Were oil-fired steam locomotives common in India?
Oil firing was never very popular in India, mainly because of the abundant supply of cheap coal. It was more expedient to work around the problems of the coal quality (high ash content, etc.) or to design locos suitable for Indian coal, than to use oil as the fuel. Nevertheless, there were some oil-fired steam locomotives in use in some places, notably on the South Indian Railway where during World War 2 several locomotives homed at Erode were converted to oil firing. Later, in 1965, there were trials with WP locos converted to oil-firing but the results were disappointing. Of course, in modern times we have the examples of the new oil-fired locos built by Golden Rock Workshops for the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. After the Partition of British India in 1947, the newly created nation of Pakistan was left without a good and reliable supply of coal, as almost all the coal fields supplying Indian railways were in what became independent India. Therefore, in Pakistan after 1947 there was
