On the road between Sukkur and Shikarpur, a bus is said to have stopped every few miles so that its crew could shovel anthracite into a small furnace on a trailer and drip water onto the burning coal. The gas that came off the fire was drawn into the engine, and the bus moved on. The journey, under forty kilometres, took three hours.
The recollection belongs to Nand Javeri, a Sindhi writer born in Shikarpur in 1937, who left for Bombay at Partition. He shared it on social media, and it reached this site through Imdad Hussain Shah of Rohri. It sounds like a tall story from someone’s childhood. The technology behind it, however, is documented in detail: during the Second World War, buses running on gas made from coal carried passengers in London and in other British cities, and the records of that experiment survive. What has never been documented is the Sukkur service itself.
Quick answer: These were producer-gas buses, not steam buses. Coal was burned in a restricted supply of air, a little water was added to the fire, and the gas produced was cooled, filtered and fed to an ordinary petrol engine that had been modified to run on it. About 150 buses were converted in London alone. The Sukkur–Shikarpur service has no documentary record that we could find; it rests on one man’s memory, and is presented here as oral history.
Research & Documentation by Rohri.net
The memory: a boy on the Sukkur–Shikarpur road
Nand Hariram Javeri was born on 1 July 1937 in Shikarpur, then a trading town in the Sukkur district of Sindh. He was ten when his family crossed the new border in 1947 and settled in Bombay, where he became a diamond merchant and, in time, a well-known Sindhi poet and literary critic. In 2016 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his collection Akhar Katha, published in 2012.
In his recollection of that childhood, he described the buses on the road out of town:
Between Sukkur and Shikarpur, we travelled as children in buses that took three to three-and-a-half hours. After every few miles, the bus would be stopped for half an hour on the way, coal and water would be put in, and then it would start again.
He remembered the owner of the service as a man called Jaya Singh, who later took similar buses to Bombay and ran them there for a short time before the venture ended. That detail, like the rest of the local account, has not been traced in any published record. It is the kind of information that usually survives only in a family’s papers, in a municipal licence, or in a newspaper advertisement that nobody has yet digitised.
How a bus can run on coal and water
The vehicle Javeri describes belongs to a family of machines called producer-gas vehicles, or gas-producer vehicles. They were not exotic. By the early 1940s they were being built and maintained by ordinary workshops, and London Transport would print an instruction manual for its drivers and fitters. The system worked in five stages.
- The furnace. A small gas generator, often mounted on a two-wheeled trailer, held anthracite coal or coke. It burned with a restricted supply of air, so the fuel did not simply turn to ash and carbon dioxide; it produced a combustible gas instead.
- The water. Water was dripped onto the incandescent fuel. The steam reacted with hot carbon to give carbon monoxide and hydrogen: C + H2O → CO + H2. In plain terms, the fire was being coaxed to make a gas that burns, rather than to give off heat.
- The cooling and filtering. The gas left the generator hot and dirty. It was passed through a cooling pipe and a filter to take out ash, dust and tar, because those would wreck an engine in a few hundred kilometres.
- The engine. The cleaned gas travelled down a pipe to the bus’s petrol engine, which had been modified for it. The gas was mixed with air and ignited by the spark plug, exactly as petrol vapour would have been.
- The crew. Before departure the fire had to be lit and brought up to temperature. On the road the driver or conductor topped up the coal, kept an eye on the water feed, and raked out the ash.
Two details surprise most readers. The first is that the water is not a fuel. It is a reagent: it is broken apart in the fire, and the hydrogen it releases is what makes the gas burn better than coal alone. The second is how weak the product is. Because the gas is made with ordinary air, roughly half of it is nitrogen, which does no useful work at all. A typical producer gas is about 50 per cent nitrogen, 17–22 per cent carbon monoxide and 12–20 per cent hydrogen, with the rest carbon dioxide and a little methane. That is why these engines lost power exactly when a driver needed it, on a slope with a full load.
Not a steam engine: the difference that matters
It is tempting to call a coal-and-water bus a steam bus, and many retellings do. The distinction is worth keeping straight, because it explains the behaviour of the vehicle. A steam engine burns fuel to raise steam, and the pressure of that steam pushes a piston. A producer-gas bus does something quite different: it burns coal to make a gas, and then burns that gas inside an internal-combustion engine. The steam exists only inside the generator, as a chemical ingredient.
The Transport for London research guide describes the London conversions in exactly these terms: gas was produced by drawing air through hot anthracite or coke, then piped to the engine, which had to be specially modified. The London Transport Museum’s catalogue note on its 1944 instruction manual uses the same description, adding the detail that the gas was made by injecting water into burning coal in a trailer unit towed behind the bus.
The same buses on the streets of London
London Transport began experimenting with producer gas early in the Second World War — the conflict that began in Europe on 1 September 1939 and ended with Japan’s surrender in September 1945. A photograph in the London Transport Museum collection, dated 16 November 1939, shows an ST-type bus, registration GF440, standing at Chiswick Works with a gas-producer unit attached to the rear while a member of staff tips the contents of a bag into it. That is a trial, not a service, but it shows how quickly the idea moved from drawing board to depot.
Four years later the system was routine enough to be written up in a printed manual. The museum’s record for that manual, issued by London Transport in February 1944, states that 150 London buses were converted during the war, and adds the verdict of the people who operated them: the idea was “effective only when travelling on the level.”
Parliament was given the operating figures in February 1943. Asked how many London omnibuses were running on producer gas, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of War Transport, Noel-Baker, replied that the London Passenger Transport Board was then operating 18 omnibuses, that the number would rise to about 550 within a few months, that each bus would burn about one ton of anthracite a week and need refuelling every 80 miles, and that 27 service stations were being arranged to handle the coal stock and the trailers. The scheme, he said, was expected to save 3,500,000 gallons of petrol a year.
The TfL guide fills in what happened next. Single-deck ST and T-type buses were converted, each towing a small trailer; performance was poor, so the buses were kept to the flatter routes, mostly in the Country Area; they were converted back to petrol in the autumn of 1944, before the war in Europe had quite ended.
Not every gas vehicle towed a trailer. Some used large gas bags on the roof, a method that goes back to the First World War, when a coal-gas bag bus was photographed on Waverley Bridge in Edinburgh. In the 1940s, recollections gathered by the Edinburgh Photo website describe both trailer units and a gas bag carried on an SMT bus on the road to Leith. The principle was the same: make the gas somewhere, carry it, burn it in the engine.
What the record confirms
The claims in this story are not all of the same kind. Some are documented in institutional archives and can be checked in a few minutes. Others rest on a single memory and cannot be checked at all yet. It helps to keep the two apart.
| Claim | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Buses ran on gas made from coal, with water added to the fire | Confirmed | London Transport Museum, manual 1944; FAO, 1986 |
| About 150 London buses were converted during the war | Confirmed | London Transport Museum, 1997/14934 |
| 18 were running in February 1943, with a plan to reach about 550 | Confirmed | Hansard, 4 February 1943 |
| One ton of anthracite a week, refuelling every 80 miles, 27 service stations | Confirmed | Hansard, 4 February 1943 |
| Performance was poor, so buses stayed on flatter routes | Confirmed | TfL Research Guide No 28; museum note |
| London converted the buses back to petrol in autumn 1944 | Confirmed | TfL Research Guide No 28 |
| A gas-producer bus was tested at Chiswick in November 1939 | Confirmed | London Transport Museum, 1998/89509 |
| A coal-gas service ran between Sukkur and Shikarpur, owned by Jaya Singh | Not confirmed | Nand Javeri’s recollection |
Two numbers in the London story look contradictory and are not. In February 1943, 18 buses were in service and the target was about 550; the museum’s figure of 150 is the number converted over the course of the war. The first is a snapshot, the second a total. Both describe a programme that expanded quickly and then contracted just as quickly once petrol returned.
What the table cannot confirm is the part that matters most here. No photograph, timetable, licence or newspaper notice has been found that places a gas-producer bus on the Sukkur–Shikarpur road. The service remains a named, first-hand memory with no paper trail, which is why this article says so plainly rather than dressing it up as settled history.
Why forty kilometres took three hours
The arithmetic is worth doing, because it shows that the memory is technically plausible. Forty kilometres in three hours is about 13 km an hour; at three and a half hours it is about 11. That is roughly the speed of a steady cyclist, and it is consistent with a vehicle that had less power than a petrol bus and stopped to be fed.
But the stops, taken literally, do not quite add up. If the bus halted for half an hour after every few miles, a forty-kilometre run would have needed more halts than three hours can hold. Either the stops were shorter, or they were less frequent, or the half hour is how a child remembers a long wait in the heat. The shape of the memory is reliable; the clock is less so. That is normal for recollections of childhood travel, and it is a reason to treat the story as evidence of experience rather than as a timetable.
The road itself was not the obstacle. The country between Sukkur and Shikarpur is flat, so the weak gas that made London buses struggle on hills would have mattered less here. What cost the time was fuel logistics: lighting a fire, waiting for it to draw properly, topping up coal, adding water, letting the generator settle, and starting again.
The road that Shikarpur lost
To understand why anyone would run a bus service on that road, it helps to know what the road had been. Shikarpur was for centuries one of the great trading and banking towns of Sindh, its merchants financing caravans and ships from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. By the early twentieth century that world was already fading. The Gazetteer of the Province of Sind for the Sukkur District, published in 1919, put it bluntly: “The trade of Shikarpur, once much more important than that of Sukkar, has dwindled away.”
The same volume records what remained: a hold on the trade in silks and precious stones, pearls from the Persian Gulf and rubies from Burma, a flour mill, thirty-three factories in the district mostly husking rice. It lists the trunk road on the left bank of the Indus from Karachi to Multan, and it notes that the railway line running north from Sukkur passed through Shikarpur. By the 1940s the railway carried the long-distance trade, and a bus on the trunk road carried the short journeys: market days, school, family visits, the thirty-odd kilometres between two towns that had once been much closer in importance than they were.
Why this memory matters
The history of Sindh is usually told through its ancient cities, its Sufi shrines, its bridges and its barrage. The coal bus belongs to a different register: the everyday machinery of ordinary lives, and the way a global war reached a district road in the form of a fuel shortage and a trailer full of anthracite.
It also shows how quickly technology can vanish. Producer gas was, for a few years, the practical answer to a real crisis, described in manuals, debated in Parliament, taught to drivers. Then petrol came back, the trailers were parked, and within a generation the whole system was remembered only by the people who had ridden in it. If Nand Javeri had not written down what he saw as a boy, the Sukkur buses would have disappeared without leaving even a sentence behind.
That is the argument for taking oral history seriously, and for being honest about its limits. A memory like this one is not proof that a service existed on a particular date. It is a lead, a place to start looking, and a reminder that the people who can still describe the 1940s will not be able to do so for much longer.
How you can help verify it
One document would turn this from a recollection into a dated episode of local history. Any of the following would do:
- A photograph of a bus with a gas-producer trailer on the Sukkur–Shikarpur road, or in a Sukkur or Shikarpur depot.
- A bus ticket, waybill or fare table from the 1940s.
- A newspaper advertisement or notice for the service, in English or Sindhi.
- A municipal, district or public works licence for a transport contractor named Jaya Singh, or a variant spelling of the name.
- A family ledger, diary or memoir describing the journey.
If you hold any of these, or remember the buses yourself, write to Rohri.net. Material can be scanned and returned, and any document that confirms the service will be added to this article with credit to the person who supplied it.
Frequently asked questions
Were the Sukkur and Shikarpur buses steam-powered?
No. They were producer-gas buses. Coal was burned in a restricted supply of air, water was added to the fire, and the gas produced was cooled, filtered and fed to a modified petrol engine. Steam was used inside the gas generator, not to drive the wheels.
How did a producer-gas bus work?
A trailer carried a small furnace. Anthracite or coke burned in it with limited air, and water dripped onto the glowing fuel. The reaction produced carbon monoxide and hydrogen, diluted with nitrogen. After cooling and filtering, the gas was piped to the engine, mixed with air and ignited by a spark plug.
How far could a coal-gas bus travel on one load?
In London each bus was refuelled at its garage about every 80 miles, roughly 130 kilometres, according to a written answer given in the House of Commons on 4 February 1943. Each bus burned about one ton of anthracite a week.
Why did the Sukkur to Shikarpur journey take three hours?
The distance is under 40 km, so three hours works out to about 11 to 13 km per hour. Producer gas gives less power than petrol, and every refuelling stop cost time. If the halts really lasted half an hour each, most of the journey would have been spent standing still.
Is the Sukkur and Shikarpur coal bus documented in any archive?
Not in any published record found for this article. The service is known from the childhood memory of the Sindhi writer Nand Javeri, who was born in Shikarpur in 1937. The technology is well documented; the local service is not.
Who was Nand Javeri?
Nand Hariram Javeri was born in Shikarpur on 1 July 1937 and moved to Bombay after Partition. He became a diamond merchant and a Sindhi poet and critic, and received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2016 for his collection Akhar Katha.
Did buses in London really run on coal gas?
Yes. London Transport converted about 150 buses to producer gas during the Second World War, according to the London Transport Museum. Each towed a small trailer containing the gas unit. They were kept to flatter routes and were converted back to petrol in the autumn of 1944.
Continue reading
- Exploring Sukkur’s transportation network: railways, airport and highways
- Sukkur railway history: station, bridges and Sindh
- The history of Rohri railway station, from colonial beginnings to a vital junction
- The surveys and designers of Lansdowne Bridge in Rohri
- Indus epochs: Rohri, Bukkur and Sukkur, part 1
Sources
- Transport for London, Research Guide No 28: London Buses in World War II (PDF), for the conversion of ST and T-type buses, the trailers, the 80-mile refuelling interval, the restriction to flatter Country Area routes and the return to petrol in autumn 1944.
- London Transport Museum, Instruction manual for Gas Producer Buses, issued by London Transport, February 1944 (ref. 1997/14934), for the figure of 150 converted buses and the description of water injected into burning coal in a towed trailer unit.
- London Transport Museum, Gas Producer ST-type bus at Chiswick Works, photograph by Topical Press, 16 November 1939 (ref. 1998/89509).
- UK Parliament, Hansard, HC Deb 4 February 1943, vol 386 c1071W, “London Omnibuses (Producer Gas)”, for the 18 buses, the plan for about 550, the ton of anthracite per bus per week, the 80-mile refuelling interval and the 27 service stations.
- “Producer Gas for Motor Vehicles”, Nature, 23 March 1940, doi:10.1038/145473a0, for the contemporary technical discussion of gas producers for road vehicles.
- Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Wood gas as engine fuel, chapter 2.2, “Theory of gasification”, for the typical composition of air-blown producer gas and the chemical reactions inside the generator.
- E. H. Aitken (ed.), Gazetteer of the Province of Sind, vol. III: Sukkur District (Bombay, 1919), for the condition of Shikarpur’s trade, its silks and precious stones, the trunk road from Karachi to Multan and the railway through Shikarpur.
- Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge University Press, 2000), for the wider history of Shikarpuri merchant networks.
- “Nand Hariram Javeri”, Sindhi Sangat, biographical note, including his birth in Shikarpur on 1 July 1937.
- “Nand Javeri”, The Sindhu World, biography, for his move to Bombay, his books and the Sahitya Akademi Award of 2016 for Akhar Katha.
- “Gas-powered buses during World War 2”, Edinburgh Photo, for Edinburgh recollections of producer-gas and gas-bag buses, and the First World War gas-bag bus on Waverley Bridge.
- Sayed Imdad Hussain Shah Rizvi, Rohri and Kotai: oral collection and family papers, recorded 2025-2026. Used for local topography and family memory, not for dates.
Published by Rohri.net · Rohri, Sindh: Heritage, History & Travel Guide · Heritage Research • Historical Documentation • Travel Information · Rohri • Sukkur • Sindh • Pakistan · https://www.rohri.net
#Sukkur #Shikarpur #CoalGasBus #ProducerGas #WWII #SindhHistory #OralHistory #RohriNet
No comments:
Post a Comment