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]

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.

Durante las décadas de 1950 y 1960, a medida que los ferrocarriles de muchos países reemplazaron el vapor por la tracción diésel y eléctrica , la necesidad de torres de carbón disminuyó y finalmente desapareció por completo. De los más de 100 ejemplos de hormigón armado construidos en Gran Bretaña, los de Immingham y Carnforth fueron los dos últimos que quedaron en pie, siendo el primero demolido en 2018. ^{[ 7 ]} La torre de carbón de Carnforth, construida por el London, Midland and Scottish Railway en 1939, es un edificio catalogado de Grado II* . ^{[ 8 ]} En los Estados Unidos , muchas torres de hormigón armado permanecenen su lugar si no interfieren con las operaciones, debido al alto costo de demolición que implican estructuras tan masivas. ^{[ 1 ] [ 9 ]}

• 
  Temuco , Chile , 2012
• 
  Tarnowskie Góry , Polonia , 2016
• 
  Locomotora SAR Clase 25NC 3437 (4-8-4) en la estación de carbón de Beaconsfield , Sudáfrica , 2009.
• 
  Carnforth , Reino Unido, 1999
• 
  Immingham , Reino Unido , 2013
• 
  Cedar Hill Yard , Connecticut , 2022
• 
  La locomotora 2576 sobre el foso de cenizas en la rotonda y estación de abastecimiento de carbón, ahora demolida, en los patios del ferrocarril Chicago and Northwestern , Chicago, Illinois , diciembre de 1942.
• 
  Patio de Collinwood , Cleveland , Ohio , ahora demolido, c. 1968
• 
  Torre de carga de carbón (tobera de carga) del ferrocarril Grand Trunk Western Railroad en Grand Haven, Michigan , 2006
• 
  Penrith, Nueva Gales del Sur , Australia , actualmente demolido, 1939

• Torre de carga de carbón de Grand Haven del ferrocarril Grand Trunk Western : una torre de carga de carbón incluida en el Registro Nacional de Lugares Históricos.

• Coalinga, California : Un pueblo fundado como una operación de torre de almacenamiento de carbón.
• depósito de fuerza motriz
• Roundhouse

• Brouws, Jeff (23 de febrero de 2026). "Los gigantes que desaparecen de la era del vapor en Estados Unidos" . The MIT Press Reader.