i appreciate all the responses.
My mother's from the Mahanoy Plane and I'm aware of some of the valley's history. My uncle showed me a model he built of a coal tipple. I wish he were around to explain more of a mine's workings.
greg - Philadelphia & Reading / Reading
If you are ever in the Centrailia Pa area, take note of the hills around the area. Alot of those hills are coal mine waste.
Centralia is famous for the mine fire burning under what's left of the town. The fire started in the early 1960s.
Hello all,
gregcI assume the preference is for mine entrances to be at the base of a slope, not on top of a mountain. Why dig further than you have to? Why not take advantage of gravity when you can.
Not necessarily...
You dig where the commodities lie.
The strata in the mountains that divide the Leadville and Alma mining districts, here in Colorado, are inclined.
The chambers of silver on the Leadville side of the Mosquito Range can be reached by adits close to the valley floor. While the chambers on the Alma side are reached by adits at elevations of 12,000- to 14,000-feet; 2,000- to 4,000-feet above the valley floor.
As far as hard-rock mine waste there are two types:
The first kind is the tailings from digging the adits and shafts. That material is just dumped at the mouth of the adit or shaft. Often times small trestles were built to extend the dumping range of the tailings piles.
The second kind is produced from the refining process at the stamp mill.
The ore rich rock is hauled to the mill where it is crushed and the rock is separated from the ore, typically by a wet chemical process using cyanide, arsenic and other heavy metals.
The raw ore is then transported to a smelter for further refining.
What is left of the crushing process is dumped into piles or pumped into settling ponds around the stamp mills.
Hope this helps.
"Uhh...I didn’t know it was 'impossible' I just made it work...sorry"
Indeed! It explains why so many millions of people bailed out of Europe from the 1880's through 1914. Endurance had ceased to be a virtue.
There's a flip side. I have a friend of Slovak descent, whose family emigrated in the 1890s from what was then the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary. The immigrants settled in Uniontown, PA, a stereotypical mining town if ever there was one; his grandfather went on to be one of the boys Hine photographed. Almost a century later, he went to the Slovak Republic to make the acquaintance of his distant relatives, and they showed him the preserved letters their own grandparents had received from Uniontown: they said "the streets are paved with gold here."
Which tells you a lot about what things must have been like in rural Hungary in the 18990s.
http://mprailway.blogspot.com
"The first transition era - wood to steel!"
Not just on the piles, but also in the breaker buildings themselves, just over the conveyor belts, picking out rocks or other debris.
A hellish, miserable job. The Lewis Hine photos tell it all. In addition, there was a movie called the "Molly Maguires" done about 40 years ago starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris that showed just how rotten conditions were for the miners back in the 19th Century. One memorable scene shows the breaker boys working furiously to pick out the rocks and other stuff.
I've got a bit of family history here. My grandfather on my mother's side worked in the coal mines in Scotland, and when he emigrated here got a job in the mines in West Virginia. He quit after several weeks. As tough as things were in Scotland there were things going on in the American mines that would have gotten them shut down instantly by British mine regulations.
I just thought of something else. Trying to negotiate a solution to a coal miner strike that occurred during his administration President Theodore Roosevelt found one of the mining company owners to be so smug and insufferable Teddy said he was "Sorely tempted to throw him out a window!"
Maybe he should have.
If you ever see the old Lewis Hine photos of children working as "breaker boys" or "slate pickers," they were working on those piles.
I've heard of the St. Nicholas breakers, both 1 and 2. Number two was still standing up until pretty recently but as I understand it's now slated for demolition, preservation efforts having failed.
Firelock76This may not be a picture of a mine, it may actually be what's called a breaker, where the raw coal right up from the ground was broken into various commercial-grade sizes.
I'm pretty sure this isn't just a breaker, although it seems to be more than just a mine and may have sorted coal to remove waste and sort by size. At that time, in the valley I believe the Bear Run Colliery was in, there was the 1st St Nicholas Breaker.
gregc in this picture, it looks like the slope is covered with stone (waste). In this case, it's not clear to me where the mine shaft is. I'm guessing it's a more vertical shaft under the tallest part of the structure. I'm also guessing the horizontal structure near the top is a path for waste either coming up from the mine or from the selection process in the structure. Perhaps there are tracks or trucks that haul to different parts of the slope where it is dumped. In other pcitures of collieries on level ground, it seems that the waste must be hauled away. I don't ever recall seeing a pictrue of a modeled mine showing piles of waste. ?
in this picture, it looks like the slope is covered with stone (waste).
In this case, it's not clear to me where the mine shaft is. I'm guessing it's a more vertical shaft under the tallest part of the structure. I'm also guessing the horizontal structure near the top is a path for waste either coming up from the mine or from the selection process in the structure. Perhaps there are tracks or trucks that haul to different parts of the slope where it is dumped.
In other pcitures of collieries on level ground, it seems that the waste must be hauled away. I don't ever recall seeing a pictrue of a modeled mine showing piles of waste.
?
This may not be a picture of a mine, it may actually be what's called a breaker, where the raw coal right up from the ground was broken into various commercial-grade sizes. The waste left behind (bits of rock or coal too fine for commercial use) was simply dumped onto various handy locations where the mounds are still visible to this day. As a matter of fact you can see the waste pile adjacent to the powerhouse in the front of the postcard. That windowed "tunnel" just to the right of the top of the structure is where the raw coal was conveyor-belted in, the finished products came out and were loaded into hopper cars on the lower left where the tracks are.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was another waste pile just to the left out of the photo.
I assume the preference is for mine entrances to be at the base of a slope, not on top of a mountain. Why dig further than you have to? Why not take advantage of gravity when you can.
The picture (postcard) shows a mountain of waste above a collery. How did it get there?
Not sure where the mine entrance is, but I see a structure leading up the slope. Is waste carried up and then hauled to slope and dumped?
In an older hard rock vertical shaft underground mine the waste rock is usually dumped as close to the head frame as possible, usually, with a tram extending out from the head frame on a trestle. For a drift horizontal entry mine, the waste rock was just dumped down the hillside. If you do a search for mines near Leadville, Colorado you'll find plenty of pictures of vertical shaft mines. Search for Idaho Springs, Colorado to see the drift mines with waste rock dumps tumbling down the hillside. If the waste rock had any sulfides, it would generate acid mine drainage - a real environmental problem.
Newer open pit mines dump their waste rock in areas that won't become the "pit". Low grade ore may also be dumped in heap leach piles and the mineral extracted with sulfuric acid (copper) or cyanide (gold) solutions. Both the waste rock and heap leach piles look like terraced man made mountains. The higher grade ores are processed at the mill, and refined at a smelter. The mill tailings are slurries that are pumped to tailing storage facilities (TSFs) which eventually become some of the largest dams there are. If you're ever in Tuscon, Arizona you can look to the southwest and see the huge TSFs for Asarco's Mission Mine. About 50% of my professional work is designing tailings slurry pumping and distribution systems for mines in Alaska, Western US, Mexico, Central, and South America and Africa.
Ray
The entrance to the mine shaft looks like a cave and the miners boards a gang car and is taken to a elevator that takes them down into the working shaft(s). Another gang car takes them to the work area. This could be a 1,000- 2,000 feet down and a mile in.
I have seen mine waste haul out by 18 wheel dump truck and gondola.
Larry
Conductor.
Summerset Ry.
"Stay Alert, Don't get hurt Safety First!"
how did it get there?