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Buckets, Flanges & Black Diamonds Mining and Moving Coal in Pennsylvania Baumes
Buckets, Flanges & Black Diamonds Mining and Moving Coal in Pennsylvania By George J. Baumes
Hardbound with dustjacket 128 pages
Copyright 2009
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1: Surface Mining in the Anthracite Region
Chapter 2: Railroads of the Anthracite Region
Chapter 3: Surface Mining in the Bituminous Region
Chapter 4: Railroads in the Bituminous Coal Fields
Chapter 5: River Transportation
Chapter 6: Anthracite Waste Coal (Culm) Reprocessing
References
Coal is removed from the ground by one of two methods-surface or underground. This book offers a brief look at the operation of surface mining through hundreds of color photographs, scenes rarely viewed by the public because of the nature of the business. The surface mine gives a clear picture of men and machines coordinating their efforts with precision and safety, using may types of mining machinery to produce a ton of coal. Equipment in a surface mine ranges in size from a huge 5000 ton excavator to the pit boss's company pickup truck.
Author George Baumes was able to obtain permission to visit surface mines throughout Pennsylvania. He was also at trackside recording mile-long railroad unit coal trains delivering thousands of tons of coal to steel mills and electric plants. He followed commercial highway trucks hauling raw coal from mines to processing plants, and stood on riverbanks photographing towboats pushing strings of barges loaded with coal. Finally, he focused his camera on the anthracite region waste coal culm) project. Once an eye sore culm banks are being harvested for coal that was once rejected and now s used as fuel for several small power plants with special boilers.
Introduction
Pennsylvania's Fabulous Coal Regions
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has had a long and prosperous history in coal mining. For many years it ranked first among U.S. coal producing states because of it's rich deposits of two kinds of high quality coal; anthracite or hard coal, and bituminous or soft coal, both representing some of the oldest and best coals in the world.
The northeastern part of the state once held about 90 percent of the anthracite deposits in North America. They are the only deposits of hard coal found in the United States and are concentrated in four small fields with a total area of about 520 square miles. The anthracite beds are steeply pitched, faulted and severely distorted, and lay in small basins described as narrow, parallel, canoe shaped troughs.
The bituminous coal fields are more extensive, being spread out over 15,000 square miles in the western half of the state. They form the northernmost part of the Appalachian Coal Basin that stretches southwest through Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama. The bituminous coal beds are generally flat and pitch slightly over long distances.
Anthracite was discovered in Pennsylvania around 1750. However, the first significant amount of coal was not recorded until 1837, when a little more than one million tons was produced. Most of this coal was
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