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My layout will host a coal mine (Walthers New River Mining) based on the Turtle Creek Central branchline project from earlier this year in MRR. I've been reading up on the carloading process at coal mines, and I can't find any 'dead end' type mine spurs like they did on the TCC branchline. Most of what I'm finding says prototype operations would either have a long loop for continuous loading of cars (like the western coal flood loaders), or a small yard that would slope downward toward the coal loading bays. When the cars were ready to be loaded, either a winchline or a tractor would start the cars rolling down the slope so they would be loaded as they rolled along down the hill, and then they would come to rest in a 'loaded' yard or tracks where they would be picked up when enough cars to build a train were ready. My question is... is the TCC branchline dead end spurs mine trackage in ANY way consistent with ANY kind of known eastern appalachian coal mines that 'might' still be operating between 1980 and the present? I want to design a coal mine that would produce about 18 HO carloads per operating session that would be switched out by the local mine switcher. I was thinking of either, A) designing the mine very similar to the TCC branchline mine, but with 3 loading tracks instead of two, and using the switcher to 'shove' the cars under the bays as they're 'loaded', loading one track at a time (very unprototypical, because you'd have three loading bays, but only one bay loading at a time, thus no real use for the other two bays) or B) redesign the mine tracks much longer so that the cars can be shoved to the end of the spur, then (insert imagination here) 'rolled' by gravity down through the loading bays, coming to a rest at the end of each yard track where the local switcher would pick them up and assemble them into an outbound train. The only other thing I could come up with is a very tight loop (22" radius) that I might be able to do a continuous loop loading, but again, I'd only need one, maybe two bays, not all three. I want to make it look like the mine is using all three bays to load. What's the most prototypical way of doing this? Does anyone have a link to some information or pictures of modern coal loading operations from the appalachian mountains? Any pics especially would help me get a better idea of what would look real and what wouldn't. Thanks! Jeremy
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