gas powered edinburgh buses during ww2?

Edinburgh's Transport* -* Gas-powered buses during World War 2

 

Nice one, Ray. Never heard of these before.

 

cheers gordon, no museum up that way that has mention of them?, ray..

 

these look worse, Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank | Energy Bulletin

 

They may "look worse", but dire straights and all that. But I don’t see why these "coal gas" fired buses should be so rare, at least that is the impression I am getting from the stories. That is because the process for producing the substance had been around for over a century by the time.

The Germans and the Swedes both had "wood gas" systems for many non-vital transports. Tank trainers (the captured Skoda Czech models were turned into wood gas burners), the Swedes had wood-gas trucks I think from Volvo, and the Germans had city buses using wood-gas. I know that last from one of my best friend’s Mom who was a young lady (early twenties) in Wiemar near the end of the war. Gertrude married an American serviceman post war and moved to Montana where she would tell of using "sticks of wood" stripped out of her parent’s attic to pay for the fare around town.

I certainly could understand the use of coal in the British Isles instead of wood, as it is more efficient and the process was well understood and coal is an indigenous raw material.

There were about 40 or 50 coal oil/gas conversion plants in America when petroleum was pumped out of the ground in Pennsylvania's Drake strike in 1859. And that made coal oil/gas too expensive to make and within two years all of the plants in Boston were closed. When that happened, and the last of the coal oil/gas plants closed in 1879, it took until the 1920s for the process to be fine-tuned, perfected and patented by Lewis C. Karrick, an oil shale technologist at the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

After treatment by the Karrick process, a ton of coal will yield up to a barrel of oil, 3000 cu. ft. of rich fuel gas, and 1500 lb. of solid smokeless char (semi-coke). The coal gas produced by Karrick-LTC yields more BTUs than natural gas because it contains a greater amount of combined carbon, and there is less dilution of the combustion gases with water vapor.

(as stated) Lewis Cass Karrick did not invent LTC of coal; he perfected it. In America before 1860, more than 50 plants were extracting oil and gas from coal. Boston had five LTC plants that produced oil and gas for heat, light, axle grease, and paraffin. But by 1873, the surfeit of Rockefeller's then-cheap petroleum had forced the last coal-oil plant to shut down.
　
For a great article on this, see:

Lewis Karrick: Low Temperature Carbonization of Coal

Now while I am sure the little "trailer" units were far from effiecient, I am surprised that the British didn’t set up Karrick plants around the Island to produce coal oil and coal gas from their coal. Or is they did it is unknown to myself. I would be surprised if they hadn’t though.

 

Ray-
I found this in the Scottish Vintage Bus Museum site;
SCOTTISH VINTAGE BUS MUSEUM - BUS PROFILES
It seems to be the only one mentioned that ran on gas in wartime.

 

thanks gordon, nice thing the old charabanc, certainly worked hard to restore, ray..

 

Gas powered buses are nothing new. With fuel shortages during World War Two, buses were converted to run on gas. This 1943 picture shows the bulky gas producer unit they had to tow.​

http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgu...l=en&sa=N&rlz=1T4ADRA_enCA331CA336&tbs=isch:1​