NOVEMBER 1999

    Credit for this month's topic goes to Greg Stubbings and Andrew Jeannes, both whom I have spoken with during the past month or so.  These two regular readers of this column have expressed an interest in learning more about retail coal traffic on the railways of Southern Ontario during the steam-diesel transition era.   Before diving into that topic, I urge anyone else who has a specific interest to contact me at  ian@canadianbranchline.com, and I'll do my best to cover it.  For that matter, for anyone who reads this column regularly or infrequently, please drop me a message just to say hello, and tell me what your area of interest is.

    For our model railways in the 1946-59 era, with minor exceptions, anthracite (or hard coal) is mined exclusively in Eastern Pennsylvania, primarily for domestic and light commercial heating use.  The coal is loaded sequentially at the mines from tipples over a series of tracks into hopper cars, beginning with the smallest size and progressing to the largest.  At the outside track, the largest size, known as foundry or broken coal in 4" to 7" chunks, is used for industrial processes such as scrap melting and blast furnaces.  Next in line is egg or furnace coal, about 3" in size, which is used for hand-fired furnaces and blast furnaces.   In the 1-5/8" to 2-7/16" size range is stove coal, appropriately named.  Nut or chestnut coal, with chunks between 13/16" and 1-5/8"  is next, used for space heating.  From 9/16" to 13/16", pea coal is used for space heating and water heaters.  Below that, buckwheat (5/16" to 9/16"), rice or buckwheat #2 (3/16" to 5/16"), barley or buckwheat #3 (3/32" to 3/16"), and buckwheat #4 (3/64" to 3/32") are used for space heating and automatic stoker furnaces.  Smallest of all is buckwheat #5 (less than 3/64"), used for making briquettes (cheap, pressed coal), and thus would never show up in a hopper car on our layouts.

    For your geographical area of interest, city directories and/or telephone books are available at libraries and archives on microfilm.  Browsing through the classified sections of these resources will provide all you need to know for specific years and retail coal company names, and brands which were carried.  For the most part, retail coal dealers were named after the owner, and names often changed every few years.  For example, city directories indicate that the Cornish Coal Company in Stratford became the Anguish Coal Company between March 1947 and March 1948.   As the decade of the 1950s progressed, retail coal company names were often modified to reflect fuel oil service as well.  Thus, the Palmer Coal Company of Guelph may become the Palmer Fuel Company.

    Then, of course, there are the brand names:  Blue Coal (Glen Alden Coal Company), Cavalier Stoker Coal, Consol Cavalier, Red Jacket Lump, Famous Harlan Seam Stoker Coal, Famous Reading Anthracite (Philadelphia & Reading Coal Company), Genuine Scotch Anthracite (expensive coal from Scotland by ship for a brief time in the 1930s), Sterling Coal and Lackawanna Coal (Hudson Coal Company--Delaware & Hudson Railway), Jeddo-Highland Coal, Lehigh Valley Anthracite (Lehigh Valley Railway), Morgan Anthracite, Old Company's Lehigh (Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company), Olga Pocahontas, Pittson Anthracite (from Pittson, Alberta), Patsy Home Stoker Coal (Princess Elkhorn Mines) and Susquehanna Anthracite.

    In terms of actual tonnage of anthracite mined in Eastern Pennsylvania, from the 1930s until 1948 this typically ranges from 50 to 60 million tons per year.  With oil furnaces coming into use, there was a sharp drop in 1949 to about 43 million tons, and a more-or-less steady decline thereafter to about 20.5 million tons in 1959.  Thus, we can see the relative car volumes over the years when we decide to replicate these on our layouts.  For computation purposes, the average home in Southern Ontario burns 2-3 tons per year, and to that must be added the small industrial users of hard coal to arrive at an estimate of carloadings to the communities represented by our layouts.  As it was quite common for customers to stock up in spring and summer months, retail coal shipments occurred year-round.

    In Eastern Pennsylvania, there was a close relationship between the railways and the mines, which in many cases shared ownership.  As well, there was a fair degree of co-operation among the competitors, and this extended to car-pooling arrangements.  For our model railways, the chief road names which should be showing up in our retails coal yards are the Central Railroad of New Jersey, Delaware & Hudson, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, the Erie Railroad, Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania Railroad and the Reading.  Others commonly seen from time to time were the Lehigh & New England and the New York Central.  These cars would cross into Canada at regular interchange points; for Southwestern Ontario this point was usually Black Rock, New York.

    As for representing the coal itself, many manufacturers such as Brian Martin's Hamilton Model Works provide scale-sized coal corresponding to various grades.  If you are adventurous, and wish to load your hopper cars loose as I do, you may be interested in purchasing a larger quantity of coal.  Strangely enough, anthracite today is used for water filtration systems, and at least one company (based in Brantford, Ontario) catering to this need supplies scale-sized coal for our purposes for about $5 per five-gallon can!

    There will be more discussion of this fascinating topic in future months.

Ian Wilson
November 1, 1999

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