fuel on the and Providence Rail Road

Harry Chase 2012

1. Introduction

The Boston and Providence Rail Road opened its 42-mile main line between the capital cities of and in 1835. The railroad operated as an independent corporation until 1888, when it was leased by the . During its 53-year history the Boston and Providence burned first wood and then bituminous (“soft”) coal in its approximately 124 steam and experimented with coke, anthracite (“hard”) coal and oil. This monograph contains a brief account of each of the fuels used in the railroad’s locomotives during its corporate history and the rationale for converting from one fuel to another.

2. Wood

In Europe, wood had been tried for its cheapness as locomotive fuel but was given up in favor of coal and coke largely because of the greater availability of fossil fuel, and also because of the annoying and even dangerous sparks that issued from the smokestacks of wood-burning engines. In the United States, wood was much more easily available and generally cheaper than other fuels, and for many years was commonly burned in locomotives; while sparks were less of a problem in the thinly settled countryside through which American railroads ran. Ingenious spark-catching devices were invented, including the popular “diamond stack” devised by Boston and Providence master mechanic George S. Griggs. [1] Spark arresters were not always effective. British travelers, who at home were accustomed to engines that burned fossil fuel, were entranced by the sparks thrown by American wood-burners. Charles Dickens, on a visit to the United States in 1842, rode the Boston and Lowell Railroad and wrote of the “mad dragon of an engine with its train of cars; scattering in all directions a shower of burning sparks from its wood fire,” and later in the day on the same railroad, “I found entertainment for the rest of the ride in watching the effects of the wood fire, which had been invisible in the morning, but were now brought out in full relief by the darkness, for we were travelling in a whirlwind of bright sparks, which showered around us like a storm of fiery snow.” [2] The geologist Charles Lyell, riding a North Carolina train after dark in January 1842, describes a wood-burning engine as “resembling a large rocket fired horizontally, with a brilliant stream of revolving sparks extending behind the engine for several hundred yards, each spark being a minute particle of wood, which, after issuing from the chimney of the furnace, remains ignited for several seconds in the air. Now and then these fiery particles, which are invisible by day, instead of lagging in the rear, find entrance by favour of the wind through the open windows of the car, and, while some burn holes in the traveller's cloak, others make their way into his eyes, causing them to smart most painfully.” [3] These sparks sometimes set serious fires, as when on 13 April 1836 a Boston and Providence engine set its own baggage car ablaze, destroying the newspaper mail for New York City and half the baggage, [4] and an instance on 29 October 1836 when a mile-long swath of woods in Mansfield, Mass., was ignited by a Boston and Providence locomotive. [5] The Boston and Providence Rail Road’s first steam locomotive was Whistler, built by in in 1832 [6] for another railway and sold by that company to the Providence road in 1833. Its mechanical specifications conform to published descriptions of Stephenson's prototype Planet, completed for the and Manchester Railway in 1830. The Planet type was designed to burn coke, [7] but I’ve seen no evidence that reveals whether Whistler in the beginning burned coal, coke or wood. At first I assumed the former, as Boston and Providence is reported to have purchased three anthracite-burning engines in the 1830s, [8] but a record of steaming tests conducted in 1835 indicates that Whistler then used pine wood for fuel. [9] At first, the dry pitch pine burned in Boston and Providence locomotives was purchased at $6.00 a cord plus $1.00 a cord for sawing and splitting. The engine Boston, built in 1835 by Edward Bury in England [10] and equipped with Bury’s dome-shaped “haystack” firebox, in making a run between Boston and Providence burned 1-1/8 cords of wood. [11] Pitch pine (Pinus rigida), though it burns hot and has been used for fuel, seems unsuitable as the resin would coat the tubes with creosote, reducing heating capacity. Perhaps, however, the fires were maintained at a high enough heat that the creosote was continually burned off. Though pitch pine grew locally but not abundantly along the line of the Boston and Providence, and is common on and in sandy soils farther inland, most of it was brought by schooner from the South. [12] During 1837, each of the 11 locomotives in service typically made one round trip per day between Boston and Providence, totaling 84 miles. On the average an engine burned a cord of wood on each 42-mile leg, sufficient to turn 700 gallons of water to steam. [13] By 1838 the locomotives were burning spruce. Spruce was not found locally in any quantity and had to be shipped from Canada, northern and western New England, and the South. Wood fuel remained a significant expense. The railroad's 10 engines, in running a total of 119,574 miles, consumed 3200 cords costing $18,618, an average of $5.82 per cord, including 75 cents for sawing it into suitable lengths. The locomotives averaged 37-1/3 miles on a cord at a cost of 15.9 cents per mile. [14] Another report states that Boston and Providence engines in 1838 got 36 miles on a cord of wood for 16 cents per mile. [15] Stops on route for wood and water were necessary, and Mansfield, 24 miles from Boston and 18 miles from Providence and (beginning in 1836) the junction of the Taunton Branch Rail Road, was the principal place where engines were given a drink and refueled from a large wood yard situated beside the track At the Roxbury shop of master mechanic George Griggs, 2 miles from Boston, locomotive tenders were filled from a water tank at the shed, then the engines were run up a spur track to the woodhouse, where a circular saw driven by a horse walking on a treadmill cut the cordwood to a length that fit in the tenders (on most railroads this was 16 to 24 inches). [16] The European railroad expert Gerstner, who visited in 1839, makes no mention of coaling facilities for the one anthracite-burning locomotive supposedly still on the roster, therefore it must be assumed that the engine had been redrafted to burn wood or had been retired from service. In 1844, 15-year-old Frederick Paine went to work for Boston and Providence at Mansfield sawing cordwood into stove lengths for heating the passenger station. He was paid 25 and 50 cents a cord. [17] In a few more years, the enterprising Paine went into the business of buying wood, hiring sawyers to cut it into lengths to fit the locomotive fireboxes and selling it to the railroad company. Some Mansfield farmers hauled their own wood, cut in standard cordwood lengths of 4 feet, to the station’s wood pile. A three-man crew worked on the pile sawing the sticks in half, one cut per stick, at 60 cents a cord. While the trains paused for water, the men tossed the billets of wood into the tenders. Not until later did the railroad company, to save money by cutting out Paine and other local middle men, manage their own fuel transactions and wood yards. [18] The problem, however, was that in New England wood was used in enormous quantities for home heating, building (including ship building at New Bedford and other seaports) and many other purposes. For miles around major cities the landscape was laid bare, and what cordwood that was cut elsewhere had escalated in price. The days when farmers along the railroad line could add to their incomes by supplying large quantities of wood for stacking beside way stations like Mansfield had all but disappeared as southeastern New England became increasingly denuded, [19] and a greater quantity of wood had to be imported from the South. A.M. Levitt, in 2002, acquired a large number of Boston and Providence invoices dating from 1846. Many of the September and October invoices are "peppered" with charges for cordwood, much of which came by ships apparently belonging to the railroad from company- owned woodlands in Virginia; although no cordwood invoices were printed during the third quarter of 1846. Both pitch pine and white pine (Pinus strobus) are mentioned. The wood was received on the schooners Achsah Parker, Jeroleman (113 cords at $6.00 per cord), Pokomoke (70 cords also at $6.00) and Sarah Francis and the sloop Eunice. The Sarah Francis is represented by two trips, having been unloaded on 14 September (28 cords) and 7 October; her loads were billed at $5.20 per cord, as was the wood from the Eunice. The Achsah Parker was unloaded 21 September (28 cords), 13 October (30 cords) and 22 October (29 cords), these loads also billed at $5.20 per cord. The two different prices suggest two separate sources in Virginia some distance apart by land or sea or both. Several invoices are for cart loads of wood, seemingly of one cord each, though one cord is a large load for a horse-drawn cart, delivered to Mansfield depot by six local individuals. The charges are for the wood and delivery and not just the cartage: pitch pine is invoiced at $4.00, $4.50, $5.00 or $5.75 per cord, and white pine (which was plentiful locally) at either $3.00 or $4.00 per cord. In all, 547 cords of wood can be identified; of these, 338 (62 percent) arrived by ship and 209 (38 percent) came from local sources. The average non-weighted price was $4.70 per cord. Eight invoices cover sawing or cording of wood, indicating that delivered wood did not always come in fit-for-tender sizes and had to be sawed and split. There is also an October payment to Isaac Emery for the "Wood Account" in the amount of $1500.00 representing 320 cords; this payment includes some pre-October purchases. It is not known whether Emery was an agent, broker or fuel dealer; probably the latter, for he also had present invoices for pitch pine and for "surveying" wood apparently shipped from the Virginia forests. No other disbursements are listed in 1846 against "Wood Account." In addition to unloading charges, there are also "surveying" charges, suggesting (Levitt felt) that either the Boston and Providence management did not trust the ships' captains or the railroad company did not load the wood at the Virginia quays. Four of the invoices relate to wood delivery by rail to Mansfield; one of these is noted "Mansfield Depot." Each invoice, both ship and cart, indicates payment to various persons, presumably the ship's captain or the carter as an individual contractor. In addition, a "woodhouse" is mentioned, apparently the shed where the fuel for the depot stove was stored. [20] In 1853, Boston and Providence, faced with an increasingly severe and apparently permanent shortage of locally available wood, paid $13,500 for an additional 1753-1/2 acres of forest land in Virginia, along with more woodland in North Carolina. There they hired workmen and built light logging railroads into the woods with wharf facilities at one end and sawmills at the other. Lighters were purchased to float the cut wood from the wharves out to a fleet of scows, sloops and schooners which then beat their way up the coast to Providence. [21] The railroad's annual report for 1856 remarked, however, that the Virginia holdings were too remote to be managed properly, and expressed a desire to sell off the tracts and opt out of the wood business. [22] Until all the locomotives could be converted to the more practical and efficient coal, many went on burning wood, and shiploads of fuel continued to be brought from the railroad's southern woodlands. It was not until the start of the Civil War in spring of 1861 that access to these sources was cut off, and then, for a while, local farmers along the Boston and Providence line again were able to augment their incomes by supplying fuel to be corded up in piles beside each station, until their wood lots became deserts of stumps and brush. But their prosperity was short-lived, for the Civil War proved to be the main impetus that eventually led to the burning of coal in all the engines. Let it not be thought that wood fuel died an easy death, however; some Boston and Providence locomotives continued to burn wood until 1874 or 1875. [23]

Section 2 Notes

1. White 1968-79: 120; Westwood 1977-78: 216. 2. Dickens 1842: 64, 69. 3. Lyell 1845: v. 1, 197. 4. Providence Journal, date unknown. 5. Stearns papers c1980, diary, v. 2, p. 428. 6. Robert Stephenson and Co. records, A.M. Levitt, pers. comm. 1998. 7. Hollingsworth and Cook 1987: 30. English engines were designed to burn coke or coal, "undoubtedly reflecting both the fact that the earliest of them served collieries and coal-winning areas, and that there was not any abundance of wood in England. . . . I haven't come across anything that indicates that the early English locomotives shipped to this side of the Atlantic were designed any differently (that is, with fireboxes fashioned to burn wood) than those for the home market" (A.M. Levitt pers. comm. 2002). 8. Westwood 1977-78: 70. 9. Boston & Providence R.R. Feb.-Mar. 1835. 10. Fisher 1938: 80.. 11. Galvin 1987: 5; Levitt 1997. Although at first thought it would seem that a cord (a stack of wood 4 by 4 by 8 feet) might contain 128 cubic feet, its actual solid volume, because of the interstices between the sticks, is nearer 90 cubic feet. Since pitch pine weighs 32 pounds to the cubic foot, 1-1/8 cord weighs when cut about 3250 pounds, but it was air-dried before use and therefore had decreased in weight when delivered to the railroad. Fitchburg R.R. locomotives also were burning pitch pine, some of it grown in Concord wood lots, as late as 1850 (Thoreau, Journal 9 Nov. 1850). Sheldon (1862: 127) tells how the coming of the railroads caused the price of local cordwood to escalate. In 1839, as a contractor building the Boston & R.R., he learned of a woodland that would provide 3000 cords of fuel wood, “and as soon as the railroad is in operation, every cord of that wood will be worth fifty cents more than it is now. They are now buying wood at Wilmington [Mass.] for $3 per cord, to run their engine to East Kingston; and as soon as the cars run wood will be worth as much here as it is in Wilmington.” 12. Copeland 1936: 64. 13. Gerstner 1842-43: 326. 14. Gerstner 1842-43: 326-8. Writing of the Mohawk & Hudson R.R. in New York state, Gerstner (op. cit: 138) says, “The finest quality spruce is used as fuel for the steam engines. A cord (128 cubic feet, weighing 2,663 lbs.) cost $5 delivered. In the forest the same wood costs only 50 cents per cord, but it must travel some 100 miles by canal, for which freightage amounts to $2.50, and another $2 is paid for felling and for transport to the canal as well as from the latter to the delivery site on the railroad. Sawing, splitting, and stacking in woodsheds costs an additional $1. As a rule, wood is not used until it has dried for 6 to 8 months. Several years' experience has shown that 1-1/2 cords of spruce are needed for 6 runs @ 14 miles = 84 miles, or 1 cord for each 67 miles. The wood is used in 2-foot pieces. Earlier, bark would be removed as a way of preventing sparks from being thrown out, but this became unnecessary once the smokestacks of locomotives had been equipped with spark catchers.” Of fuel used on the Saratoga & Schenectady R.R., Gerstner (op. cit.: 149) writes, “The fuel (yellow spruce) used to operate the line costs $4 to $5 per cord, including sawing and splitting. This wood is purchased as 4-foot logs, which are sawed and split into pieces 16 inches long and 2 or 3 inches thick. These are then stored for drying, usually for half a year. The thick bark is always removed, because otherwise it tends to clog boiler tubes and also causes more sparks to escape. . . . [A] cord of firewood is sufficient for 59 miles.” Britton and Brown (1970, v. 1: 61) list no such species as “yellow spruce,” but note that white, black and red spruce grow in New England. For railroad use, Baldwin Locomotive Works (c.1915: 23) states that 2-1/4 pounds of average thoroughly air dried wood equals one pound of average quality bituminous coal, and that the heating value of different woods is nearly the same; that is, the fuel value of hardwoods such as oak, hickory or maple is about the same per unit of weight as softwoods such as pine, birch or poplar, provided both contain the same percentage of water. “Water in fuel is very detrimental, every 10 per cent. of moisture reducing its value as a fuel by about 12 per cent. Wood cut in winter will retain, by the end of the following summer, about 40 per cent. of its water . . . . Two and a half pounds of good dry wood is generally assumed to evaporate as much water as 1 pound of good coal.” (ICS Staff 1920-45: 46-47.) 15. Railway and Locomotive Hist. Soc. 1927, bull. 13, in White 1968-79: 78. The statement is made (White 1968-79: 84) that Boston and Providence “was forced to pay $7.00 per cord as early as 1838 when other railroads were paying less than half that price.” This figure, repeated in op. cit.: 85, does not agree with that given by Gerstner, who writes (1842-43: 326) that the spruce bought by Boston and Providence in 1838 cost $5.50 per cord plus 75 cents for sawing. By my arithmetic, using Gerstner’s 1838 figures for engine miles and total cost of fuel, a cord of wood (delivered and sawed) cost Boston and Providence $5.82. 16. Gerstner 1842-43: 324. Thoreau (Journal 18 June 1853, 15 Jan. 1857) describes a Fitchburg R.R. open-sided woodshed at Concord depot where several men cut wood for the engines by means of a machine-driven saw powered by a horse walking on a treadmill. 17. Copeland 1931a, 1936: 64, 69; reprinted in Mansfield News 26 Jan. 1951. 18. Copeland 1936: 64-5; Carnevali 1949; Hodges 1957; Dix 1973. 19. A British visitor noted in Nov. 1841 that timber was "beginning to grow scarce in New England, where coal is dear" (Lyell 1845: v. 1: 127). 20. A.M. Levitt pers. comm. 2002. Levitt acquired "all the invoices paid in October 1846 by Boston and Providence" as well as some paid in July and Sept. 21. Copeland 1936: 64; White 1968-79: 84.. 22. Harlow 1946: 354 in White 1968-79: 84n. 23. White 1968-79: 88.

3. Rationale for the change from wood to coal

The debate about wood versus coal as a fuel for steam locomotives reminds one of the steam versus diesel controversy of the 1940s and '50s. When the opinions on both sides had been heard, one wonders why it took so long to come to a logical decision. By mid-20th century the conversion to diesel oil was jump-started by coal miners' strikes which resulted in an unreliable supply of fuel for steam locomotives. [1] One hundred years earlier the spur applied to a lagging horse was the shortage of locally available wood for fuel. It was also a matter of inventive ingenuity and technology catching up with the availability of coal. [2] It’s a common belief that the earliest locomotives here and abroad burned wood and that use of coal came later. In reality, the first English engines, which hauled coal from the mines, quite naturally burned coal or coke. Coal-burning engines were operating on the Middleton Railway by 1811 and on English public railways in 1825. [3] Boston and Providence Rail Road, while under construction, used anthracite-burning power as early as 1833 [4] and experimented unsuccessfully with burning coke in one of its engines in 1834. [5] Wood came to be used as fuel throughout most of the U.S. because outside the principal coal-producing states of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland it was cheaper than coal, and despite its propensity for throwing burning embers and sparks, it was cleaner than bituminous coal, which tended to sprinkle everything with black dust and soot. [6] Boston and Providence almost from the beginning had a disproportionate problem with wood for their engines. In 1838, when they were paying $5.82 a cord for sawed, split and seasoned spruce, their locomotives got 36 miles to a cord at a cost of 16 cents per mile; while at the same time, the Boston and Worcester, experimenting with coal, was getting 56 miles per ton and paying only 12.4 cents per mile for fuel. Adding to the problem was the unpredictable up- and-down price of wood: from $5.82 (possibly $7.00), it fell to $3.50 a cord in 1855 and rose to $5.41 in 1860. [7] It was about this time that the Boston and Providence management began to realize that the renewable fuel grown in small wood lots along their line produced steam as well as the firewood brought by sea from Virginia. [8] But there just wasn't enough of the local wood. Those who live in what is now the third most heavily forested state in the U.S., measured in terms of the percentage of Massachusetts covered by woods, would be shocked at the denuded appearance of southeastern New England after 1835, especially around urban areas. Needing cordwood to heat their houses, timber for building them, plus wood for poles, fencing, shingles, railroad ties and for building whaling vessels in New Bedford, charcoal for jewelry shops and forges which needed intense heat, and oak or ash logs for the basket industries that thrived in the area, [9] local farmers were hard pressed for fuel wood to sell to the railroads. Mansfield, when the first settlers came in 1669, contained several large open plains where the woods had been burned by Indians to make deer hunting easier; by estimate the town was 60 percent wooded. In 1831, four years before the railroad began running, the town was only 37 percent forested and the area covered by woods continued to decrease until around 1900. [10] A writer in the Boston Cultivator in 1848 fretted that in woodlands near the railroads, “the locomotives [were] sweeping away thousands upon thousands of acres yearly . . . .” [11] With the price of wood starting again to escalate simultaneously with the decline in the cost of coal shipped from Pennsylvania, Virginia and Nova Scotia, the directors of the Providence and Worcester Railroad in 1855 undertook a study to determine the feasibility of converting all their engines from wood to coal. When research showed that using bituminous coal would save them nearly 50 percent in fuel costs, they began changing their locomotives to burn fossil fuel. [12] There was a familiar down side to burning wood. Flaming embers from inadequately netted stacks set fires to woods, brush, hayfields, wooden-shingled barns and other structures along the tracks, not to mention the roofs of the cars themselves; and travelers complained about sparks and cinders entering the open windows of passenger coaches and burning holes in their clothing, umbrellas and themselves. A female passenger on a train in New York State was almost denuded when her clothing caught fire from an engine spark. Yet wood was a familiar fuel, easy and simple to use – just about every New England household employed it for heating and cooking. The coal with which, in the 1830s, Boston and Providence had flirted briefly was Pennsylvania anthracite, which had the advantage of being clean burning and relatively smokeless. But it had disadvantages not yet fully understood as late as the 1850s. Its low content of volatile gases made it hard to ignite and slow to burn, necessitating a blower to keep it alight and a broad grate (wood needed a simple rigid grate) raised close beneath the crown sheet. Bituminous coal, though dirtier and smokier, was less of a problem for the Irish immigrant fireman who at a $1.50 a day was not likely to have acquired much formal education in the theory of combustion. Serious coal experimentation by American railroads, which began in the 1840s, continued for 20 years. Early on it was recognized that coal presented problems not previously encountered with wood. Aside from the necessity of introducing suitable grates and a means of providing strong artificial draft, the intense heat generated by coal warped or burned out firebox sheets and the fingers of grate bars; while the coal-burning firebox of the time had a life of three years compared to 10 or 15 years for one in which wood was burned. [13] A spectacular incident on the night of 13 May 1857 must have gone a long way toward convincing the management of the Boston and Providence Rail Road to convert from burning wood in their steam locomotives to coal. Near their old Exchange Place terminal at India Point on the west side of Seekonk River in Providence, where scows and schooners from southern woodlands tied up, the railroad maintained a wood track one mile long. The crew of a locomotive backing down to "wood up" that night found the entire pile in flames. Railroad officials had set up a procedure to be followed in such an emergency, and the engine crew observed it precisely. They ran to the home of the sexton of the nearby First Congregational meeting house, rousted him out of bed and had him toll the church bell that served as a fire alarm. A hand pumping engine named Gazelle was towed to the scene by a party of fire fighters, and while some worked the pump handles to lift water from the harbor, others directed a stream onto the blaze. The men of Gazelle, aided by other fire companies, pumped for 27 hours, but their efforts were in vain; the seasoned pine burned furiously, and when all was over, nothing remained of a thousand cords of locomotive fuel but heaps of water- soaked ashes. [14] The claim was made that by 1860 Boston and Providence locomotives were almost all coal-burners. [15] This was untrue, for even the railroad's own annual reports admit that engines burning wood remained in service until 1874 or 1875. [16] It is possible, of course, that the wood-burners were held in reserve as extra engines and that most trains were handled by new or improved machines that used coal. The price of wood was now $5.41 per cord, well up from the $3.50 of five years before but still cheaper than the $7.00 purportedly paid in 1838. Foresighted or fortuitous it was of Boston and Providence to have commenced the conversion to coal, because now the Civil War cut the railroad off from their southern woodlands, making it again necessary to obtain fuel from the dwindling wood lots on local farms. Every station along the line still had its wood pile, but Mansfield, with its important junction and engine house, remained the principal fueling point between Boston and Providence and the wood pile there was larger than at most other way stations; it was the custom to keep about 200 cords stacked on the opposite side of the track from Mansfield depot. But there is no question that coal-burning locomotives were operating on Boston and Providence before the start of the Civil War. [17] And before the war ended in 1865, coal burning locomotives had supplanted many if not most of the wood burners formerly in service on the Boston and Providence. [18] The Boston, Clinton and , which after 1871 intersected the Boston and Providence at Mansfield, still used some wood-burning locomotives, because they set up another wood yard and shed near the junction for the use of their engines. Here the wood at first was sawed by horsepower, but later a boiler was installed and the saw was run by steam. [19] But the Mansfield paper noted in 1874 that the “Clinton” had stored in their engine yard more than 5000 tons of bituminous coal for use as locomotive fuel, which formed "some idea of the enormous business done by that road . . . ."[20]

Section 3 Notes

1. Similarly, in the 1970s a sudden jump in the price of diesel oil caused many major railroads to at least think of converting to electric traction. 2. Mansfield News 27 Oct. 1876, referring to a Boston, Clinton & Fitchburg locomotive, reads: "The engine ‘Northboro’ has lately been changed from a wood to a coal burner, and on her trial trip Engineer Fitts made the run from South Framingham to Fitchburg with the mid- day passenger train, a distance of 37 miles, and including nine stops, in 59 minutes." 3. A.M. Levitt pers. comm. 2002. 4. White 1968-79: 86; Westwood 1977-78: 69; Chase 2012. 5. Providence Journal 10 June 1835; courtesy of D. Forbes 2002. 6. Botkin and Harlow 1953: 469. 7. White 1968-79: 78, 84, 85. See White's excellent chapter on fuel beginning in op. cit. page 83. 8. Appleton 1871: 3. 9. Basket-making was no trivial industry. In Mansfield alone, 56,000 baskets worth $13,560 were manufactured in the year 1855 (Copeland 1936: 92-3) and many of these were shipped out by rail. 10. Chase, Mansfield News 13 March 2009; Hewins 1831. 11. Russell 1982: 228. 12. Lewis 1973: 20. Providence & Worcester was the first railroad in the U.S. to burn coal in its locomotives as a regular practice. By 1867 most U.S. roads either had converted their engines to coal or were seriously thinking of doing so. Boston & Worcester in that year owned 30 engines that burned coal and nine woodburners plus one omnivorous unit that was not particular to either diet. The coal-fired engines ran from 41.8 to 100.3 miles per ton consumed, costing in fuel 9.5 to 21.9 cents per mile, the best mileage and lowest cost being racked up by a yard switcher, while the woodburners got 30.8 to 50.8 miles per cord. Taunton locomotive builder William Mason turned out his first coal-burner, this one slated for Boston & Worcester, in 1856 (Harlow 1946: 354, 354n). The New-York, Providence & Boston (“Stonington”) Railroad obtained its first coal burner in 1859, and before long learned that steam engines which had been burning wood at a cost of 15 cents per mile could be run on coal for 11 cents per mile (Turner and Jacobus 1986: 6). 13. Lozier 1986: 448-9. 14. Belcher 1938: no. 7. 15. White 1968-79: 88. The claim appeared in American Railway Times 28 Jan. 1860. 16. White 1968-79: 88. 17. Copeland 1936: 65. 18. Carnevali 1949. 19. Copeland 1931b, 1936: 65. 20. Mansfield News 31 July 1874.

4. Coke

Coke is the hard residue left from heating coal in the absence of air. The use of coke, though once practically universal in England because it avoided the smoke nuisance of soft coal or wood in that densely-settled countryside, was very limited in the U.S. due to its expense and because smoke was not then such a problem in the open country through which most American railroads operated. [1] As mentioned earlier, the Planet type engines built by Stephenson and used in England, on which Boston and Providence Rail Road’s Whistler was modeled, were designed to burn coke. But I have seen only one record of an attempt to use coke in engines of the Boston and Providence Rail Road, and this is in a newspaper article telling briefly of an unsuccessful experiment with coke in an engine departing Boston on 7 June 1835:

The Boston Advocate informs us, that a large company filled the Providence Rail Road cars on Saturday afternoon, principally of No. 7 Engine Company, who by invitation of the Directors took an excursion on the road. In going out, owing to an "experiment" in the use of coke, some little delay took place until wood could be procured, but in returning, great velocity was obtained . . . . [2]

Section 4 Notes

1. Lardner 1850: 336, in White 1968-79: 89. 2. Providence Journal 10 June 1835, Boston Advertiser 10 June 1835; courtesy of D. Forbes 2002.

5. Bituminous (“soft”) coal

The Boston and Providence Rail Road in the 1830s seems to have given up on burning Pennsylvania anthracite as a bad job. Two decades would pass before the railroad once again experimented with burning coal, and it would be many more years before bituminous coal-fired engines became common. [1] In New England, with its extensive forests, wood was the fuel with which all persons, including railway superintendents, master mechanics and locomotive firemen, were most familiar. One obstacle in the way of conversion from wood to coal was the mistaken notion that major alterations in the design of locomotive fireboxes would need to be made before the change in fuel could be effected. As it turned out, ordinary fireboxes were capable of burning either wood or coal. [2] Although many New England railroads suffered from stodgy managements and were slow to convert from wood to coal, Boston and Providence proved an exception. It took the innovative master mechanic George S. Griggs and Mansfield locomotive fireman Herbert Brown to bring the art of building and operating coal-burning engines from the realm of theory down to practical blue-collar basics. Griggs may not have forgotten but obviously had recovered from the less than sparkling performance of the three anthracite-burners purchased by Boston and Providence two decades before. In 1856, looking toward saving money by converting his engines’ diet from increasingly scarce and costly wood to coal, he installed a firebrick arch in the fore part of the firebox on two locomotives . This nearly horizontal structure, which extended from side to side in the firebox and halfway of its length, was simplicity itself and could be applied to any ordinary engine. It deflected the flames and gases rising from the fire, forcing them to the rear, then up and over the arch and forward to the boiler tubes, lengthening their travel, which consumed the smoke, allowed better mixing of air and gases and increased the intensity of the heat passing through the tubes. The under surface of the bricks stored heat transferred from the incandescent fuel below, and this heat was radiated back to the fire when the fuel bed cooled as fresh coal was shoveled onto it. Griggs did not invent the brick arch, and at first did not realize the significance of lengthening the path of the gases – he thought the hot brickwork ignited the air and gases as they passed over it. But never mind; the arch worked, even though for reasons not understood. It is questionable whether it brought about any significant fuel savings, but it did cut down on smoke emitted from the stack, and excessive smoke meant unburned and wasted coal. Matthew Baird of Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1854 tried a firebrick arch which when applied to two Pennsylvania Railroad engines proved its worth. But he failed to patent his idea and it was Griggs who patented the brick arch which he did not invent. Griggs's advanced form of arch was made from firebricks 24 by 8 by 4 inches in size and proved to be a direct ancestor of the efficient brick arches used in steam locomotives as long as they were built. [3] In summer of 1857, Griggs subjected the two arch-equipped engines to coal-burning tests and compared their performance with that of engines that burned wood. The following report is worth quoting nearly in its entirety:

The Mansfield, [4] a Taunton-built freight engine weighing 52,900 lbs., 16 inch cylinder, with 20 inch stroke, and five feet driving wheels, made six round trips on the night freight train, 90 miles each, ending July 9th, with 24,092 lbs of Cumberland coal. [5] The average number of cars drawn was 41. Putting the cost of coal delivered at $6 25 per 2240 lbs., and the kindling wood, of which one foot was used each trip, at $7 per cord, and we have an expense of about $12 08 per round trip, or 13.4 cents per train mile. The cost of wood fuel, as estimated by Nathan Hale, Esq., on the Worcester Railway [6] returns of 1855, was 41.9 cents per mile of each freight train, and as the average weight of the trains was probably not more than the 41 cars drawn by the Mansfield, we may set down to the coal-burning in this case a saving of 68 per cent. in the cost of fuel. Again, on the same road, the New York, [7] an engine weighing 48,500 lbs., 15 inch cylinders and 20 inch stroke, and five feet driving wheels, made six round trips of 90 miles, with 16,024 lbs of Cumberland coal, drawing on average of 30 cars. Here was an expense of $8 60 per trip for fuel or 9 1-2 cents per mile of train, or considering the work done, a small gain on the previous experiment with the Mansfield. This experiment was concluded on the 8th July. On the 9th July the same engine, the New York, ran a round trip leaving Boston at 11 A.M. with the passenger train, and we had the pleasure of accompanying her. She had 6 long cars from Boston to Mansfield, 4 from Mansfield to Providence, 5 from Providence to Mansfield on the return, and 6 from Mansfield to Boston. The time of running each way was two hours, including in the return trip 28 stops. We saw the coal weighed which was taken on, 3,500 lbs and have no doubt that the weight of the pile left, which we did not have time to see weighed, has been correctly stated to us since as 2,120 lbs., it having been weighed in presence of numerous witnesses. The consumption of coal on the round trip was then only 1,380 pounds, and the whole expense for fuel $4 72, or about 5.2 cents per mile. The average cost of fuel for passenger trains by Mr. Hale’s estimate on the Worcester road in 1855 was 20.35 cents per mile. Compared with this, the New York realizes a saving of over 74 per cent. The Mansfield and New York are both common wood-burning engines, 2 inch tubes 12 feet in length, altered by Mr. Griggs to coal burners by simply inserting an arch or bridge of fire-brick over the grate and under the tubes, across that part of the fire-box next to the latter. This arch or diaphragm extends towards the door of the fire-box perhaps one third of the way, and the effect is to throw forward or reverberate the flame and gases from the combustion of the thin stratum of coal that is projected under the bridge, and create an eddy in the fire-box, and thus mixing the air and gases to cause sufficient detention for a more complete combustion before the current enters the tubes. The coal, more heaped toward the door, gets heated up and partially coked before being pushed down under the heated fire-brick arch. This experiment certainly indicates a quite effective combustion, and it only remains to test whether it is the best way of applying the reverberating principle for the permanence of the parts of the boiler most exposed to the heat. A perfect coal-burner must combine with the most thorough combustion of the fuel, that distribution of the heat to the steam generating surface which will produce the least inequality of strain or wear on the boiler. [8]

Having revamped the firebox, Griggs in 1857 went to work on the locomotive's other end; he invented an improvement on the bonnet smokestack commonly in use. This was the famous spark-arresting "diamond" stack, which Griggs was the first man to mount on a locomotive. It was intended to enable wood-burning engines to be changed over to coal. It became so popular that before long it was used throughout the United States and remained practically a standard until the 1880s. The familiar lozenge-shaped outer shell provided space for an interior sheet metal deflecting cone which, with its point facing downward, broke up and dispersed any fiery particles of wood, bark or coal that survived the trip through the tubes. Griggs obtained patent number 18883 on both his firebrick arch and diamond stack on 15 December 1857. [9] Again with coal in mind, Griggs experimented with (though again, apparently, he did not invent) rocking and dumping grates. These consisted of parallel cast iron bars placed crosswise at the bottom of the firebox, their purpose being to support the fuel while it burned. The bars had projections or fingers on each side which dovetailed with the fingers of the adjacent bars. When the fireman rocked the bars by means of a lever in the cab the fingers disengaged one another and allowed the hot ashes to fall through into a metal ash pan which at the terminal could be emptied. [10] Griggs's experiments proved coal practical as a locomotive fuel in 1857, which was the year coal-burning engines reappeared in regular service on the Boston and Providence. [11] The use of coal necessitated, in the late 1850s and into the 1860s, a change from fireboxes, tubes and sheets made of copper to wrought iron, which stood up better and longer under the more intense heat. [12] Now we get to Mansfield’s Herbert Brown. As was the practice with wood, it had become customary to allow the coal fire in a locomotive to die each night, after which a new fire was kindled the following morning by igniting wood atop which coal was then added, a time-consuming process. One night in 1857 Brown, an intelligent fireman who lived in West Mansfield, tried preserving the coal fire overnight by banking it. For those too young to remember the era of coal-burning household furnaces, banking means putting in a layer of green coal and heaping it up along the sides and far end of the firebox so that the fire will have sufficient fuel to burn slowly over a longer period of time. A hot spot is left in the middle and the grates are not shaken, preserving a heavier than usual layer of ash at the base which retards combustion by shutting off most of the air from below. This procedure took an extra half hour when putting the engine to bed, but if done properly was worth the time spent, whether tending a household furnace or a locomotive. It also avoided those extreme changes from cold to hot inside the firebox that tended to loosen the connections of the boiler tubes to the back tube sheet. Brown's brainstorm worked, and after that the huge wood piles maintained at important stations along the Boston and Providence began steadily to diminish. [13] As an indication of how much the railroads had changed since the days of wood-burning locomotives, on 12 September 1884 the Old Colony had 6,705,177 pounds (3352.5 short tons) of engine coal piled in its yard at Mansfield, [14] where it was loaded into the tenders by means of a self-propelled steam crane equipped with a clamshell scoop.

Section 5 Notes

1. Coal imported from Pennsylvania, Virginia, Nova Scotia or even Britain was too costly. 2. White 1968-79: 89. 3. White 1968-79: 108; Westwood 1977-78: 216. 4. Mansfield, B&P no. 11, was built in 1854 for the Boston & New York Central R.R., their no. 156, Hamilton Willis, acquired by B&P Aug. 1855. 5. A low-volatile, high-carbon coal from Cumberland County in western Maryland. Cumberland coal was ranked as semibituminous, an obsolete term for coal midway between bituminous and anthracite. Its disadvantage in a locomotive firebox was that it tended to form clinker. 6. Hale was president of Boston & Worcester R.R. (Harlow 1946: 274.) 7. New York, the second B&P engine of that name, no. 19, was built by Griggs in Roxbury shop in 1854. 8. Railway Times, in Tenney 1857. 9. Baldwin Loco. Wks 1923: 56-7 in Westing 1966: 41-2; Fisher Sept. 1938: 79-80; White 1968-79: 88, 107 (a drawing of Griggs's patents), 108, 120, 449; Westwood 1977-78: 216. 10. Westwood 1877-78: 216. 11. Copeland 1936: 65; Belcher 1938: no. 7; Westwood 1977-78: 216. 12. Lozier 1986: 460. 13. Copeland 1936: 65. 14. Mansfield News, date unknown. At another time Old Colony had 7000 tons of coal piled at Mansfield.

6. Anthracite (“hard”) coal

In the 1830s Col. Stephen H. Long and William Norris in Philadelphia built three anthracite-burning locomotives for the Boston and Providence Rail Road. These engines were delivered to Providence by sea [1] As early as 1829 Long had designed a locomotive having a firebox in which Pennsylvania anthracite coal could be burned. [2] Not much had been learned even in the Keystone State about the use of anthracite, which, though clean and smokeless, is difficult to ignite and to keep burning, requiring heavy artificial draft and a skilled and conscientious fireman, and Long's first engine, when placed on trial by its builder, had to stop every mile to blow up its flagging steam pressure. [3] Refusing to be put off by this failure, Long, with Norris and others, in 1832 founded the Steam Carriage Company [4] and in 1833 [5] produced a second engine, called Black Hawk, [6] which was only marginally more successful. [7] This machine, delivered to Boston and Providence in 1834, [8] had a "detachable" firebox and, to provide sufficient draft for the anthracite coal, a smokestack towering 20 feet above rail level. The stack was hinged and could be lowered by the fireman when passing under bridges. [9] Black Hawk’s boiler contained two sets of tubes between which was a 20-inch combustion chamber for the gases and smoke. Attached to the boiler was a fan blower driven by exhaust steam which could be operated by the engineman “at pleasure.” [10] Black Hawk, which the railroad used in construction service, lasted about a year before it was lost in the quicksands of Sprague's Pond, Readville, Mass. [11] After Boston and Providence’s Black Hawk appeared, the American Steam Carriage Company was dissolved and restyled as Long and Norris. [12] These partners built four more engines for Boston and Providence: Lincoln, in service probably in 1834; Philadelphia, 1835; Canton, 1835; and Dedham, 1835. [13] Available records do not reveal which of these used hard coal, though Lincoln probably was one, and definite information about their performance is lacking. [14] All three Long and Norris anthracite burners bought by Boston and Providence failed to perform as hoped. [15] Lincoln, named for the Massachusetts governor, in 1834 was shipped back to Long and Norris, presumably for conversion to wood for fuel, and returned to the Boston and Providence in 1835. [16] Norris claimed that the engines worked well but that the firemen did not like handling anthracite. Since the Norrises were not above using deception to sell their products, that tale must be questioned. [17] They also may have been trying to act as salesman for the product of their state's coal mines. My feeling, however, is that the anthracite-burners were indeed unpopular with the firemen, who probably regarded them as monstrosities and perhaps did not know how or did not try to adapt their firing techniques to the unfamiliar qualities of hard coal. The man who had to shovel black diamonds into Black Hawk’s firebox very likely was not sorry when the engine slipped beneath the waters of Sprague’s Pond. Yet on the Boston and Worcester Rail Road in 1838, though most of their engines burned wood, it was found that some performed well with anthracite coal, getting 56 miles from a ton at a cost of 12.4 cents per mile. [18] Another drawback to anthracite is that it’s breakable, and by the time it was dumped into the engine tender after transport from the Pennsylvania mines and repeated handling, it contained much "slack" or fine coal, which was carried unburned from the firebox through the tubes and up the stack, creating smoke and wasting as much fuel as if the fireman had thrown every third or fourth scoopful overboard instead of through the fire door. [19] Add to this the cost of shipping anthracite from Pennsylvania, which was high, [20] and it probably was natural for Boston and Providence to revert to the familiar, cheap and easily available wood fuel, despite its propensity for showering sparks on the trackside forests and fields, the engine crew and (later) the passengers. A peculiar kind of graphitic anthracite coal was mined at the time in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Three Mansfield mines were only a half mile from the Boston and Providence main line. The coal contained the lowest percentage of organic sulfur and the highest percentage of carbon of any coal in the hemisphere and no explosive gas. [21] But the underground coal beds were steeply inclined, folded and crumpled and of variable thickness and quality. As a result, production was sporadic, supply uncertain, and the fuel contained so much incombustible mineral matter and was so difficult to ignite and of such low heat value that some critics called it “fireproof,” suggesting that at the final conflagration of the universe the safest shelter would be a Yankee coal mine. [22] Although in the 20th century the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad twice experimented unsuccessfully with Rhode Island coal, the Boston and Providence apparently never considered using it. [23] No doubt the cantankerous Philadelphia engines did much to prejudice the Boston and Providence against the worth of clean-burning Pennsylvania hard coal. It would be 45 years before the railroad resumed experimenting with burning anthracite, and then in only one locomotive. This engine, second number 2, William R. Robeson, a 4-4-0 type built by Rhode Island Locomotive Works in 1881, was regularly assigned to the “Shore Line Express,” popularly known as “the Lightning Train.” Apparently Robeson was built and drafted to burn anthracite, because the Mansfield newspaper carried the following item:

The shore line engine, Robeson, . . . is the new hard coal burner which has been running regularly on the shore line of late, and we understand giving excellent satisfaction.[24]

The Mansfield paper noted that, "Travel behind this engine, where one can have a car window open without being smothered with smoke and cinders, is a positive luxury” [25] and “Two and a half tons of coal are required to build a fire in the hard coal burner, 'Robeson' of the B. & P. RR." [26] Whether the engine spent its entire life as a hard coal burner I do not know; probably not, because railroad companies find it unhandy to maintain “one-of-a-kind” motive power. It was not difficult to convert a coal-burning engine from anthracite to bituminous; “some tweaking of the exhaust nozzle to change the drafting” might be sufficient. [27].

Section 6 Notes

1.Westwood 1977-78: 70. 2. Ringwalt 1888. 3. Westwood 1977-78: 69. Gerstner (1842-3/1998: 531) speaks of "that difficult-to-ignite fuel, anthracite," and notes that engines that burned hard coal needed "very large fireboxes" and artificial draft produced by a fan driven by exhaust steam. 4. White 1968-79: 454. 5. Westwood 1977-78: 69. Fisher (Sept. 1938: 80) says Black Hawk entered Boston & Providence service in 1835, but I favor Westwood, who provides details about its construction. 6. Boston & Providence's Black Hawk should not be confused with a more successful engine of the same name built by Matthias Baldwin for the Philadelphia & Trenton R.R. in May 1835 (White 1968-79: 270). 7. Ringwalt 1888 notes that Black Hawk "performed with only partial success on the Boston and Providence Railroad . . . ." 8. Speculation exists that Black Hawk possibly was rebuilt, and that previous to its delivery to Boston and Providence it had been rejected by Boston & Worcester (J.W. Swanberg, pers. comm. 2002, referring to R&LHS Bulletin 101, Oct. 1959). Confusion may exist with the engine Philadelphia, also built by Long and Norris, which Harlow (1946: 97, 97n, quoting Fisher) says may have been tried and rejected by Boston & Worcester before coming to Boston & Providence. 9. Westwood 1977-78: 60, 69-70. Long's trick firebox may have been a predecessor of Matthias Baldwin's detachable firegrate, patented Oct. 1836. Baldwin's brainstorm was that, to make sure a coal-burning engine would always have a bright clean fire, a new grate with a fresh fire already burning would be set between the rails at each station and hoisted by means of levers, when the incoming engine stopped, to replace the dirty old fire and grate. (A.M. Levitt pers, comm. 1999.) I’ve seen no evidence that this invention was put to use. 10. Anon., no date. 11. Fisher, Sept. 1938: 80 says simply, "Lost with load of dirt in the quicksands of Sprague Pond, Readville." As to the date of its loss, Westwood (1977-78: 69) tells us that Black Hawk "ran barely a year" after being built in 1833. 12. Westwood 1977-78: 69. 13. Chase 2012. Fisher (Sept. 1938: 80) claims Lincoln entered Boston & Providence service in 1835. Edson (1981: xvii) says Lincoln was rebuilt in 1834. I have assumed that this engine, like Black Hawk, probably was built in 1833, and that 1834 is the date it was converted from burning anthracite to using wood. It was gone from the Boston & Providence active locomotive roster by 1838 (Fisher 1943-98: 9). One of the Long and Norris engines was received by Boston & Providence at Providence 1 June 1835, but which one is not stated {Providence Journal and Boston Advertiser 6 June 1835, courtesy of D. Forbes.) 14. Westwood 1977-78: 69-70. 15. White 1968-79: 88. 16. Fisher Sept. 1938: 80; Edson 1981: xvii; Fisher 1943-98: 9. 17. Westwood 1977-78: 70. There is no question that anthracite, because of its slow ignition and burning and its need for heavy draft, qualities that differ markedly from those of bituminous coal, in areas outside Pennsylvania and England was an unfamiliar fuel that few if any knew how to manage properly. Even in Pennsylvania the first shipments of anthracite were referred to as “stone coal” and were broken up for sidewalk paving. The early American railroads made very little use of anthracite. By 1840 the Philadelphia & Columbia and the Beaver Meadow railroads in Pennsylvania, being near or (in the latter case) in the hard coal fields, were burning anthracite in most of their engines, although exhaust steam blowers had to be installed to provide sufficient draft for the fires. White (1968-79: 87) claims that the only coal mined in the U.S. before 1840 was anthracite, which fell short of providing the rapid combustion needed in a locomotive, and if bituminous had been more easily available the conversion from wood to coal might have arrived earlier than it did. But Taylor (1848: xix) states that in 1840, 985,828 long tons (of 2240 pounds) of bituminous coal and 863,489 long tons of anthracite were mined in the U.S. The following long tons of coal were imported by sea into Boston during the five years 1836-1840: anthracite, chiefly from Pennsylvania, 383,439; Virginia and Pennsylvania bituminous 23,370; Scottish and English bituminous 49,653; Nova Scotia and Cape Breton bituminous 189,898; total bituminous coal 258,921. (Taylor 1848: 151.) 18. Despite a search of the sources cited, the origin of this claim has been lost. 19. ICS 1920-45: 7-8. 20. Gerstner (1842-43: 661) tells, surprisingly, of one case in the Mid-Atlantic States where wood-burning locomotives were operated at 47% the cost of Norris anthracite-burners. In the Philadelphia area, however, where anthracite was cheap compared to wood, the use of hard coal was thought to save money (op. cit.: 578). On the Patterson & Hudson River R.R., because a ton of coal delivered by canal cost the same as a cord of wood, coal was much less used (op. cit.: 531). 21. P.C. Lyons, Coal Div., U.S. Geological Survey, pers. comm. 2000. 22. Chase 1997a, 1997b, 1998. However, the Mansfield mines closed in 1854 and would not open again until 1909; while the mine in Portsmouth, R.I., though producing coal at the time, was inconveniently situated for Boston and Providence use. 23. Chase 2012. 24. Mansfield News 19 Aug. 1881. 25. Mansfield News 26 Aug. 1881. Hard coal, because of its smaller percentage of volatile combustible matter, can be burned at a higher rate than soft coal without producing black smoke. The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western R.R. famously capitalized on the clean-burning qualities of hard coal when, beginning in 1904, they popularized an advertising jingle about a spotless fictional female passenger: “Phoebe Snow, dressed in white, Rides the Road of Anthracite.” 26. Mansfield News 30 Sept. 1881. The amount of coal needed just to build up a fire would seem to be another disadvantage. Robeson was scrapped 16 Jan. 1913, after having carried Old Colony R.R. number 775 and New Haven R.R. number 1704 (Chase 2012). 27. E.J. Ozog, pers. comm. 2012.

7. Oil

The reasons for converting locomotives from burning coal to oil were numerous. Oil storage takes up less space and requires less servicing manpower than coal. Oil cranes can be installed adjacent to water columns so both can be taken into an engine’s tender at the same time. Cinder pits, and ash grates and front end netting on engines can be done away with. The fireman’s work is simpler because oil produces 25% more steam than coal, big engines can be fired as easily as small ones and constant steam pressure can be kept up regardless of grade conditions. The heat value of oil is constant whereas coal heat value varies with its ash content and rank. Turnaround time at terminals is reduced because no cinders have to be removed and the fire and tubes need no cleaning. And oil causes no sparks. [1] The first oil well in the United States was drilled in Pennsylvania by a former New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad conductor in 1859. The next large oil discovery occurred in Ohio in 1885-86. [2] But well before the Ohio strike, the Boston and Providence Rail Road in 1873 conducted an experiment in burning “coal oil,” a term which at the time was used (incorrectly) as a synonym for petroleum.

As similar experiments are being made elsewhere, it may be well to mention that in May last, lease was given to Messrs. Seagraves & Robinson, to alter the old engine “Norfolk” at their own expense, with a view of substituting coal oil (petroleum) for coal, as a generator of steam in locomotives. On the 27th of September, a train was run from Boston to Canton, and back to Readville, a distance of twenty miles, with this engine, burning petroleum. At a later date, the “Norfolk” was set fire to by the combustible fuel, while further adaptations were being tested. Little injury was done to the locomotive, but the experimenters were somewhat singed. Apparently encouraged by their experience, they are still engaged in the endeavor to carry their theories to a safe and practical result. [3]

A second experiment with burning "petroleum" as locomotive fuel came in November 1886 with (it was reported) "good success.” [4] A burner for crude petroleum invented by B.A. Moody of Dedham, Mass., was applied to a condemned Boston and Providence engine at Hinkley Locomotive Works in Boston. [5] The success was not "good" enough, however, to warrant continuing the tests or converting Boston and Providence motive power from coal to oil.

Section 7 Notes

1. ICS 1912-44: 3-4. 2. ICS 1912-44: 1. 3. Boston & Providence Ann. Rep't for 1874 in Fleischer c.2012 and White 1968-79: 90. 4. Fleischer c.2012. Dedham Transcript 27 Nov. 1886. 5. Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers 1887. To be burned smokelessly oil must be “atomized,” introduced into a hot firebox in a fine spray. How Moody’s burner operated I have no record.

Special thanks

Richard A. Fleischer, Danuta Forbes, Alan M. Levitt, Dr. Paul C. Lyons, Edward J. Ozog, J.W. Swanberg.

Sources cited

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------, 1997b, Graphitic coal mines in Rhode Island and Massachusetts: unpub., deposited in R.I. Historical Soc., Providence, R.I., and Mansfield Public Library, Mansfield, Mass. ------, 1998, Coal and coal mining in Mansfield, Bristol County, Massachusetts: unpub., deposited in Mansfield Public Library, Mansfield, Mass. Chase, Harry, 2009, Where did our woods go?: Mansfield News, Mansfield, Mass., 13 Mar. 2009. ------, Mar. 2012, Revised date index of locomotives of the Boston and Providence Rail Road: unpub., deposited in Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Univ. of Conn., Storrs, Ct. ------, 2012, Rhode Island coal failed in New Haven Railroad locomotives: unpub., deposited in Archives and Special Collections, Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, Univ. of Conn., Storrs, Ct. 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