Combined Coal and Oil Burners

[Chris Newman]

In my “Members’ Forum” topic talking about my coffee afternoon with Robin Barnes, I mentioned that he had told me something about German and Romanian locomotives that carried both coal and fuel oil in their tenders and could operate with either fuel. He followed up with an email today saying:

[quote] DB Class 10 4-6-2 (see attachments). These were two powerful three-cylinder locomotives built for DB by Krupp in 1957; 10 001 was withdrawn in June 1968 and now is at the Neuenmarkt-Wirsberg museum; 10 002 was withdrawn January 1967, served as stationary boiler at Ludwigshafen until scrapped at Offenburg in April 1972.

As built, 10 001 was equipped for dual coal and oil firing, the four-axle tender holding 9 tonnes of coal and 4.5 cubic metres of heavy oil, also 40 cubic metres of water. The coal was carried at the front of the tender, firing assisted by a coal pusher (bit like the ‘Duchess’), and oil to the rear. The coal bunker had a sliding cover. So far as can make out (limitations of language) oil firing was intended as supplementary, able to relieve the fireman of up to 30% of his workload. At some point the tender was converted to oil only, to match 10 002 which had been so-equipped from new.

They were very sophisticated locomotives; the footplate crew were even provided with foot warmers (the cab was fully enclosed). They seem to have performed well enough, sadly just too late off the
starting blocks.

There’s probably a good English-language account of all this somewhere, but for the moment I can’t think of where that might be.

As to Romania, I quote from Dusty Durrant’s The Steam Locomotives of Eastern Europe:-
Romanian engines burn a mixture of coal and oil fuel, tenders having a bunker and fuel tank in tandem above the water tank. On the 2-6-2T a normal bunker is fitted behind the cab, but the oil is contained in two small sloping and tapered containers above the side tanks [he doesn’t describe the firebox arrangements, unfortunately].

However, Chris Bailey in The Railways of Romania tells us:- The majority of Romanian locomotives were either built, or converted, to run on an oil and coal mixture. The coal is used to start the fire, then oil is sprayed onto it. The method, invented by a Romanian engineer, Cosmovici, enables the crew to increase the steam pressure rapidly when needed to cope with gradients and so on. [unquote]

Robin sent me scans a couple of pages about the DB Class 10 Pacifics from a German publication (Dampflok-Report 4). However the website forum isn’t set up yet to handle images so I’ll have to email them to anyone who is interested, along with a (crude) Google translation of the German text – which doesn’t seem to say much more than what Robin told me.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Chris Newman.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Chris Newman.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Chris Newman.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Chris Newman.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Chris Newman.
• This topic was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Chris Newman.

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