Steam & Excursion > Sure The Fuel Was Cheap, But Look How Much Work Went Into It!

If any of you have had the privilege of firing a wood-burning locomotive you will relate to the attached photo.  I can assure you it is not for the faint of heart.

Back in the early days of steam railroading, wood burning locomotives were quite common all across the country  Most railroads finally converted to coal or oil by the early turn of the century.  However, there were still a number of road that lasted into the 1940's that clung to wood as the primary fuel source for their locomotives.

One such line was the Michigan-California Lumber Co. of Pino Grande, California.  Even into the 1940's many of their woods locomotives were still fueled with wood as we see here with M-C Shay #10.  The company had a ready supply of slab pieces from the Pino Grande mill that they felt was still the cheapest way to fuel their aging fleet of geared logging engines.  While the wood fuel was readily available, the work that went into gathering it, stacking it and then loading it into the engines was enormous.

Just look at the work involved in maintaining the huge wood pile at Pino Grande as shown here and the similar piles along the right-of-way in the woods.  This dry pine would burn fast and hot in the little engines thus requiring frequent stops to re-wood so the log train could proceed on it's way.

Yes, it was cheap to fuel engines this way, but clearly only so long as labor was chaep.

Martin



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 10/01/15 04:27 by LoggerHogger.

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Wood burning steamers......it is interesting to me where these topics pop up.  I understand that the cutting of trees to fuel the steamers, probably mostly paddle wheelers, really opened up the views in the Columbia Gorge.  Now the tree growth is limiting some of the scenic views.   I remember the slab burners that heated some of the schools in the Hood River Valley......    Arlen

Back in the mid-1960s, we were coming back from a family excursion to San Bernardino.  I had told my daughters that one of my colleagues at Bell & Howell in Pasadena and a friend of his owned a real steam locomotive, and this was a chance to show it to them.  Rogue River Valley RR 1 was a 12-ton Porter 0-4-0 woodburner that Stan Garner and Bill Oden kept on an abandoned spur in Alta Loma CA (part of Rancho Cucamonga now).  So we detoured to the site and found that Stan had Old Number One fired up.  My girls got a cab ride in the ancient steamer and even chucked wood into the firebox.