Coal grades in city coal yards

[OldEastRR]

I was wondering if there was a wide variety of coal sold out of those old coal yards. Or if only one or two size grades. I assume that if the coal was mostly for home use it was about fist-sized or so. That's what I remember hauling up from the coal bin in the basement when I was a kid, for the kitchen stove.
I can crush sandblasting grit and seive it for various sizes.

[wazzou]

When my family had a Coal Company in SW Washington, they received carloads of Coal from Mines in both Utah and Wyoming but kept them separated for consumer consumption. 
They burned a little differently and were priced differently, though I do recall on occasion they delivered a blend to some customers upon request.
Lump Coal as we called it, like large rocks, was delivered by truckload to the yard and mostly picked up by customers, sold by the pound.

[Maletrain]

At some times in the east, I think there was also "hard" coal (anthracite), and "soft coal" (bituminous) sold to retail customers.  In the area and era that I model  (B&O west side of the Allegheny Divide in the early to mid 1950s) the hard coal would probably come to the dealer in Reading hoppers and the soft coal in B&O hoppers, or maybe some other local short line hoppers.

But, I don't know how many sizes for either.  (And my grandfather used to sell it - wish I had paid more attention 50 years ago!)

[Chris333]

Think 2 types of coal could be exactly the same, but kept separate because one is "Joe Blow coal" and the other is "Blow Joe coal".

[Mark5]

I don't know what kind of coal you'd find at the local coal purveyer (I'm not that old) but back east coal came in various sizes (7 sizes in the table that follows in this link):

https://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/abcs-of-coal/

I understand that back when coal was commonly used for heat that there were trucks that brought the coal around somewhat similar to what you see with oil heat today.

I remember seeing cars full of the rather large "lump" coal but the smaller sizes were more common in the 1960s/70s when I was watching coal drags on the N&W.

Mark

[Tristan Ashcroft]

My father (born in 1942 in Altoona, PA) remembers coal yards when he was a little kid having maybe 4 or 5 options (maybe a couple grades of anthracite and a couple grades of bituminous?).  And as he got older, as coal was going away, a smallish yard might have just 2 options, anthracite or bituminous (no sense of the grades at that point).  And there'd be empty bins for the grades they used to stock but didn't have anymore.  His sense is the number of options generally varied with the size of the coal yard with the big ones having more (seems reasonable). 

Here's hoping that helps.

[x600]

OOOO, OOOO, OOOO, I know this! (Hand thrust way in the air repeatedly)

One of my new chores when my brother went off to college was to take care of the stoker fed coal fired furnace at our house in Scranton, Pa. "The Capitol of the Northern Anthracite Field".
I was 8, 1963......
Watch the water glass, keep the hopper (55Gal. drum) full. Let Dad know when I took the bottom board from the coal bin.
There was a big sticker on the post next to the coal bin with the phone number of the coal dealer and the sizes available.
I even got to call and order coal a few times.
Note: this is relative to home use Anthracite, and only the names of the sizes are from memory.

Barley  3/32-3/16 Coarse sand

Rice    3/16-5/16  Pencil eraser

Buckwheat  5/16-9/16  Dime

Pea   9/16-13/16   Quarter

Chestnut  13/16-1 5/8  Golf ball

Stove   1 5/8- 2 7/16  Baseball

Egg   2 7/16- 3 1/4  Softball

Our coal bin held 5 tons of "Peakhole" and If we were getting a delivery I had to stick our chute out of the cellar window above the coal bin
to a strap under the front porch,then make sure the boards were in the slot in the doorway to the coal bin other wise the coal would spill out into the
the hallway, and I would have to shovel it back into the bin. The truck had a scissor type lift body with dividers, 5tons was half the load and the driver
would back up to the porch and stick his chute into the "window in the porch lattice, and let it rip!! Whe the bin was full, it was higher than the top of the hopper and all I had to do was shove the
coal over to it.
  I could tell when we were doing well, because the coal bin would not get too low when we got another 5 tons and it would spill over the boards (about 5 ft tall)
and spill into the hall. When things were tough I would have to scrape around the walls and gather up enough coal to fill the hopper and we might just get 1 or 2 tons.
The stoker worm (screw) went into a hole in the bottom of the hopper and it was really bad if I ever went to fill the hopper and the worm was showing.

 This is probably more than anyone cared to know, but when my mind went to the name of the sizes, all this other stuff came down the memory chute, too

"Yeh, Stashu, my fadder wants ya ta bring us 5 ton a peakhole. "   

Greg O

[Chris333]

So how much of that dust is still in your lungs?

[peteski]

"Yeh, Stashu, my fadder wants ya ta bring us 5 ton a peakhole. "   

Greg O

. . . he said with a thick Polish accent. 

Growing up in Poland, in the '60s and '70s, we also used coal as fuel at grandma's, but I don't remember much about it.  The furnace ("piec" in Polish) was up in the room and in the morning grandma used to bring a bucket of coal to feed it into the furnace. Of course first she had to shovel out the ash from the the previous day.

[MVW]

OOOO, OOOO, OOOO, I know this! (Hand thrust way in the air repeatedly)



Greg O

Horshack, is that you? 

Jim

[OldEastRR]

Hey, thanks. It makes sense that there's be at least a few different sizes depending on the furnace or stove using it. For my folk's kitchen stove, it was "Stove" size, as I remember the size about what's listed. And for a stoker type furnace of x600 there'd be a smaller size needed to get through the auger. Neat. I wonder what the finest grades were for -- that small in a hot directed flame they would burn up almost immediately, making a constant heat, so maybe they were used in small forging processes?
So my coal trestle will have at least 3 sizes of coal (as I have a small forging company in my town) -- and neat, because of the two types of coal I can have different railroad's hoppers (one PRR, one C&O) delivering each. Plus an oil tanker for fuel oil!

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Something else to keep in mind with all this old school coal business.

As I was looking at photos and videos of this era, I was shocked by the mixup of hoppers all over the place.

I grew up in the unit train era where loose coal cars were a rarity, so my brain (and I'm guessing a bunch of yours) always just thought about the hopper as coming from the originating road. But boy, was I wrong.

Looking at photos of anthracite breakers you'd see a variety of roads hoppers. Yes, the majority might be the home road, but there were plenty of others in there.

Hoppers definitely followed the same rules as boxcars back in the day.

Oh, so there was a load of anthracite delivered to the local coal yard in a Reading hopper? When it's empty, send it to the local tipple and let the army of clerks all figure it out.

Basically, don't feel compelled to follow super strict rules about "Anthracite in LV cars only, bituminous in B&O" when you're planning your movements.

One thing to keep in mind though: car size might matter. For example, is the local coal dealer setup to be able to handle a 70 ton triple hopper? Or going back further, a PRR H21a? It simply might not fit.

Hell, even the WM had that problem with it's export coal dumper in Port Covington.

[OldEastRR]

Yeah, it's definitely a 35' two-bay hopper trestle -- the bays are set up for that length car. But as for roads  I'd still like an excuse to stick a C&O hopper in the NH freight local.

[thomasjmdavis]

Here's a bunch of midwestern road hoppers in downtown Toronto in 1950....so yep, they got around.
http://www.railpictures.ca/upload/the-downtown-toronto-skyline-and-railway-corridor-is-pictured-looking-east-of-the-spadina-avenue-overpass-in-1950-at-the-bottom-right-illinois-central-louisville-and-nashville-and-cei-hop

sorry, the link would not let me post the photo here

I think hoppers traveled simply because the large commodity buyers would order from whatever mine could supply the particular grade they were looking for at the lowest price.  So, Orient #1 might load 30 cars for Toronto, 50 headed to a port on the Mississippi for barge loading, and 25 headed to a power plant in Wisconsin.  Into C&EI or whatever hoppers were most readily available.

[peteski]

Here you go Tom.