What do they mean by bad coal/bad oil?

jordon412

33 Year Old Railfan
What does bad fuel, as in coal or oil, mean? What effect does it has on the locomotive? Why is considered bad?
 
Sometimes when we get bad oil where I work, it doesn't burn quite right in the locomotives. It burns, but not as hot and not as cleanly. It leaves a large amount of crud built up in the boiler tubes and creates a large amount of smoke (kinda unusual from an oil burner). I would assume the bad coal has a similar problem.
 
I have Steam Across America on video and I know that during the filming of the video Cotton Belt 819 received a load of 'bad oil', which resulted in thick, black plumes of smoke. I searched for 'cotton belt 819', 'cotton belt 819 with bad oil', and 'cotton belt 819 with bad fuel' on YouTube, with no luck. If I could have found the video, I could have shown an example of what I was asking about. Also, during the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum's 2015 Railfest, Southern 4501 developed some problems on the Sunday morning Chattanooga-Cleveland excursions, which resulted in her being taking off and replaced by veterans unit SD60E #6920 for the afternoon excursion. I don't know if there's a connection, but I've heard two different reasons why. Either it was a load of 'bad coal' or that problems with the grates developed during the morning excursion. I also must note that I have a picture of 4501 having the front of the smokebox open with a guy in there with a rake, shoveling out soot from the smokebox.

@flyboy559:
I know that crews often toss some sand into the firebox of oil-burners and the sand goes thru the boiler flues, removing some of that crud. This sounds like a dumb question, but, can you just use more sand to clean the flues or is that not possible to do without making the situation worse? Such as causing a blockage in a flue?
 
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For the most part you can just use more sand to clear the flues but if it gets plugged you have to open up the smoke box and try to get the blockage out. Usually a long rod with some sort of scraping or scrubbing attachment on the end.
 
Does bad coal mean it has a lot of clinkers'' Steam engines I don't think have coal mills in them. So I would imagine you could get a lot of non burnable material in the firebox.
 
Poor quality (bad) coal can refer to high sulfur, high polluting coal. But it can also refer to coal that tends to crumple rather than remain in big chunks when mined.

In 1903 the Pacific Coal Company, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway, opened a coalmine and established the coal-mining town of Bankhead, just north of Banff, Alberta (http://www.ghosttowns.com/canada/alberta/bankhead.html ). The mine supplied coal for the Canadian Pacific Railway’s steam locomotives. About 200 to 300 men were employed there with the output of coal running between 500 to 600 tons per day.

But the coal was of poor quality, tending to crumble when it was mined and moved. This made it difficult to stoke the firebox of steam locomotives to efficiently generate heat. As new steam locomotives demanded better (hotter) fires in the firebox the coal produced by the Bankhead mine became a problem. The Canadian Pacific Railway and the Pacific Coal Company tried to rectify the problem by building a coking oven at Bankhead. But it was expensive to produce coke as oil need to make coke (charcoal briquettes) had to be brought in from some distance. Because of the shale-like and unstable nature of the coal it was mined by tunneling underneath the seams. A mine collapse, a strike, and the unprofitability of the coal/coke production lead to the mine’s closure in 1922.

Cayden
 
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