There's been a big hubbub surrounding the announcement that Reading #2100, the other Reading T-1 being restored to operation, is going to be converted back to burning oil. Back in 1998, the #2100, never as active or as famous as her sisters #2101 and #2102, had been purchased by Thomas Payne and moved to the old New York Central shops in St. Thomas, Ontario, with the eventual intent of running it on his Central Western Railroad. According to Ross Rowland, who had once owned the #2100, he called Payne when he learned that he had bought the #2100, congratulating him on the purchase. During the conversation, he mentioned that he intended to convert #2100 to burn oil, and Rowland said he offered to introduce him to Robert Franzen, the then-CMO at the Grand Canyon Railroad who has just converted a locomotive or two to run on oil, thinking that Franzen could offer some expertise. Payne's reply was "I know exactly what to do and don't need any advice".
The resulting conversion was a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption that was hacked together and never functioned properly. The locomotive never received a proper deep fire pan with the burner under the throat sheet aimed to the rear. Instead, they just laid steel plates laid over the grates, and installed a burner in the fire door aimed at the flue sheet. It was impossible to get a clean stack out of it (losing one advantage of oil-fired locomotives), it struggled to maintain boiler pressure, and it heated very unevenly and damaged parts of the firebox. It ended up being moved west to Tacoma, where it ran on the Golden Pacific Railroad's Tacoma Sightseer service (with hideous red-painted running boards, secondary headlight and ditch lights) out of Tacoma's Freighthouse Square to Fredrickson, Washington over the old Milwaukee Road. It was one of those blink-and-you-missed-it operations, closed down very quickly due to low ridership numbers, but the #2100 never ran right while it was there.
![](https://live.staticflickr.com/2843/9540874262_ec8679fbbc_b.jpg)
When Golden Pacific shut down, it sat out there for a long time, then was brought east by American Steam Railroad Preservation Association to Cleveland, Ohio to be restored to operation in 2016. Early on, the plan was to revert it back to being coal-fired, since the old oil-firing system was complete junk and there were some concerns on whether the Wooten firebox on a T-1 could properly be configured to burn oil. They had removed the oil bunker insert from the tender, reclaimed the stoker equipment from the museum in Canada where the oil conversion was done, put in an order for brand new grate castings, and had some work done on the stoker motor.
Then the other day, they made the announcement that they were pivoting back to burning oil in the #2100, with FMW Solutions being called upon to develop a proper oil-burning setup. A lot of people are pissed off that they're going to burn oil in it, but there's really no other choice especially if the locomotive's operating locations may change frequently, which at the moment the #2100 doesn't have a place to operate set in stone. The combined costs of proper grade and properly-sized coal, getting it loaded into the tender, and getting rid of the ashes properly add up to being very expensive and logistical nightmares. Meanwhile, oil is easily available, easier to transport, a breeze to load, and there are no ashes to dispose of. It's also cleaner out of the stack, no cinders and very little smoke if properly fired, and operations have also used bio-diesel or used vegetable oil, which makes it a bit environmentally friendlier.