The mod terrafirmacraft reworks survival in MC. They replace all the world gen and ore spawn from vanilla among other things. They recently added all their ores into the ore dictionary though, but when trying to use them in Railcraft Steam Machines they are not accepting it. The dev said the name they are using in the ore dictionary is gemCoal and gemCharcoal. Going to link back to their Github Issue i posted.

Deadrik/TFCraft#643

I am trying to add it to the hobbyist steam engine, which i did mention i was working with railcraft steam engine in the previous post. however it does seem to be the only low tier steam that will take an input besides steam to help it generate power. regular MC coal and charcoal work fine on the machine.
decided to test on a few other machines, it also does not work in the coke oven. The Blast Furnace is not needed, but it also does not accept charcoal from TFC. Currently running

Forge version:1217
TFC: 79.9
Railcraft 9.3.3.0

I cannot help if TFC does not give their items a fuel value.

it was working in their last version in 1.6.4 so not sure why it would have broken now.
i will let them know about that and see what they say, thanks for your reponse.

The only machine this is likely to affect is the Blast Furnace. Everything else accepts anything with a fuel value.

I find your description lacking or misinformed due to this fact, please clarify.

You play TFC with RC! Most people don't play TFC with other mods because of the bad compatibility. It's mostly not recommended to do so.

there is a buildcraft crossover that is integrated very well into the TFC world. With that and minetweaker/modtweaker Railcraft works very well. TFC's plan is not to be an outcast and be left alone, but because of the way it plays it does require some work for the time being to get things to play nice. Archemides and Bibliocraft are also great additions if done correctly with minetweaker

TFC 2 was suppose to have native support and integration of Railcraft, but the project was cancelled. I don't mind doing what I can to improve support, but in this case, I don't think the problem is on my end.

the devs have fixed the coal issue, thanks for helping track down what the issue was.

Hey CovertJaguar,
TFC coal along with several other items have been added to forge fuels and work fine on engines.
However it is still not accepted in your coke oven machine, any idea why?

The Coke Oven requires actual recipes be added for each item.

@CovertJaguar Then it might be because TFC coal differs from vanilla coal, maybe that's the problem.

ok, thats fine. did not know that was the issue. Ill just use modtweaker for the time being