As a kid, we used to go along the train tracks and pick up pieces of coal that tumbled out of the cars.
Coal heating was very common especially in the more remote regions of my area, until the late '70s.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Yes! I was on vacation in Colorado and one of the residents there used it to warm their cabin in a wood burning stove. It was pretty amazing actually. One small chunk would heat the entire house to a very hot temperature for hours at a time. I can see why it was a popular option back in the day.
Western PA, literally everything is near an abandoned coal mine. The woods near my house growing up had sink holes all over the place and coal just sitting on the sides of the hill where it had been dumped and abandoned.
I use it and see it often for argentinian style barbecues.
Yeah, used it for heating, just until few years ago when we switched entirely to central heating, mainly because it become illegal to use coal for heating in my area.
Yes. We still heated our house with wood and coal in the 90s. I remember a big truck brought coal for us before winter. We even had a dedicated coal room in the cellar.
Not sure what the English terms are, but we used Steinkohle (stone coal) for barbecue in the 80s and 90s,so I guess yes.
Charcoal?
I had a hookah for a long time, so yes.
We used it to heat our house growing up. But only on the very coldest nights, normally we'd use wood since the coal would actually put out too much heat. This was the 80s through early 90s in New York state, us.
My father runs live steam engines.
Closest I've ever seen outside of pictures of coal or digital representations of it would be charcoal, for grilling. Otherwise, I've never seen it, unless I saw it once in a geology class I did in the fall and don't remember it.
Me and my sister got coal for christmas one year we were extra annoying. Mother just brought in some from the grill bag, i know she wanted to make a point but my older sister litteraly said oh we can just grill out with this! Made our mom sooo mad. It didnt help we had copious amounts of gifts from our grandparents so it didn't matter to us. We were mostly good kids, just brats. Besides the time we attacked the mail man, I believe that was the coal year.
Don't grills use charcoal briquettes rather than actual lumps of coal?
Yeah man maybe, i have no idea. My family used a coal grill and tossed what i think as coal into the bottom and lit it on fire to cook food. This was almost 30 years ago. If that wasnt real coal then 🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Yes, that's not coal.
Yeah was an old quarry near my house when I young used to throw rocks and sticks of the huge cliff there, was a decent amount of coal around
Yes, in west Virginia... The shits everywhere.
It's a dark rock...for reasons I have lumps of coal embedded in the concrete of the basement
I have no idea how they got there. Probably the coal used when they wete pouring the concrete left there. Again, no idea
I used it at barbeques, other than that no
Is that not charcoal?
Yes it was actually charcoal lol. Both coal and charcoal are translated as cărbune in romanian so until now I thought both of them were the same thing
Use to have an open coal fire in my childhood home. Made many a coal fire. It's very sooty on the hands!
It wasn't charcoal? That sounds wretched. Would it not release toxins into the house?
Don't think so! Defintely much heavier and more solid than bbq charcoal. I don't remember it being very smoky, weird less so than wood fires (which have a distinctive and pleasant smell) or peat fires, which were also common in my region but would trigger my asthma. But possibly it was just that I was used to coal? Maybe someone else would have found it gross?
Edit: Doing a bit of research, it seems like historically home fires would use bituminous coal, but by the time I was a child it was anthracite coal that was used. Which only releases 20% of the smoke of bituminous coal. But it's still a fossil fuel, and not charcoal.
Coal for heating at my grandma's place yeah. In the southern US, you can also see trains filled with the stuff going west along I-40.
We still use it to heat our tea.
I lived in a town built on top of a coal mine. You could just go outside and walk a few feet and find chunks of coal just laying around. I also loved by train tracks for a long time and trains full of coal would go by multiple times a day.
I'm old enough to remember people actually using it for heating at home!
That's where I last saw it, my very old neighbor had an equally old farmhouse. The road had natual gas put in decades before but she still had a small pile of the unused coal she used to rely on
rip mary you were the sweetest
My wife's family are in mining. I've seen coal, coal mines, mine tailings, coke ovens, coke, coal trucks and coal trains, and I've driven mining roads on a family vacation. I have a little vial of Cominco coal as a souvenir.
In university, I got a summer job as the single caretaker of a ~200 year-old church. I did everything from plastering the cracks in the walls to mowing the lawn. Anyhow, I also had to clean out the old coal bin. There wasn't much left, but there was some. I also found newspapers from 1914 lining the bottom. That was pretty cool. There were no services there anymore, (no electricity or running water, either) so I was alone for 8 hours a day. I managed to read War and Peace at work that summer (I picked it because it was notoriously long, and I had so much down time when there wasn't grass to be cut.) As far as minimum wage jobs go, it was pretty great. It was also a huge turn on for my girlfriend at the time who would visit in the afternoons sometimes. Haha!
Sure! My stepfather was a coal miner and brought home several fossils in coal when I was a kid. Ferns, tree bark, etc. I’ve lost track of them over the years, unfortunately.
I’ve actually been in a coal mine too. In my hometown, they have a decommissioned mine where they give tours.
Yeah, was walking over a bridge over some train tracks as a train was going by, had hopper cars full of coal.
I see a lot of "yes" here, so let me chime in with: no, I don't think I ever have.
This question got me. I'm 53, too young to have seen it used for household heat or the like. Was a major rockhound as a child, knew all about rocks.
I roll my own lump charcoal for black powder. If you handed me a chunk of coal, I'd say, "Yep. That's coal."
I've... never seen coal.
My neighbour used it for heating in winter when I was a kid.
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