings in the neighbourhood of London, where the waggons await the orders of the coal merchants to whom they have been consigned. ”

“ A whole train made up of nothing but cars loaded with coal is called a black snake. Since rain and snow won’t hurt coal, it travels in cars without tops. One kind of coal car has sloping ends like the one on this page. It is called a hopper car. You load the coal in at the top, but you unload it by opening trapdoors in the bottom which let the coal drop into chutes.
Coal also travels in gondolas, which are just square-ended bins on wheels. They have to be unloaded by hand or by a dumping machine. It is hard to believe how fast some of these machines work. ”

“ The railway waggons are taken to the head of the inclines, where they are loaded at the coal screens. Each waggon weighs when full about eleven tons, and when empty about four. A great advantage, as far as the quality of the coal delivered is concerned, is gained by taking the railway waggons up the inclines to the screens, as in this case, there is only one handling of the coal, from the time it is sent out of the mines to the time when it is put on board. The sidings are made as nearly as possible to be self-acting. ”

“ Black men were moving about with flaming lamps at their heads, electric cars came whizzing out of the darkness, drawing trucks of coal. Whole trucks were elevated in the opposite shaft from that in which we had descended, elevated to the pit-mouth with a roar and a rush and a scattering of lumps of coal. I gained a lively realisation of one way in which it is possible to get a coal-bruise. ”

“ To the importance of coal in our manufactures, therefore, we owe the subsequent development of steam locomotive power as the means of the introduction of passenger traffic, and by the use of coal we are enabled to travel from one end of the country to the other in a space of time inconceivably small as compared with that occupied on the same journey in the old coaching days. ”

“ As you pass through the country at night, the earth looks as if it were bursting with fire at many points; the blaze of coke-ovens, iron-furnaces, and coal-heaps reddening the sky to such a distance that the horizon seems to be a glowing belt of fire.
From the necessity which existed for facilitating the transport of coals from the pits to the shipping places, it is easy to understand how the railway and the locomotive should have first found their home in such a district as we have thus briefly described. ”

“ It holds a cradle, large enough and strong enough to accommodate a single steel railroad "gondola," which in turn carries fifty tons of bituminous coal. The sides of the table are clamped over the sides of one of these "gondola" cars, which a seemingly tireless switch-engine has just shunted into it. Slowly the cradle is raised to the top of the framework. A bell strikes and it raises itself upon edge, three-quarters of the way over. The coal rushes out of the car in an uprising cloud of black dust and drops through a funnel into the expansive hold of the vessel that is moored at the dock. ”

“ When coal is brought out by a slope the track and grade of the slope are usually continued, by an open trestlework, from the mouth of the opening to the head of the breaker. Wherever it is possible to do so, the loaded cars are run by gravity from the mouth of the opening to the breaker, and the empty ones are drawn back by mules. Sometimes they are hauled both ways by mules, and sometimes a small steam locomotive engine is employed to draw them back and forth. ”

“ Railway companies very seldom pilfer, but the action of more than one railroad on this continent in appropriating urgently needed steam coal billed to others during the winters of 1917–18, will prepare the reader’s viewpoint for a claim for reimbursement placed in the hands of the Silverplate Road, covering fifty cars of slack coal, lost and being vigorously traced, which that line had seized and hastily dumped into a big washout cavity. ”

“ Moreover, it contemplates the electrification of all the railroads within the zone whose traffic is heavy enough to warrant it, and as it is estimated that two pounds of coal applied to an electric locomotive will do as much work as seven and one-half to eight and one-half pounds when applied to a steam locomotive, the amount of coal now used for transportation will be still further reduced. Through such beginnings as these projected superpower systems must come the comprehensive integration of the industry. ”

“ The noise of the shovel scraping against the floor and the clatter of the coal as the great pile slid down and filled each hole that I dug out at its foot, filled the tunnel with friendly sounds; but when the car was loaded and I slipped on my coat and sat down on a pile of fine coal-dust beside the track to wait, silence suddenly submerged me. I could hear my heart beat, and curious noises sang in my ears. Up in the roof, under the stratum of slate above the coal, came a trickling sound like running water—the sound of gas seeping out through the crevices in the coal. ”

“ The two ways by which coal in greatest volume can be saved are the discovery of the method by which more power can be taken from the ton and the discovery of what kind of coal is best fitted for any particular use.
It has been everyone's business to save coal, hence.... The railroads have experimented with some success. They get perhaps 10 per cent of the heat energy from a ton shoveled beneath the locomotive boiler, 10 per cent of the total in the ton. They use one-quarter of all the coal mined. Next to labor this is the greatest expense which our railroads have. ”

“ The overcoming of this waste in transportation made possible the swifter and steadier use of rolling stock, thus speeding deliveries and more quickly returning cars and engines to the mines for new loads, and made more effective the railroad consumption of coal, which amounts to about twenty-five per cent of the coal production of the country. ”

“ A century later, Arthur Young observed that not only had these roads become greatly multiplied, but important works had been constructed to carry them along upon the same level. “The coal-waggon roads from the pits to the water,” he says, “are great works, carried over all sorts of inequalities of ground, so far as the distance of nine or ten miles. The tracks of the wheels are marked with pieces of wood let into the road for the wheels of the waggons to run on, by which one horse is enabled to draw, and that with ease, fifty or sixty bushels of coals.” ”

“ Now, Miss Bessie, we have come to the first lesson in the book. The coal is let down from the mine on that inclined railway to this big building, which is built out over the railroad track so the coal can be dumped right into the cars without any extra handling. The coal, as it comes down, is in all sizes, called ‘run of mine’—big lumps and little, and a lot of dirt. ”

“ IT is a fact generally known, that by far the greater part of the tens of thousands of tons of coal brought to London finds its way thither via the Great Northern, the North Western, and the Midland lines of railway, but it is questionable if one consumer in a score is aware of the vast and peculiar facilities that exist for the cheap and speedy discharge of the contents of the great trucks into the horse wagons which bear the valuable mineral to our coal-cellars. ”

“ With freight trains consisting of as many cars as a heavy locomotive can draw without difficulty, the consumption of coal will not exceed from [138] 1 to 11⁄2 pounds of coal per car per mile if the engine is carefully managed. It takes from 15 to 20 pounds of coal per mile to move an engine and tender alone, the consumption being dependent upon the size of the engine, speed, grades, and number of stops. ”

“ When all is said and done, however, this super-power plan, so sweeping as to be all but staggering to the imagination, and yet sponsored by the shrewdest and most far-seeing of American engineers, is based primarily upon the consumption of coal at the mines rather than in distant factory engine-rooms, central power-stations, or locomotive boilers. ”

“ Economy, however, should not be carried too far in any branch of the service, and if the passenger traffic be heavy the use of soft coal may be a great detriment. To a traveller there can be nothing more disagreeable than the smoke and cinders emanating from it; and if, besides this, the road be an especially dusty one, the combination of dust, smoke, and cinders will be quite sufficient to turn the tide of travel in some other direction and over another route.
For freight service bituminous coal is decidedly the best, and perhaps might not be out of place on short local passenger trains ”

“ We mine the coal, bring out the heat, raise the steam, drive the train, so that in the ultimate analyses it is sunshine that drives the train. These great beds of coal are nothing but condensed sunshine—the sun's great force, through ages gone, preserved for our use to-day. And it is so full of force that a piece of coal that will weigh three pounds (as big as a large pair of fists) has as much power in it as the average man puts into a day's work. Three tons of coal will pump as much water or shovel as much sand as the average man will pump or shovel in a lifetime ”

“ The use of cranes, hand labour with shovels, wagons and locomotives, horses and carts, is unavoidable for the transit of coal; and labour to trim the coal, to stoke it when under combustion, and to handle the residual ashes, are all indispensable to steam-raising by coal. On the other hand, a system of pipes and pumps, and a limited quantity of skilled labour to manage them, is all that is necessary for the transit and combustion of petroleum fuel ”

“ Our locomotives use 100,000,000 tons per year, and by even the best methods known a large proportion of the heat units is wasted. Great effort should be made to improve the locomotives so that they will consume less coal; but as long as the railroad companies own the coal mines, as they do in many instances, they can obtain coal so cheaply that the cost of the improved form of engine is greater than the amount saved. ”

“ In a large colliery where the shafts are situated near the centre of the field, and the workings extend on all sides, both to the dip and rise, the drawing roads for the coal may be of three different kinds— (1) levels driven at right angles to the dip, suitable for horse roads, (2) rise ways, known as jinny roads, jig-brows, or up-brows, which, when of sufficient slope, may be used as self-acting planes, i.e. the loaded waggons may be made to pull back the empty ones to the working faces, and (3) dip or down-brows, requiring engine power. ”

“ For a five-day period in January and for each following Monday for several weeks the Fuel Administration asked commerce and industry to forego as far as possible the burning of coal in order that it might give priority for deliveries of coal to the waiting ships and to the newly established Railroad Administration, struggling with ice-covered tracks, frozen engines and storm-tied trains, a little time in which to relieve the congestion of cars and set in motion long lines of stalled coal trains. ”

“ A narrow-gauge railroad is to be built from the mine to the neighboring towns.
One or two mills have been run with coal, but the cost of hauling it on wagons is too great to make it much more economical as a fuel than the wood and coal already in use. ”

“ During the calendar year ending December 30, 1909, the company I am connected with used 4,193,617 tons of coal in its locomotives and power plants; we have a large force of instructors, including master mechanics, road foremen of engines, and traveling firemen who are continually riding the engines and giving the enginemen the benefit of their experience in the proper method of handling the locomotive so that steam will not be wasted, and that only the proper amount of coal will be shovelled into the firebox to produce the desired results. ”

“ This powerful machine picks up bodily from the railway track a car loaded with a hundred tons of coal, overturns it, and discharges its contents into the hold of a vessel; after which it returns the car to the track. It is capable of handling fifty cars an hour. It is equipped with special apparatus to prevent the coal from being discharged too violently, and thus being badly broken up. ”

“ The immense value to us of the coal-deposits which lie buried in such profusion in the earth beneath us, can only be appreciated when we consider the many uses to which coal has been put. We must remember, as we watch the ever-extending railway ramifying the country in every direction, that the first railway and the first locomotive ever built, were those which were brought into being in 1814 by George Stephenson, for the purpose of the carriage of coals from the Killingworth Colliery. ”