I’m finishing an American Model Builders kit of Martinsburg No 1 Coal Mine… which has a trestle coming out the side of the loading house. I guess a small car filled with “spoil waste” was wheeled out on the trestle and dumped at the end… and I should model the waste pile under the trestle.
Not being much familiar with coal mines… what should I use to model the pile, and what color should it be? For information… what kind of car did they use for the waste (I assumed it could dump somehow), and did they manually push it on the trestle?
The real coal would be sent to the breaker (anthracite) or whatever the crusher/sorter for the particular type of coal was called locally. The waste pile would receive whatever came out of the mine that wouldn’t burn - raw rock. The waste mountains I saw in 1959-60 were grey, with some spots of other colors (notably brick red.)
At the small mines, the same cars that carried coal underground were used to carry waste - just routed differently when they were brought to the surface. At the larger still-operating mine, the waste was brought up in cars that looked like bathtubs on wheels and dumped at the waste dump with rotary dumpers. The closed mine had a different waste car design, side-door hopper, used purely for that service. Both mines brought the salable coal to the surface in large skips.
For ‘hand-tipped’ modeling purposes, the small side-dumping cars once sold by Egger-Bahn would be ideal. Usual motive power would be a pair of 0-5-0s, with hard-hat miner attached.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with a couple of transplanted Kyushu coal mines)
The spoil pile would be clay of assorted colors with lots of rocks mixed in, both small and large. For a model railroad, you might be able to get by using a pile of dirt from your yard with some gravel mixed in.
Coal is a sedimentary rock and is associated with other sedimentary rocks. Thus, waste from an underground mine would normally consist of sedimentary rock such as sandstone, shale, and limestone. I doubt most “backyard dirt” would be a good representation of sedimentary rock. Check out companies such as Arizona Rock and Mineral that offer natural rock products for suitable products. Mines follow the stratum of coal, so once the seam has been reached there would be little additional spoils unless there were multiple coal strata.
One problem with coal is that it isn’t found ‘pure.’ A coal seam 1600mm thick might contain 350-400mm thickness of included non-flammable waste. OTOH, the actual seam might be so thin that rock would have to be excavated to provide transport adits. The Wyoming coal fields, with their seams measured in tens of feet of depth, are not typical of coal deposits worldwide.
The mines I was checking out half a century ago were bringing up about a cubic meter of spoil for every 3-4 cubic meters of coal. Japan has since stopped mining coal - not because the seams were played out but because costs had gotten too high. I don’t doubt that the cost of moving spoil contributed to that.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with coal mines that don’t have to turn a profit)
My father was born before WW-I in a coal mining town, Portage, PA. A few years ago, on a business trip to Altoona, I had the opportunity to take a little detour and visit it. Just as I got into town, I rounded a curve on the highway, and at the entrance to the town was an 8’ pile of tailings, or spoil, topped by a “You Are Now In U.M.W. Country!” sign. IIRC, the pile was a kind of a brownish-black color, with traces of very dark grey and black soil and rocks mixed in. Texture seemed to vary from fine dirt to small fist-sized cliumps.
Of course, the family moved out to our current (former) steel town around 1920. My dad was interested in the pictures, but he didn’t remember much of the town, except falling through the ice into a pond, contracting pneumonia and pluresy, and being carried 15 miles to the hospital in Altoona by my Grandfather on foot. My Dad was a little over 4 at the time.
My grandfather didn’t want to raise a family in such a dangerous environment. Today’s coal mininng is MUCH safer than it was back then. Which might explain the size of the Cemetary I saw.
I grew up about an hour’s drive north of the Carbondale-Scranton area in PA (just across the river in NY state). As I recall, the overburden piles were a sort of black to charcoal gray, with a little reddish brown (probably the red shale) mixed in. I do know, too, that these piles were mountainous; 100+ ft. in height. I don’t know what kind of a car they used to dump the overburden. All I can remember are the enormous shovels they used to excavate the coal. You could drive a dump truck inside the shovel bucket. It also seemed to me that they used a large (huge) conveyor, operating 24/7 to convey the spoil onto these piles.
Having grown up in Eastern Pennsylvania and having family from up in “Coal Cracker Country,” I seem to remember family members referring to the “Spoil or Overburden” as “Culm.”
Any overburden removal I was privileged to see in my association with my father, a retired copper mining expert and engineer, involved trucking or conveying the material to make earthen dams, often with a view to damming a creek or a stream enough that it provided a water reservoir for a co-located processing plant/mill. Alternatively, a dam was created behind which tailings could be stored, and provision was made to manage any creek (hopefully small) by using gates or run-off sluices/weirs.
So, you would have small electric tractors on rails towing several one tone ore cars on twin axles, going around tight curves on a narrow 20" or 22" gauge. These small tracks would run out from an addit, or from a hopper lifting stuff out of an open pit/quarry, turn sharply and head directly toward the berm/dam. There would be extensive use of passing sidings of a suitable length with ground throws.
Crandell- A very interesting description and one I had never even thought about. Probably more than I want to model… probably put a hill of stuff under the end of the elevated spoilage track from the mine … but your real observation is enlightening. Same with the others who have responded since my last comment.
For a realistic depiction of Pennsylvania anthracite country in the '50s, check out the article in the June 2010 issue of RMC on Wayne Sittner’s layout. In my opinion, the pictures alone are worth the price of the magazine.
