In a 1 hour video by JMJ Productions, copyrighted 1992, titled “Vintage Rails, Vol. 1, Delaware & Hudson”, there is film of a steam train travelling north between Scranton and Carbondale, Pa.
On the left of the tracks was what appeared to be a large steel plant.
TOWERING behind that steel plant loomed a HUGH dark grey Pyramid, probably made of metal.
Does anyone know anything about this GIGANTIC structure ? I’m assuming it is to keep raw materials out of the weather ?
Sorry, but I am not computer savvy enough to transfer a picture from a video to this thread.
Between Scranton and Carbondale, it was probably one of the culm dumps. Waste from the coal cleaning and grading process. The waste color varies between grey and black depending on the lighting and reflectiveness of the pile.
Might not be a steel plant. I’d expect it to be a breaker, and if you search the Net for pictures of the anthracite breakers in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton region, you will probably find which one it is. Sadly, almost all are gone now. Amazing how the area has changed in less than 15 years!
The black line is almost certainly a conveyor – otherwise how could the dump arrive at so perfect a ‘pyramidal’ shape? (Determined at least in part by the angle of repose of the ‘culm’ involved.) It wouldn’t ‘pay’ to place the culm in a pile just about any other way…
When I was a kid, my father’s family all lived in the Kingston area (across the river from Wilkes-Barre) and we (incorrectly) called the culm piles ‘slag heaps’. There were a couple that seemed as big as any of the mountains we traversed getting from eastern New Jersey, and I remember thinking that they would NEVER disappear… but they disappeared completely, and quite quickly too, within just a few years after Hurricane Agnes flooded things out … I think in part by being used as fill for the Rt. 81 and Cross Valley Expressway projects…