I know little about strip mining. I remember as a kid in WV seeing bare mountains in Logan county That in the early 70s they had to reclaim the land but that is it. I think I would like to model a 1940s strip mine but don't know how. I have searched the internet but found very little. Can anyone out there help me out?
You might try searching on the web for the name of the company that operated in your area. In eastern Ohio that would be Hanna Coal, or later Consolidation Coal. There are some interesting photos there. I am not sure but I believe surface mines (commonly called "Strip" mines) did not really become profitable until the late 40's and early 50's when large shovels were built to handle the overburden (Dirt above the coal). I understand the BTU value of the shallow coal was much less than that of the deeper coal. I do know that in eastern Ohio, Hanna Coal build a coal pipeline beginning in Georgetown Ohio, near Cadiz in Harrison County, to pump/float coal from the Pittsburgh #8 seam to Cleveland, in part due to uncertain hauling rates by the railroads. This area was served by the Wheeling and Lake Erie/Nickle Plate, as well as the Pennsylvania, B&O and their subsidiaries. Hope this puts you on the right track
Kevin
Google "open pit mining"
There is a lot of reference on the web.
Strip mines (open pit mines) are HUGE, and were even back in the 1940s - I have a National Geographic issue from that WWII era, talking about how coal was helping wining the war effort (of course), and there's a image of a pit mine that has chew through several farm fields and is making inroads on others - quite impressive actually. (in the same article is a micro-mine - a guy found his house was built abutting a coal seam, so he built a door in his basement to access the seam and was extracting the coal to use in his furnance).
OK, I think the usual way to model strip mines is to model a railhead loading area, then part of a pit (especially cool if this is built into the aisle fascia), and the rest of the mine implied by a backdrop or some equivalent.
Basics of a strip mine or open pit mine is to strip the unwanted dirt covering the mineral desired. Usually this is placed to one side and piled up as the mine gets longer and not wider. Then the wanted mineral is taken out. Then the mine operator puts the stripped off material back in the hole or big ditch the mineral was removed from. Then the whole process is started again. This time the over burden is placed on the dirt that was put back in the first hole or ditch. Most of the work done at a mine is handling over burden and not so much the mineral desired. Google large stripping shovels. The worlds largest mining machines were built to handle the unwanted over burden as efficiently as possible. Most of the largest shovels never touched the coal.
Pete
I pray every day I break even, Cause I can really use the money!
I started with nothing and still have most of it left!
I was raised among the southern Illinois coal strip mines. They covered many square miles. An entire layout could be nothing but an open pit strip mine.
In the early days they used Porter steam engines (0-4-0s and 0-6-0s) to haul away the overburden to a dump site, and coal from the pit to the washer/sorter. In later years huge shovel dump trucks took over the haulage chores, with one or two trucks taking the place of an entire train.
The biggest challenge to modeling a strip mine would be finding the gigantic draglines, power shovels, trucks, and other equipment that they used.
A "walking" shovel built by the United Electric Coal Mine was the size of a 5 story building with two booms that extended several hundred feet in opposite directions. The main boom had a huge grinding wheel on the end which could remove the overburden in a continuous stream. The other boom dumped the dirt onto a pile on the opposite side of the pit.
OK, I have the article right here - National Geographic, May 1944 (1 month before D-Day - so we can safely assume it fits your 1940s timeframe): "Coal: Prodigious Worker for Man" - the image is on page 575 (I think in those days they used consecutive page numbering across the entire year), an aerial view of a Indiana Surface mine in the middle of farmland - there is a big fan-like section of disturbed ground with ridges radiating out from a central pivot (nearby is a small yard w/ hoppers and the coal loading railhead) - you can readily see the coal seam at the working head, and the ridges were the former working head of the mine - the article states the working head will eventually be mined and then filled with overburden, forming yet another ridge. This mine was using a 1,000 ton electric shovel, mounted on tracks (not a walking beam or the like). Compared to the standard "steam" shovel it's posed next to, it could be 5 stories tall to the top of the boom. Anyway, at that time they were willing to go 80foot deep with a strip mine to recover a 36inch coal seam.I just mention this as, while there are many images of strip/surface mines on the web, this image (possibly findable at your local library - I'm afraid my scanner is not working right now) and the one of the huge electric shovel is definitely in the 1940s timeframe.
Strip mining in WV has been around since 1916 when mines were opened in Brooke and Hancock counties and produced around 200K tons per year using very small steam-powered shovels. By 1943, almost all surface operations in the state were in Harrison County where they mined 50K tons in 1940, increased to an average of 3 million tons per year in 1943 and held steady at 10 million tons per year between 1945 and 1965.
If your layout is set in the less mountainous area of Northern WV, your 1940 era layout could possibly incorporate some typical steam shovels and load coal cars directly. Tipples usually were not used for surface mined coal (in this area and era) with rough trackage laid down across the pit areas and then pulled back up as they mined under the tracks to get the last reserves in the working field. Look at the March 2009 issue of MRR for a great example of a gravel mine using this exact method. Although an example of a gravel pit, a 1940 era northern WV surface coal mine would be almost an exact duplicate.
If you model southern WV, surface mining just didn't exist due to a lack of technology for mining the steep hillsides. In 1949, Blair & Oldham introduced auger mining at their surface mine near Isom in Letcher County Kentucky which bores horizontally into a coal outcrop or small bench cut into the mountainside. This became popular in southern WV starting about 1963 where auger mining accounted for 3.7 million tons of production and peaked in 1970 at 5.7 million tons.
Since southern WV railroad loadings were done by tipple set at openings to drift mines, you could add a auger mining example next to an existing tipple where the company opened up the outcrop and augered in to get the coal near the surface which was usually not mine-able from the inside out due to engineering issues. However, as stated above, this technology just didn't exist in WV until the '60s.
Robby Modeling the L&N CV Subdivision in 1978 http://s226.photobucket.com/albums/dd247/robby-ky/CV%20Subdivision%20Layout/