Re: Sumpter Valley Christmas on YouTube...

In the summer with dry, good quality wood an experienced crew will burn about 1 cord per 2 round trips (11 miles plus 1 mile switching per trip). With low BTU wet fir we burned a cord per trip on these runs. The 4' length works well for us and it seems to be mostly what they burned in the logging days, I have found old wood piles along logging spurs that are 4 foot length. They were cut and stacked by contract wood cutters. These days we have the wood delivered to our wood yard in 4' lengths and our crews split it into manageable sizes on a custom built hydraulic wood splitter. At a minimum the wood is handled 4 times by the time it is split, placed in the metal racks, loaded into the engine, then thrown into the fire box.

Water consumption again varies depending on the skill of the engineer and fireman. It usally goes through 1/3 of a tank for about 400-500 gallons per 12 mile round trip.