Coal Chute

Coal Chute. . , Lady Elgin Burns Wood , Railways without access to on-line coal mines in the early 1850s were forced to rely on wood fuel. The first steam powered locomotive in Ontario, the Lady Elgin Engine No. 1, relied on wood to chug along the new Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Union Railroad between Toronto and Allandale. She would have required four times more wood than coal to fuel the firebox that boiled the water to create steam. , Conversion to Coal , As the transcontinental railway system was built, access to coal supplies became reliable. In the 1870s, most locomotives were converted to use soft bituminous coal and could be seen puffing out black smoke from the narrower smokestacks of the engine. Each refueling station on the line erected a tall coaling tower or chute and surrounded it with huge stockpiles of coal. , Conveyor Belts and Chutes , Most coaling towers emptied the coal from a hopper car into a pit below the tracks next to the tower. From the pit, a conveyor with a chain of motor driven buckets lifted the coal up to the top of the tower where it was dumped into a large coal storage bunker. The coal was released to slide down a chute into the waiting locomotive's coal storage area. , Sanding pipes mounted on the tower allowed for simultaneous filling of the locomotive's sand box. , Elevator System , As a homemaker, you might not have been happy about the expansion of the Allandale rail yard in 1906, when the Grand Trunk Railway erected an 18.3-metre (60-foot), four pocket coaling tower fed by an elevator system. Each time the bail chain was pulled, several thousand pounds of coal crashed into the waiting tender (fuel storage car) below. This action created a cloudburst of dirty black dust that coated everything around, including any laundry drying on backyard clotheslines nearby. , Depression Era Help , Every few nights, a coal drag with 20 to 30 loaded hoppers arrived to replenish the chute and stockpiles. If the supply was threatened, such as during both World Wars and several coal miners' strikes, enormous mounds of coal were assembled on every available space along the rail line. Without fuel, passenger and freight service would come to a halt. , In the tough times of the 1930s, the railway company allowed Allandale yard workers to take as much coal as they could carry to heat their homes. , The landmark coaling tower at Allandale was demolished in 1964.