From the fantasy world of ‘what might have been’ we now return to the harsh realities of railway operation after World War II, though only two countries persisted with the pulverised coal concept. One was the Victoria State Railway in Australia and the other the Deutsche Reichsbahn (DR) of East Germany. The first was a by-product of a much larger project undertaken by the State Electricity Commission of Victoria into using brown coals in power plants. In 1952 one of its executive engineers, H. Herman, wrote a comprehensive book on the whole subject, in which chapter 6 includes a useful summary of the previous attempts to apply pulverised coal to firing locomotives, from which I have already quoted several sources.1 He goes on to describe how, as a result of a national coal strike in 1949, it revived the work that had been done in the 1920s and converted one of its X Class booster-fitted 2-8-2s (No.X32) to firing with pulverised brown coal on the STUG system. This particular class was chosen because it had a very long, narrow firebox, while the STUG system was selected in preference to that from AEG “because it was simpler”.
Numerous comparative trials over two years with X32
