Chapter 34 cont. After a time, however, the Chicago & Rock Island and the M. & M. companies began to seek for a way to use the soft coal of this part of the country. It was all a new thing to them, and they had to work it out. The locomotive builders of the east were giving them no aid, for they had no such fuel back there, so they had to puzzle it out here, and they were years in doing it. The little Iowa was one of the first attempts in this direction. In 1857 she was equipped with Wright's coal burner. Malding Wright was the boss blacksmith here at the M. & M. shops. His device consisted, broadly, of a grate space, one by two feet, in the middle of the bottom of the fire box. The rest of the bottom of the fire box, extending from this central grate in all directions to the walls of the fire box, was solid brick or iron. All the draught there was to be had came through that small space. Of course there wasn't enough. The device was expected to be a great success, and the company offered Wright $20,000 for it, which he refused, expecting bigger money. But the ting wouldn't work; it was impossible to keep fire enough going with it. After this he devised another form of coal burner which was applied; a water table in the bottom of the fire box, connected with the boiler by pipes. Some twenty-four holes, or flues, pierced this water table, on top of which the fire lay. These flues admitted draught from the ashpan below, as the other had done; but, like the other, this device did not give draft enough, and failed. After these efforts the company and all the other roads out here practically quit trying to burn coal for the space of about ten years, except for some occasional experimenting, and went back to wood burning. But in 1868 the company began to succeed in burning coal. The old Davenport, later numbered the 78, was converted int hat year and with some qualifications she worked. She had been built for the Hudson river road and guaranteed to make forty-five miles an hour with fifteen cars, but she had failed to fill the bill down there and had been sold to the M. & M. She came to us with a six-foot wheel, which was too high for her on our grades. These wheels were taken out and five-foot wheels were put in their place. The Davenport's old drivers lay for years north of the roundhouse in Davenport. In this conversion the Davenport was fitted of pouch-like extension in the fire box back of the flue sheet, and around this the flame was forced to curl before it entered the flues. This gave great increase of heating surface, and worked well, but there was leakage at the side of the fire box, and after a time it had to come out. It was Superintendent Kimball and Master Mechanic T. P. Twombley who equipped the old 78 in this way. The test with her lasted about two years; then Jerrett's water table was thrown out and they fell back on coal burning in a plain fire box. They had given the 78 a copper fire box, but it cut out so fast under the wear of the coal that it had but very short life, so they went back to the iron fire box. The difficulty, in the main, was due to lack of fire surface, and insufficient heating surface exposed to the fire. The 78's fire box was only about four and a half feet long, by three and one-half feet wide, where a modern fire box will run from nine to eleven feet long and be proportionately larger in heating surface. From the time that the company got to burning coal in a plain fire box on down to this day there has been a serial story of improvement, but there are no interesting features in it. Debbie Clough Gerischer Iowa Gen Web, Assistant CC, Scott County http://www.celticcousins.net/scott/ IAGENWEB: Special History Project: http://iagenweb.org/history/index.htm Gerischer Family Web Site: http://gerischer.rootsweb.com/