Standard Stoker

[B&O grandson]

My mom's father worked for Standard Stoker in Erie PA - after WWII.

I will assume that unless they went into another line of business that they went out of business after 1955 when most all the railroads went to electric diesels.

I was doing some research on the company and found that before WW II, they were in court several times for copy write infringement.

One had something to do with the doors that opened up in the front of the fire box that was a copy of another design and others had to do with the way the stoker worked - auger feed and steam blasts that moved the coal from the center of the box to the sides.

My first guess is that they built stokers for Baldwin Locomotives - since it appears that they were some of the most popular locomotives for hauling coal.

Does anyone else have any more information about that company?

Any pictures of locomotives with Standard Stokers on their boilers?

[Allen Hazen]

Sheer, utter, total ignorance speaking here! I don't know anything about the Standard Stoker Company...

But I wouldn't be TOO sure about their having to change business or fold: lots of non-locomotive coal burners had some form or other of powered stoker: probably coal-fired electric generating plants still do. I don't know how similar the technology would have been, so I don't know whether it was likely that the same factory would make locomotive and stationary plant stokers...

And now you've made me curious!

---

Up to the 1950s, many houses were heated by coal furnaces, and at least some had motorized automatic stokers. Of course, THIS business vanished in the 1950s too: a disappearance reflected in the railroad world by the disappearance of the Lehigh and new England and of the New York, Ontario and Western!

[B&O grandson]

My first thoughts was exactly that, except that I worked for a year for a old Greenhouse and they had at one time two coal fired boilers, which were made by the Erie Boiler works.
Only these boilers had a type of piston ram stoker that rocked back and forth on a crankshaft and it couldn't burn more then 4 tons of coal in 24 hours and it had a firebox that had to be 7 feet wide and 12 feet deep with a door on each side to manually clean the ash pit and another door on each side where you could manually shovel in coal after you cleaned the boiler.

Our church had a boiler and it had a identical set up to the Standard Stoker - right down to a transmission and gear box and drive shaft and auger. The owner of the greenhouse came down to look at the stoker when we took the boiler out and did not want anything to do with a auger fed boiler, because in his opinion - it was nothing but troubles.

Coal fired power plants, uses the same auger type system, on a larger scale with no problems.

[Typewriters]

Looking at the US Patent & Trademark Office, it looks like Standard Stoker was merged into Capitol Products Corporation in 1956, which itself then either was merged into or else sold to Ingersoll-Rand in 1957. The only stoker-related direct reference I found then seems to indicate that Ingersoll-Rand sold that business to Dresser-Rand, which most probably was a newly formed joint venture, in 1989.

So, it looks like Standard Stoker didn't just quit and liquidate but got merged.

-Will Davis