Looking Back: Black Pillows for Your Stove
A strategic move to recapture some of the coal market
In the Crowsnest Museum display yard, next to the giant brick rail bender, you will find two cast iron cylinders with symmetrical indentations on their outer rims. Segmented pockets on wheels if you will. To the uninformed eye they might seem a mystery but they are in fact briquette presses, and there-in lays a story.
In the early 1950’s the coal mines in the Pass, namely West Canadian Collieries (Blairmore-Bellevue) and Coleman Collieries Ltd , made a strategic move to recapture some of the coal market. They did this by installing special plants designed to produce briquettes. Pillow shaped compact coal, all identical in size, which was perfect for coal stoves, furnaces and fireplaces. In the case of Coleman Collieries a $500,000 plant was built alongside the existing International Tipple. They situated it so that two existing storage bins of 800 tons each could be used to store briquettes or slack coal. The bins were originally used to charge the now defunct coke ovens. High pressure steam was needed for this new plant so an additional boiler to the existing one at the International tipple was added.
It should be noted that there was sound reasoning for this move to briquettes. Mined coal is friable and breaks down leaving a percentage of it as what they term “slack“or very fine coal. It is no good for stoves and furnaces because you need air circulation around the coal to build a lasting fire. Normally this coal was wasted but the emergence of briquetting brought the opportunity to use the slack.
The process of forming this slack coal into a nice compact briquette required the use of asphalt which acts as a binding agent to hold the briquette together. To keep the asphalt in a liquid condition, two ten thousand gallon insulated and steam heated tanks were also installed. The briquetting unit itself was called a Komerak-Greaves press and could produce thirty tons of briquettes per hour. That worked out to about a quarter of a million of those easy to handle pillows in a year. The mixture of asphalt and coal was fed by a rotating screw that fed it between the pocketed rollers. As they rotated against each other, briquettes were formed and dropped onto a slow moving cooling conveyor. The existing railroad sidings near the plant were used for unloading slack and loading briquettes. This was a big investment at the time when coal was beginning to decline. I can remember being sent to fill our coal