I have recently upgraded several of my older Lionel TMCC steamers with real coal loads. What a difference it makes in appearance, with minimal effort and cost!
I remember when Lionel was doing this on their scale steamers in the early 2000s and asked Richard Maddox at YORK why, especially when MTH was using the individual coal piece loads. His response was the consumer preferred molded coal and didn’t want to deal with real coal loads. Well not me!
This upgrade, along with adding cruise control and the 4 chuffs to these older steamers, really breathes a lot of new life into these older models.
This process was really easy and thought I would share my method and results below. I used the coal shown below (they have a store on ebay). It comes in different sizes and tried several and blended some. In the end, I prefer the medium size by itself. I would suggest washing the coal first to remove the extra dust, so it will be cleaner to handle once completed.
I first tape off with painters tape the bunker and then put a thin layer of coal down. 
Out of convenience, I have been using windex mixed with Elmer’s glue mixed to almost a milk consistency. This has worked well on my older Lionel finishes, but not sure the how paint might react from other manufacturers.
I pour little amounts of the glue solution on the pile and let it spread for a bit before adding more. Too much and you have a mess on your hands. One of the reasons I like to put the coal down first before pouring the solution it is can really saturate the pile.
At this point, I then remove the tape and make corrections to any coal that moved. Then clean up the extra solution with a dry paper towel and also additional paper towels with windex if needed.
Let dry for a day and you have a solid coal pile. Extra dried glue can be easily cleaned up now with a little windex on a paper towel.
The reason I like this method is it is not permanent if you make a mistake. By re adding the windex to the dried coal load and letting it set in for a few minutes, it can then be recovered and pulled up. I did this a few times as I was making the pile to tall initially and it looked funny. The trick being to keep the addition coal as thin as possible to prevent large coal load piles. Some piles pull up easier than others, for example the S2 and Class A, released really easy, where as the berk’s molded coal load was more aggressive in texture and did not release as well, but could be picked out.
Shown below is a do over with the Class A load and working to pull it up.
Regardless, here are the final result of the engines I did. They came out really nice!
kline hudson-
lionel PRR S-2
- lionel Class A
lionel NKP berk
lionel C&O hudson
Keep in mind on this one, be sure to remove the molded coal load and build the coal up off the engine as there are controls underneath it. Another option might be to just have a small piece of styrene be used as a new base and build it up from there.
