Re: Coal on the D&S

John C Wrote:
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> The coal size was not something the railroad was
> ignorant about, and efforts were made to get
> properly sized coal over many years.

My former employer found that the size of the coal available today is tied to the technique the mine uses to mine it, which is tied to the mine's majority customer's size demand (and we, at 900 tons per year were most certainly not the majority customer). Decades ago, we got ungraded old-fashioned run-of-mine coal, ranging in size from dust to lumps the size of desks (no kidding). We could have gotten sized coal, but that would have cost more, and due to lack of demand, the only size available was smaller than a golf ball, a little too small for hand firing, so the hostlers would break up the very large lumps with the backhoe (if they liked the fireman), and the firemen kept the slice bar handy of large lumps that showed up in the tender. Speaking for myself, if it would go through the fire door, it went in the fire, though I did have some tense moments where the borderline lump got stuck halfway through the door and had to be pounded the rest of the way through so I could resume firing.

Starting around twenty five years ago, the mine's machinery changed to a "long wall machine" which mills and sizes the coal as it grinds it off of the coal face inside the mine. We would still get run-of-mine coal, but because to the machine used, we never saw anything larger than a base ball, but since that was what was available, that's what we used.