Coaling tower

A coaling tower, coal stage, coaling plant or coaling station is a facility used to load coal as fuel into railway steam locomotives. Coaling towers were often sited at motive power depots or locomotive maintenance shops.^[1]

A steel coal tower at Grosmont Motive Power Depot, United Kingdom, 2007

In the early years of railways, coal was shovelled by hand into locomotive tenders. The first attempt in Britain to replace manual labour by gravity in the refuelling process was at Shildon, County Durham, where coal drops were built by the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1847.^[2]

In time, railway companies constructed more elaborate coaling towers, made from wood, steel, or reinforced concrete (ferroconcrete).^[3][4] In almost all cases, coaling stations used a gravity-fed method, with one or more large storage bunkers for the coal elevated on columns above the railway tracks, from which the coal could be released to slide down a chute into the waiting locomotive's coal storage area.

The method of lifting the bulk coal into the storage bin varied. The coal was sometimes dropped from a hopper car into a pit below tracks adjacent to the tower. From the pit a conveyor-type system used a chain of motor-driven buckets to raise the coal to the top of the tower where it would be dumped into the storage bin. A skip-hoist system sometimes lifted a single large bin for the same purpose.^[5][6] Some facilities lifted entire railway coal trucks or wagons and tipped their contents into the hopper. Sanding pipes were often mounted on coaling towers to allow simultaneous replenishment of the sand box on a locomotive.

During the 1950s and 1960s, as railways in many countries replaced steam with diesel and electric traction, the need for coaling towers declined, and eventually vanished completely. Of the more than 100 ferroconcrete examples built in Britain, those at Immingham and Carnforth were the final two left standing, the former being demolished in 2018.^[7] The Carnforth coaling tower, built by the London, Midland and Scottish Railway in 1939, is a Grade II* listed building.^[8] In the United States, many reinforced concrete towers remain^{[needs update]} in place if they do not interfere with operations, due to the high cost of demolition incurred with such massive structures.^[1][9]

Gallery

• 
  Temuco, Chile, 2012
• 
  Tarnowskie Góry, Poland, 2016
• 
  SAR Class 25NC 3437 (4-8-4) at the coal stage at Beaconsfield, South Africa, 2009
• 
  Carnforth, United Kingdom, 1999
• 
  Immingham, United Kingdom, 2013
• 
  Cedar Hill Yard, Connecticut, 2022
• 
  Locomotive 2576 over the ash pit at the roundhouse and coaling station, now demolished, at the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yards, Chicago, Illinois, December 1942
• 
  Collinwood Yard, Cleveland, Ohio, now demolished, c.1968
• 
  Grand Trunk Western Railroad Grand Haven Coal Tipple (coaling tower), Grand Haven, Michigan, 2006
• 
  Penrith, New South Wales, Australia, now demolished, 1939

See also

• Grand Trunk Western Railroad Grand Haven Coal Tipple: A coaling tower on the National Register of Historic Places

• Coalinga, California: A town founded as a coaling tower operation.
• Motive power depot
• Roundhouse

References

1. "Coal facility". Archived from the original on 29 September 2010. Retrieved 27 August 2010.
2. Longhorn, Danny (22 December 2022). "Historic England Research Discovers Locomotive Coal-refuelling Stage Is First of Its Kind in Britain". Rail Business Daily. Wakefield: Business Daily Group. Retrieved 25 December 2022.
3. Meadows, David Stanley (1908). Locomotive Coaling Stations (BSc). Chicago: University of Illinois. Retrieved 26 December 2022 – via Internet Archive.
4. Schofield, R. B. (1997). "Concrete, Use of". In Simmons, Jack & Riddle, Gordon (eds.). The Oxford Companion to British Railway History from 1603 to the 1990s. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 103–104. ISBN 0192116975. Retrieved 25 December 2022 – via Internet Archive.
5. Dixon, Thomas W. Jr. (2002). Steam Locomotive Coaling Stations and Diesel Locomotive Fueling Facilities. Lynchburg, Virginia: TLC Publishing, Inc. ISBN 1883089778.
6. Locomotive Coaling Stations: Yard Storage Systems, Cinder Conveyers, Sand Plants; Bulletin No. 73001. Reprint by TLC Publishing, Sterling, VA: Fairbanks, Morse & Co. 1935. pp. 4–5.
7. Hewitt, Sam (3 April 2019). "The Coaling Plant story: Towers of Strength – Part 1". The Railway Hub. Horncastle: Mortons Media Group. Retrieved 26 December 2022.
8. "Carnforth: The Coaling Plant". Historic England. 2015. List Entry Number 1078213. Retrieved 26 December 2022.
9. "Unusual Ash Pits Feature New Engine Terminal". Railway Age. Vol. 73, no. 4. New York: Simmons-Boardman Pub. Co. 22 July 1922. pp. 154–159. Retrieved 25 December 2022 – via HathiTrust.