Green Dragon Burns wood briquettes?

Last night, I found out about the South Tynedale Railway's locomotive "Green Dragon" burning wood briquettes. I'm curious to know; would the wood briquettes burn just like coal? What I mean by that is, were there any changes to the firebox.

And, in your opinion, do you think using wood briquettes or other sources that are renewable in order to preserve steam should the phasing out of coal plan goes through? Or do you have another, much cleaner fuel in mind that UK steam locomotives should burn to be environmentally friendly?

One of the major problems I can foresee if energy density. Wood is significantly less energy dense than the fairly high quality coal used for locomotives and higher energy density wood tends to be hardwoods that aren't exactly renewable in any sensible time frame. Talking to somebody involved in ordering coal supplies for a heritage line the entire heritage usage including mainline is less than 2% of UK coal usage, the majority is now used for industrial processes rather than power generation.

The problem comes in that locomotives require a fairly specific grade of coal to operate effectively (mostly to do with how long it takes to ignite well and size of lumps) and it is not really produced in the UK any more and has to be imported. Some of the coal stock is imported to NI from Poland by ship and then further transported by lorry and ferry which probably has a bigger carbon impact than being burnt itself. The importation problems are probably going to become a bigger driver than the relatively minimal environmental impact.

I'm not 100% but I do remember reading a few studies indicating that wood burning for a similar amount of energy produced far more particulates than "good" anthracite coal.

I'm not sure if there would be major changes required for fire boxes with fairly limited line speeds and tractive efforts required by short trains on heritage lines. However, when wood firing was common in the US for engines used in constructing the railways westwards they had fire boxes modified to cope with the amount of oils and sap produced by the wood as it burnt (they tended to use the cheapest wood available, poplar was very common apparently despite being rubbish in energy density terms). However, I would think the lowered temperature of wood vs. coal when burnt would be the biggest headache.

How much work is it to convert a locomotive to oil firing?

Greg Wetzel said:

Last night, I found out about the South Tynedale Railway's locomotive "Green Dragon" burning wood briquettes. I'm curious to know; would the wood briquettes burn just like coal? What I mean by that is, were there any changes to the firebox.

And, in your opinion, do you think using wood briquettes or other sources that are renewable in order to preserve steam should the phasing out of coal plan goes through? Or do you have another, much cleaner fuel in mind that UK steam locomotives should burn to be environmentally friendly?

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The Heritage Railway Association has done some work on this, and there's a lobby in Parliament to ensure that coal remains available for heritage railways. Their usage of coal is absolutely tiny in the grand scheme of things, and their value to the economy is very high in some parts of the country. It's been recognized that phasing out coal completely would make it impossible for most steam engines to continue operating, and that's an unintended consequence.

It may be that heritage railways end up being just about the only users of coal, but there's a strong argument that as long as it's being used efficiently and carefully, and that railways are taking steps to offset the carbon (tree-planting, using renewable electricity where possible etc), there's no serious problems with continued use.

There's no other solid fuel with anything like the same energy density. The only other real alternative is oil firing, which of course has been done on a limited scale in this country, but it requires fairly major modifications to locos and isn't really all that great for a number of reasons, particularly because it doesn't smell very nice! The smell of burning coal is a big part of the steam loco's appeal.