vsmith wrote: "General" Palmer (I stand corrected I just remembered it was a high military rank) certainly knew how to sell the big idea, just like PT Barnum did when you think about it the two were not that very different.
"General" Palmer (I stand corrected I just remembered it was a high military rank) certainly knew how to sell the big idea, just like PT Barnum did when you think about it the two were not that very different.
Well, they did name a lake after him....
(Palmer Lake--the high point between Denver and Colorado Springs on the Joint Line)
One of the great things about the Rio Grande was their ability to turn lemons into lemonades over several decades. The operated "succesfully" in the expansion times, the progressive era of the Trust Busters, the Public Utility period (1920-1929), the Great Depression, WW II, the Rise of Trucks (1945-1970, and Collapse of the National Rail System. They finally ran out of gas with Phil's arrival. It was a long and great run but dust to dust...
bobwilcox wrote: One of the great things about the Rio Grande was their ability to turn lemons into lemonades over several decades. The operated "succesfully" in the expansion times, the progressive era of the Trust Busters, the Public Utility period (1920-1929), the Great Depression, WW II, the Rise of Trucks (1945-1970, and Collapse of the National Rail System. They finally ran out of gas with Phil's arrival. It was a long and great run but dust to dust...
The secret to that success was coal. And even though the name might be gone and the railroad not much of a through transcon route these days, the coal moves in greater volume than ever before. The transcon business lasted for 70 years whereas the railroad's last spike was driven 127 years ago.
So today the Rio Grande has come full circle to its original rationale, a railroad that moves minerals from the mountains to the cities, but it's not dust yet nor is it likely to be as far as I can see into the future.
RWM
Murphy Siding wrote: vsmith wrote: "General" Palmer (I stand corrected I just remembered it was a high military rank) certainly knew how to sell the big idea, just like PT Barnum did when you think about it the two were not that very different.I've always found it fascinating, how seems like there was always someone willing to invest with people promoting big schemes. When you think about how many fortunes were made and lost, just in the railroading business, you wonder how new investors were found.
"Found"? They were born. Their descendents were last seen clutching fistfuls of worthless shares of pets.com while watching the repo man hauling off the big-screen plasma TV after flipping one too many houses in Las Vegas.
nanaimo73 wrote: From the limited amount of reading I have done on the D&RG, it would seem a major turning point took place in 1878, when the AT&SF won control of Raton Pass. I believe this turned the D&RG westward into the Rockies, while the ATSF continued on to the coast.Would anyone care to speculate what would have happened if the D&RG had been the victor at Raton? I'd guess the D&RG would not have aimed for California, while the ATSF would have found a differnt route.
From the limited amount of reading I have done on the D&RG, it would seem a major turning point took place in 1878, when the AT&SF won control of Raton Pass. I believe this turned the D&RG westward into the Rockies, while the ATSF continued on to the coast.
Would anyone care to speculate what would have happened if the D&RG had been the victor at Raton? I'd guess the D&RG would not have aimed for California, while the ATSF would have found a differnt route.
I think the race to Raton Pass is mythology informed by the knowledge of what played out much later rather than what people actually were thinking when it happened -- an answer in search of a question. While the event did occur I do not think it greatly mattered at the time to the parties. Either railroad could have gone around Black Mesa to the east, which the C&S did much later on its way to Texas, or used a couple of other passes, if it wanted so badly to reach the coalfields of Raton Mesa or the rude adobe village that was Santa Fe. Neither the Santa Fe or the D&RG was sure at that time where its destiny lay. The Santa Fe was not en route to Los Angeles at that time -- Los Angeles being a dusty hamlet adjacent to an intermittent stream in a hot desert basin. Raton Pass was a convenient path to ... something. But they didn't know what yet.
Murphy Siding wrote: Railway Man wrote: ...............and the Pacific Coast schemes never seemed more than token and half-hearted, designed merely to attract the small and naiive investor who expected ANY railroad west of the Mississippi to have Pacific plans in its portfolio. RWM Wasn't that more or less what they aimed at later, when hooking up with line to Salt Lake City, and later yet, with WP?
Railway Man wrote: ...............and the Pacific Coast schemes never seemed more than token and half-hearted, designed merely to attract the small and naiive investor who expected ANY railroad west of the Mississippi to have Pacific plans in its portfolio. RWM
Not really. The connection across the desert was a convenience to enable profitable commerce between western Colorado and Utah, a connection which occurred when it became obvious that the eastern extent of the Utah lines in the Book Cliffs Coal Field, and the western extent of the Colorado lines at the junction of the Grand and Gunnison Rivers, would be only separated by about 150 miles of open desert.
The WP venture came two decades later under the aegis of George Gould. Almost nothing has been documented about the business methods or life of the junior Gould, unfortunately. It's not known if he genuinely thought it was valuable to build a coast-to-coast system, and if so, what possessed him to think it could be economically muscular with such a peculiar skeleton. Perhaps he was engaging in a bear run on Harriman with the WP, thinking to connect with the CB&Q or C&NW in central Utah, and the D&RGW was a stepping stone that would soon revert to its logical role as a feeder line. Or, perhaps he was merely a guileless inheritor of great wealth who was driven to demonstrate his importance and boldness, and thus step out from the shadow of his feared and brilliant father. I most think it was the latter, as the railroad expansion era was already obviously drawing to a close and if one was to make a mark in the early 1900s as a railroad builder one had to do it quickly and with whatever kit was handy. There wasn't much left in the way of untapped new routes that had even the barest of economic reason. Senator W.A. Clark of the SPLA&SL was another of that type.
Thanks to Chris / CopCarSS for my avatar.
Railway Man wrote: 4. The key to the D&RGW's purpose and need was and is coal. Without coal, there would have been no D&RGW beyond 1900; without coal it would not have survived the depression; without coal it would not have been rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s; without coal it would not be here today post SP-UP merger. Coal was always its raison d'etre.RWM
4. The key to the D&RGW's purpose and need was and is coal. Without coal, there would have been no D&RGW beyond 1900; without coal it would not have survived the depression; without coal it would not have been rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s; without coal it would not be here today post SP-UP merger. Coal was always its raison d'etre.
Murphy Siding wrote: Railway Man wrote: 4. The key to the D&RGW's purpose and need was and is coal. Without coal, there would have been no D&RGW beyond 1900; without coal it would not have survived the depression; without coal it would not have been rebuilt in the 1960s and 70s; without coal it would not be here today post SP-UP merger. Coal was always its raison d'etre.RWMWithout regulation to make DRG a player in the transcon business, wouldn't DRG's coal traffic have made it a target for some connecting railroad, such as a western extention for one of the railroads in Denver?
Several reasons why it didn't:
1. Coal moving in very large volumes greater than 500 miles distances from mine to market entirely by rail is a post-1970 phenomenon. Prior to 1900 coal moving more than 200 miles from mine to market was quite exceptional. The D&RGW coal market basin in the domestic heating era was bounded tightly to its own lines with the addition of the MoPac east to western Kansas, the LA&SL south to Milford, the WP west into central Nevada, and the OSL north and west throughout southern Idaho. Coal mines in the Denver Field on UP and CB&Q barred D&RGW coal from markets north and east of Denver. Coal mines on C&S and Santa Fe in the Raton Mesa field competed in markets east of Pueblo and Trinidad.
2. The UP via its lease of the LA&SL and OSL interchanged with Utah Railway at Provo and preferentially interchanged with URY, which had good penetration in the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateau Coal Fields. LA&SL participated 50-50 with URY in the "Utah Coal Route" coal car fleet and the Provo yard and engine terminal was a 50-50 URY/LA&SL facility. URY thus shared with D&RGW the coal market on the LA&SL south, the WP west, and the OSL north and west -- along with Wyoming coal competing on UP in the Idaho and Montana markets.
3. By the time coal began to move long distances railroad mergers were regulated. By the time railroad mergers were partially deregulated, 1980, the railroads in a position to buy D&RGW consisted only of SP, UP, Santa Fe, and BN. BN was cash-poor because it was investing so heavily in the PRB and did not have routes leading from D&RGW territory into coal buying territory except to the east and south, where it would be competing with PRB coal. Santa Fe, even poorer connections. SP, cash starved. UP -- it got the coal interchange anyway.
4. Connecting railroads to D&RGW got the coal traffic anyway, without all the headache of having to run the railroad or pay for the thinly trafficked lines.
5. A western extension to someone like the BN or Santa Fe got it nothing unless it wanted to also buy the WP or SP. Merger policy under the ICC made it highly unlikely either Santa Fe or BN could purchase the SP, and the WP was a very weak and undesirable railroad with no obvious future potential. UP -- why would it want it?
6. In the early 1900s the D&RGW had value as a cash source, but zero value as a transcon player. The coal business was highly local in character. UP and Santa Fe had excellent on-line coal sources -- UP at Carbon, Hanna, Rock Springs, and Kemmerer, Wyo., Santa Fe in the Raton Mesa and Gallup fields. So there was no 1+1 =3 potential, just more railroad, more territory, and more risk.
7. Coal markets prior to 1900 consisted mostly of mines and smelters. D&RGW-served mines had the only cokable coal in Utah and competed into Montana for a brief period until cokable coal was developed in the Kemmerer field in western Wyoming. Santa Fe, C&S, and D&RGW all served the Raton Field, which had cokable coal, so competed for the smelter market in Pueblo and Denver. Smelters after 1900 declined and closed in Colorado with the exception of the AV Smelter in Leadville. Big smelters in Utah were served directly by D&RGW or Utah-UP, or both.
Murphy Siding wrote: Hello! I'm back online, after having been unexplicably locked out from logging in for 3 days. I've been told by the moderator, that I had not been intentionally locked out, and I will take that as the truth. I don't, however, expect to change who I am, or how I interact with other members on the forum. I have a lot of people on here that I consider to be friends...and a few detractors. Such is life, and I guess we'll work our way through it. If I'm out of line, by all means tellme, on here or in a PM, and we can discuss it.
Your personal problems are fascinating. Once again, what on earth does this have to do with this thread?
Michael, it seems to me the Murph is informing those who wondered where he had disappeared to over the past three days that he had a problem getting onto the forum. In view of his suspicion that one of the mods had locked him, he had time over that absence to reflect on his behaviour on the forum, including his interactions with you. I would guess that the rest of his announcement was also explanatory, if largely unnecessary. I don't think it ranks as objectionable.
Let's get back to the topic.
-Crandell
selector wrote: Michael, it seems to me the Murph is informing those who wondered where he had disappeared to over the past three days that he had a problem getting onto the forum. In view of his suspicion that one of the mods had locked him, he had time over that absence to reflect on his behaviour on the forum, including his interactions with you. I would guess that the rest of his announcement was also explanatory, if largely unnecessary. I don't think it ranks as objectionable.Let's get back to the topic.-Crandell
He had a field day expressing his opinions on the Conductor's Waiving thread, which most of his victims there hadn't even posted on, including me. His interruption of this thread with his vehement personal opinions was likewise objectionable. He has a hard time staying on topic and a penchant for voicing his personal opinions about people, and interrupting threads with sarcastic remarks.
I didn't see anyone wonder where he was. I doubt that anyone noticed. He didn't need to explain anything. He didn't need to tell the world that he's not going to mend his ways and that he intends to go right on interrupting threads to satisfy his personal needs. His post was right up what has become his typical alley: snide remarks, personal comments, and his perceived role on the forum, including starting threads with other people's names while he alone pretends to decide what is appropriate and inappropriate content. The behavior is weird and getting weirder.
I'm on this forum to read about railroads in an economic context and not about some guy's ongoing personal anxieties, inability to do any minimal research, and his continuing empty grudge matches smothered in puerile sarcasm, nor do I care for announcements on a D&RG thread about where he's been or why he thought he was there.
He can start his own thread for that. Maybe I'll start one for him.
Railway Man wrote:The secret to that success was coal. And even though the name might be gone and the railroad not much of a through transcon route these days, the coal moves in greater volume than ever before. The transcon business lasted for 70 years whereas the railroad's last spike was driven 127 years ago. So today the Rio Grande has come full circle to its original rationale, a railroad that moves minerals from the mountains to the cities, but it's not dust yet nor is it likely to be as far as I can see into the future.RWM
And I do see a lot of coal moving on the Moffat Sub! Just for curiosity, is there a chance that Uncle Pete would ever consider using the line for transcon purposes again? Kind of a "relief valve" for their transcon?
Also, since I haven't seen it pop up lately here, what's the current status of the Tennessee Pass line? Is the reopening of the Climax mine going to affect the line, or is that operation planning on operating with trucks?
-ChrisWest Chicago, ILChristopher May Fine Art Photography"In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration." ~Ansel Adams
MichaelSol wrote: inability to do any minimal research
These forums exist so that young railfans and casual railfans can learn more about railroads, and hopefully become Kalmbach customers. There are a lot of members on this forum like myself that learn from Murphy's questions and the respones he receives.
nanaimo73 wrote: MichaelSol wrote: inability to do any minimal researchThese forums exist so that young railfans and casual railfans can learn more about railroads, and hopefully become Kalmbach customers. There are a lot of members on this forum like myself that learn from Murphy's questions and the respones he receives.
And I am sure they will learn a lot when he refers to people openly as his "arch-nemesis," and continually posts snide remarks on threads he doesn't like, shutting down the recent conductor thread and the nuclear locomotive thread -- neither thread of which I had anything to do with, incidentally. Perhaps Kalmbach would be better served by developing a market of polite, informed railfans who are not obsessed with asking questions they already have an answer to, and with blowing up thread after thread with their personal agendas that are often the antithesis of an actual discussion about railroading -- of which this one is a good example of inserting himself into a specific comment he was not a part of and frankly, had no business sticking his nose in if he, in fact, had nothing to say about the specific railroad subject matter.
And he didn't.
Edited by the author. My apologies Selector.
I will repeat myself this once only, gentlemen. Get back on topic.
CopCarSS wrote: And I do see a lot of coal moving on the Moffat Sub! Just for curiosity, is there a chance that Uncle Pete would ever consider using the line for transcon purposes again? Kind of a "relief valve" for their transcon?Also, since I haven't seen it pop up lately here, what's the current status of the Tennessee Pass line? Is the reopening of the Climax mine going to affect the line, or is that operation planning on operating with trucks?
I can't comment on your first two questions.
Mines that extract hard rock metallic ores of virtually all the metals except iron and aluminum -- even world-class mines like Climax -- do not consume or generate large quantities of material. Most metallic ores other than aluminum and iron these days are mining ore that contains less than 1.0% of the desired metal, which is usually combined with oxygen, carbon, sulfur, etc. Almost without exception the ore is concentrated as close to the mine as possible to reduce transportation costs. In many large mines such as the porphyry copper mines, the concentrate is smelted on site too, or if its an oxide ore it's heap-leached and the leachate is electrolyized to anodes (the term is SX-EW, for solvent extraction electrowinning). Thus in a big open-pit mine extracting 30,000 tons of 1.0% ore per day, only 300 tons of that represents the mineral. After concentration the result is three covered hopper loads or 12 truckloads. While those three covered hopper loads might be very high intrinsic value -- the contents worth well over $1 million each -- the transportation value is very low.
Inputs to open pit mines are largely diesel fuel to run the machines and in combination with prilled ammonium nitrate provide the explosive. Construction materials such as cement and structural steel to build the concentrator might amount to maybe 200-300 carloads in total, not a lot. Underground mines can use a lot of cement and some steel, but underground mining is increasingly too expensive to do in the U.S. as the labor input is very high. Block caving methods decrease the amount of labor but the skill level required for a block caving operation is high and attracting and holding skilled miners is very expensive. SX-EW mines consume sulfuric acid, and concentrators and exotic autoclaves and things like that in use today consume reagents and pH modifiers, but again in quantities that can be economically trucked a few hundred miles without serious effect on the economics of the mine.
"We have met the enemy and he is us." Pogo Possum "We have met the anemone... and he is Russ." Bucky Katt "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." Niels Bohr, Nobel laureate in physics
Railway Man wrote: 1. Coal moving in very large volumes greater than 500 miles distances from mine to market entirely by rail is a post-1970 phenomenon. Prior to 1900 coal moving more than 200 miles from mine to market was quite exceptional. The D&RGW coal market basin in the domestic heating era was bounded tightly to its own lines with the addition of the MoPac east to western Kansas, the LA&SL south to Milford, the WP west into central Nevada, and the OSL north and west throughout southern Idaho. Coal mines in the Denver Field on UP and CB&Q barred D&RGW coal from markets north and east of Denver. Coal mines on C&S and Santa Fe in the Raton Mesa field competed in markets east of Pueblo and Trinidad. RWM
You mention coal movement before 1900, and after 1970. What about in between? My employer was big into the (lumber) and coal business in years past. The elderly owners were proud of the fact that back "before the war" they were the biggest coal dealer in town. They carried 46 varieties of coal(!)(?) I never did get the low-down on why you needed 46 varieties, and maybe that was an exaggeration on their part. I was intrigued, however, by the thought of 46 kinds of coal coming from maybe 46 different mines? These old boys were smart. They built a lumber & coal yard where the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road crossed.
Jay -- Sort of.
The basic difference is that coal lies in a seam that extends indefinitely in all directions, like the frosting layer inside a two-layer cake. The art of coal mining consists of removing as much of the seam (the frosting) as possible and as little of the surrounding rock (the cake) as possible. Since it is impossible to hold up the mountain above the seam over a vast acreage all at once, the idea is to hold up the mountain only above where you happen to be mining at that moment, and letting the mountain collapse to fill the void as quickly as possible to keep weight from building up on the area where you absolutely must hold the mountain up.
Long-wall mining as you know is a system where the coal is extracted continuously along a long face by a travelling cutting head that deposits the coal into a conveyor belt system that moves the coal to the surface of the mine. (There were pre-mechanized long-walls but we'll avoid that here to keep this below book-length. Also sometimes shuttle cars are used instead of conveyors; same comment as above.) The working face is held up by large robotically controlled steel shields that consist of a bottom leg laid flat on the floor, a vertical member that is hydraulically extended to take weight onto the shield system, and a top leg laid flat on the ceiling, arranged in a big C shape with the open side of the C facing the coal cutting face. The longwall cutter and the miners work under the protection of the shields until a foot or so of the coal is removed. Then the shields retract downward one at a time just enough to relieve pressure and step forward, all in sequence, and the entire working face a thousand or more feet in length advances forward. Behind the shields the roof is now unsupported and caves into the void, relieving pressure on the shields.
Long walls have many ways to get into trouble. A roof that is too competent, e.g.., made up of a thick, strong, sandstone layer, may not collapse in little pieces and try to span too far until the pressure is so severe on the shields that they are driven into the floor and cannot advance. There is more than one instance of a $6 million long-wall being abandoned inside a mine. Long walls don't like seams that have dips, splits, pinches, faults, or hogbacks. They want a nice, near-flat, seam of uniform height. Longwalls can't be made strong enough to span very thick coal seams either and in those cases the only practical solution may be to slice off the bottom of the seam and leave the top of the seam behind.
The longwall requires a lot of prepatory work to advance haulage and ventilation tunnels to the back of the area that will be mined. These tunnels are narrow enough in width that the roof will span naturally like an arch from side to side. Rock bolts and steel mesh are used to keep superficial rock from spalling off -- often the roof isn't a nice thick layer of sandstone but consists of a foot or so of rotten shale that wants to fall off in chunks and kill miners. The rock bolts are only there to tie the roof into a solid piece; they by no means are holding up the mountain! In the past a tremendous amount of wood timbering and lagging served the same purpose. Sometimes steel sets are used to make up for deficiency in the strength of the roof or the coal pillars on either side, but they're only helping out: you cannot hold stand a mountain on top of a post and expect that it won't crush the post like a bug.
Generally the long wall advances from the back of the area to be mined toward the entrance to the mine so that the collapse area and the pressures it creates and the methane it might trap is not between the miners and the way out. A lot of coal has to be left in the long, continuous barrier pillars between the haulage and ventilation tunnels and between the tunnels and the longwall area itself, in order to protect the tunnels and the longwalls from too much pressure or from tranferring collapse zones to each other. In ideal geologic conditions a longwall might remove 80% of the coal, leaving 20% behind forever. That may seem dismaying but the old room-and-pillar system often did no better than a 40% extraction ratio.
Metallic minerals in contrast occur in two basic ways -- as a defined vein structure in worthless country rock, called a lode, and as a disseminated mineral in a large body of rock. Gold is about the only metal that rarely combines with other elements in nature and is found in the pure form. All other metals happily form compounds with common elements such as oxygen, sulfur, or carbon. Metals that compose a large percentage of the earth's crust such as iron and aluminum are almost always mined from large deposits where the metal occurs in high concentration, e.g., 60% or more iron was common in the Mesabe Range in hematite beds. Valuable metals such as copper, silver, lead, zinc, molybdenum, etc., that are relatively scarce in the earth's crust can be found either as lode deposits or disseminated deposits. Most of the lode deposits on this planet have been located and extracted by now as they present highly concentrated minerals in a very defined, small, and obvious space, and could be extracted profitably with hand tools.
By the late 1800s the presence of disseminated deposits was known but there was no economic method to extract them nor any reason to, as lode deposits were still available at shallow depths. In 1900, the first disseminated non-iron metal deposit was attacked by the brilliant mining engineer Daniel Jackling and the Utah Copper Company at Bingham Canyon, Utah, using open-pit methods. It took Jackling several years, taking his ideas to one investor group after another, to find one who agreed to Jackling's plan to use steam-powered churn drills to open blast holes and steam shovels to load the broken ore into trains, thereby profitably mining copper ore that until then was regarded as copper-bearing waste rock. The Utah Copper enterprise was an immediate success and Jackling's techniques were emulated world-wide.
Disseminated deposits could now be economically mined, but only if they lay close to the surface. What if they laid beneath several hundred feet of barren overburden? Or if the ore body was not shallow and broad but tall and slender, forcing an open pit to bench far into country rock on either side? The answer was block-caving, an expansion and refinement of earlier techniques of mining large veins called shrinkage stoping (describing this is far more detail than I want to get into here.) Block caving consists of starting to one side of the ore body and sinking a shaft beyond the bottom of the ore body. From the shaft, miners drive flat haulage tunnels at regular parallel intervals a hundred feet or more beneath the ore body. Finger raises are driven upward from the haulage tunnels to the bottom of the ore body. The ore body is divided on paper into blocks several hundred feet on a side. When all is ready, the bottom of each block is completely sliced off and removed -- the ore removed during this process falls by gravity into the finger raises and down to where the raises meet the top of the sides of the haulage tunnels, where gates control the ore flow and a motorman opens the gates to meter broken ore into his train. To complete the slice of the block, the final pillars of ore holding it up are shattered with explosives and the ore block is now completely unsupported from below. The block will for a brief period try to span in an arch from one side to the other, but soon the arch will begin to fail under its own weight and the block will start to collapse into the void beneath it, shattering itself into pieces as the ore block shears apart and falls. The broken ore is regularly drawn off into trains and more ore collapses into the void beneath it until the entire block -- several hundred vertical feet high -- has collapsed, been drawn, and the block is considered mined out. The surface of the earth above collapses along with it, creating what's called a glory hole. Sometimes an open pit operation will work in the glory hole at the same time, shoving broken ore into the hole to fall into the finger raises. Assays are taken constantly to make sure that what's being mined is "ore" and not "waste," since visually they might be indistinguishable. The line between waste and ore depends on the market price of the metal that day. In a rising market waste becomes ore and in a declining market ore becomes waste.
Block caving is extremely challenging. The blocks have to be drawn off in careful sequence and with constant engineering analysis to avoid creating so much pressure on any portion of the haulage tunnels below that they cannot be supported and collapse. The ore in a block may not break into small enough pieces to fit into the finger raises and miners have to crawl up into the caved area beneath the block and set charges to break it. The blocks may hang up. The finger raises very frequently hang up and miners have to figure out how to unstick them -- often by climbing up into them, figuring out what's wrong, and setting charges that are big enough to break the ore but not so big they destroy the finger raise and the gates below. This often consists of tieing several sticks of dynamite to a long wooden stick with a long dangling fuse, fishing it up in between boulders in the raise, lighting the fuse, and hoping it works. Or too much ore falls too fast and blows out the gates. Or the blocks fail diagonally and worthless country rock dilutes the ore values, or the good ore may not come out at al. The timbering costs in the drifts and haulage tunnels can be very high. Many miners have been killed or maimed by raise blockages unexpectedly deciding to come down.
Block caving properly practiced was an amazing technique that extracted millions of tons of ore that otherwise was too deep for open-pit mining, with very low labor inputs compared with traditional shrinkage stoping methods. The cost of skilled labor and the forests of trees that went into the drifts, tunnels, and raises have rendered this technique uneconomical in most cases now. However, the cost of open-pit mining has continued to rachet down, with the continuing development of bigger, faster, and less labor-intensive down-hole drills, rope shovels, front shovels, and off-road trucks. Jackling's Utah Copper enterprise quickly replaced rail-mounted partial-swing shovels with full-rotation shovels on caterpillar treads, steam shovels with electric, steam locomotives with electric, and now is using the largest trucks in the world, the Caterillar 797B hauling nearly 400 tons per truckload. Several previous block caving operations (including the Climax Mine) have been converted into open-pit, and the overburden that previously made the decision to make them underground mines has been stripped off to get at the ore body. Many ore bodies that 50 years ago would have been without question a block-caving operation are now mined open-pit without question.
(Now how is it that you and Murph ask 10-word questions and I have to post 1,000-word answers!)
If you want to know about block caving, there is a wonderful two-volume set called "The Porphyry Coppers in 1933" and "The Porphyry Coppers in 1956" by A.B. Parsons that describes the entire history, economics, and technology of large-scale mining of disseminated copper ore bodies in lucid and readable prose. These mines include Bingham Canyon, Ely, Morenci, Ray, Chino, Baghdad, Ajo, Bisbee, Miami, and San Manuel in the U.S., and Braden, Chuiquimata, and a couple others in Peru and Chile.
Murphy Siding wrote: You mention coal movement before 1900, and after 1970. What about in between? My employer was big into the (lumber) and coal business in years past. The elderly owners were proud of the fact that back "before the war" they were the biggest coal dealer in town. They carried 46 varieties of coal(!)(?) I never did get the low-down on why you needed 46 varieties, and maybe that was an exaggeration on their part. I was intrigued, however, by the thought of 46 kinds of coal coming from maybe 46 different mines? These old boys were smart. They built a lumber & coal yard where the Rock Island and Milwaukee Road crossed.
Before 1900 the coal market consisted mostly of three buyers -- domestic heating and heating of stores, schools, and the like; railways; and steel mills, smelters, and foundries. Metallurgical coal was almost all coked right at the mouth of the mine in beehive coke ovens. Domestic users needed lump coal that didn't fall through the grates of their stove. Coal was mined entirely by hand with great care taken to remove it in lumps -- the miner was paid for the lump coal and nothing for the "slack coal" -- the fines and dust inevitably created in the mining process. The slack coal was coked, if it was cokable, right at the mine mouth. N&W, which owned its coal lands, required lessors to construct coke ovens to optimize the value of its coal lands -- a mine was "rated" in number of coal cars it would receive per day according to its size, and its rating determined the number of beehive ovens it had to construct and operate. Railways bought the cheapest coal they could get, usually the "mine run" that was not quite slack and not quite lump, and often not quite flammable because it was so full of bone (carbonized shale), clay, and rock.
After 1970 the coal market consisted virtually 100% of steam coal and met coal. Met coal was now almost 100% coked at the steel mill or dedicated merchant coke plants in "byproduct coke ovens," so called because they recover the byproducts of the coking process, e.g., the valuable volatile gasses and oils. Beehive ovens waste all this to the atmosphere, which as you might imagine blackened the sky with a yellowish, noxious, cloud of smoke, and poisoned all vegetation and animal life to a moon-like surface throughout the vicinity of the ovens. Steam coal, since it is blown into the fireboxes at high pressure, is crushed at the mine to 2x0 (i.e., small enough to fall through a grate with 2" round holes; the "0" means that anything down to dust that will fit through the grate is good to be loaded into the train and sent to the power plant. Coking coal is crushed as well before being charged into the ovens. Thus, the market shifted 100% from a lump-coal driven market where slack was waste, to a crushed-coal driven market where lumps were meaningless or undesirable.
In between the market transitions from one to the other. Steel mills started to build byproduct ovens in the early 1900s when the market for coal chemicals appeared, and because the coke oven gas, largely methane, became very valuable to power the many heat processes in the mill. The domestic market held pretty strong until WWII, when it collapsed both natural gas became available, because home owners were sick of the filth and the bother, and because air-pollution laws outlawed coal burning for heating in most cities. (I have a photo in my files of high noon in Salt Lake City on a winter day, with the visibility downtown about 20 feet due to coal smoke.) The steam market starts to appear in the 1950s, at first mostly with mine-mouth plants but in the early 1960s with power plants located near load centers (eastern and midwestern cities) or water sources (in the west). Unit trains, dallied with by the ICC since 1947 on a one-off "let's see what happens" basis, finally became a going thing in 1958 to keep the B&O, Erie, PRR, and NYC from losing all their coal traffic to mine-mouth plants or cheap Venezualan resid oil.
The 46 varieties you mention is probably no exaggeration. Most mines of any size in the lump-coal era would ship from 6 to 10 different sizes of lump, everything from "egg" to "pea" to "nut" and all sorts of other interesting size descriptions. Each field tended to have its own sizing system, too, just to add to the complexity. So a coal dealer in South Dakota might stock eight sizes of Wyoming low-BTU bituminous, Iowa semi-bituminous, Illinois high-BTU bituminous, cannell coal from Oklahoma and something from Pittsburg, Kansas. When people's life revolved around coal, people were picky, just as they might go into a Starbucks today and order a double-shot half-caf dry vanilla mocha fair-trade whatever. I just order "medium coffee, strongest you have, room for cream." I refuse to call it a GRANDE or whatever silly name it is that they give it.
I do not believe there would be enough money in the world to pay me for the job of setting charges to clear the raises or break up the oversized rocks.
As you know, I have watched a long wall coal mining operation in a southern Illinois mine. The seam of the mine I was in ran from 6 to 9 feet in depth. It was something to witness. The roof in this area was shale, and although I did not witness the event, at the early stages of the mining of a panel the roof would just sag, getting lower as the wall was advanced until at some point it broke apart and collapsed. One of the engineers told me it was like a big dynamite blast.
A further aside, my company employed retreat mining on a room and pillar mine in West Virginia. Starting at the back of the mine, a continous miner took coal out of the pillar and timbers were used to hold the roof in the newly mined out area. This process went on until almost all the coal was removed from the pillar. At that point everybody cleared out of the are until the roof collapsed splintering the timbers like so many match sticks. Substantial increase the yield from the 40% figure.
Now back to our regularly scheduled program.
I think it's important to remember that the Rio Grande also benifited from the fact that three railroads had lines into Colorado from the east. Through freight on these lines had nowhere to go but on the Rio Grande. The MOP line to Pueblo, the Rock Island and the CB&Q all came into Colorado from the east and literally had to turn through freight over to the Rio Grande.
With the Federal minimum rate regulations (established in 1920) keeping these routes operating, if not financially chipper, the Grande benifited from being the only place to go.
Now the MOP route has been taken out, the Rock Island is long gone, and the BNSF can get freight to/from Northern California on its own. Another reason the ex-Grande is no longer an important transcon route.
greyhounds wrote: I think it's important to remember that the Rio Grande also benifited from the fact that three railroads had lines into Colorado from the east. Through freight on these lines had nowhere to go but on the Rio Grande. The MOP line to Pueblo, the Rock Island and the CB&Q all came into Colorado from the east and literally had to turn through freight over to the Rio Grande. With the Federal minimum rate regulations (established in 1920) keeping these routes operating, if not financially chipper, the Grande benifited from being the only place to go.Now the MOP route has been taken out, the Rock Island is long gone, and the BNSF can get freight to/from Northern California on its own. Another reason the ex-Grande is no longer an important transcon route.
The interchange traffic was the other way around -- the preponderance of the loads ran eastward, not westward. D&RGW was a feeder to the grangers and important to their traffic base. Most of the inbound traffic from the east to Denver stopped in Denver, which was open to reciprocal switching, thus of little benefit to D&RGW which received only the switching charge. Most of the customers were on UP, CB&Q, and Rock Island. There was some finished auto and autoparts traffic interchanged to D&RGW but not nearly as much as what UP, SP, and Santa Fe got the long hauls on. CF&I Steel had its own Class III railroad, the Colorado & Wyoming, and its output to the east and south went directly to those railroads with no D&RGW interchange. Northward it had to share with C&S and Santa Fe. Iron ore came in shared between C&S and D&RGW from Wyoming, and shared UP-D&RGW and UP-C&S from Utah. Coal it had to share with Santa Fe.
The important part of these three grangers was that none of them was named "Union Pacific". D&RGW did not have much interchange traffic with UP as it was in direct competition with UP for the commodities it hauled if not the actual shippers themselves. Ponderosa pine mouldings from Weyerhaeuser Lumber in Klamath Falls shipped SP-D&RGW-CB&Q did not look any different to the lumberyard in Chicago than the ponderosa pine mouldings from Boise-Payette Lumber in Emmett, Idaho, routed UP-C&NW. Canned tomatoes shipped SP-D&RGW-MP were the same as shipped Santa Fe all the way.
There is at present one manifest train weekly operated by BNSF on the Central Corridor via the Overland Route. BNSF access to Northern California is the continuation of the GN-WP partnership of old, resumed after the interruption by the UP-MP-WP merger.
Murphy Siding wrote: If coal was the reason DRG existed, what of the other minerals on the route? Were the rails there because of the mines, or the mines there because of the rails?
Must ... use ... fewer ... words. OK. That's out of my system.
The mountains and desert of Colorado and Utah were explored and appropriated from tribal ownership specifically for the potential of precious metals. Placer gold discoveries along Cherry Creek in 1859 became the genesis of the city of Denver, and careful prospecting by experienced Georgia miners soon led to very rich lode gold discoveries at what became Central City, nearby in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Prospectors rapidly fanned out and by the 1870s had sampled virtually the entire state. Leadville, the first major silver discovery in Colorado, was at first a placer gold discovery that quickly went barren. Only after the camp was derelict was it realized that a bonanza of silver in shallow limestone replacement deposits underlaid a broad area. Only two major discoveries, Creede and Cripple Creek, silver and gold camps respectively, escaped this first wave of prospectors, and went undiscovered until the late 1890s.
Gold and silver camps required supplies -- coal, lumber, foodstuffs, machinery -- which could only be economically transported by rail. So in this case the mines attracted the railroads. The coal fields, of which Colorado is rich, in many cases awaited the arrival of the railroad to be exploited. But many coal branches and lines were constructed specifically to extract coal, such as the D&RGW's North Fork (of the Gunnison River) Branch, which today ships out more than 50,000 tons daily of high-BTU, low-sulfur, low-ash, low-moisture coal.
The other major mineral in Colorado is molybdenum. A mountain's worth of the steel-alloying metal was discovered in the 1890s near Leadville -- the Climax Mine, containing more than a trillion dollars of ore value. No one had any use for moly until WWI, when it was realized that it improved armor plate and armor-piercing shell casings, making them harder but less brittle, ideal qualities for something that is not supposed to shatter on impact. The mine soon became the largest underground mine in the world, employing more than 10,000 at peak production, driven after WWI by the automotive industry who needed lightweight high-strength alloy steels for tooling and engine parts. It was later converted to an open-pit operation and shut down under pressure from byproduct copper mine molybdenum in 1983. Skyrocketing metals prices have finally led its owner to reopen it beginning this year. Interestingly there were TWO railroads literally at the doorstep of the Climax Mine at the time this t side by side and both narrow-gauge, a D&RG branch running northwest from Leadville to the Blue River Mining District at Dillon, and a DSP&P (later C&S) main line running in the opposite direction from Denver to Leadville. The D&RG branch was abandoned before the moly deposit attained merchantability, and the C&S line was the one to get the business. Later the C&S abandoned all of the main line except the last bit from Climax down to Leadville, leaving an isolated stub interchanging with D&RGW at Leadville to carry the business of Climax.
Utah is a bit of different case. The Church of Latter Day Saints discouraged its members from prospecting and discouraged outside prospectors, believing (correctly) that mineral discoveries would lead outsiders into Deseret and diluting its ability to offer a safe and self-sufficient kingdom for its members. U.S. Army occupiers went prospecting anyway, quickly locating rich silver and gold deposits in the mountains surrounding the Salt Lake and Utah Lake valleys. One of those discoveries, in Bingham Canyon, was a mantle of silver and gold values on an enormous core of copper. That became the Utah Copper Enterprise, still, I believe, the largest open-pit mine in the world, and the largest man-made excavation in the world. Mining and smelting activities demanded coal, and although UP could supply all the coal the valley might desire from its literally trackside mines in Wyoming, UP's prices were rather high. Vast coal deposits were known to exist on the other side of the Wasatch Plateau from the Utah Valley. That encouraged independent interests to build what became the Rio Grande of Utah, eastward from the Utah Valley over Soldier Summit to open coal mines of the Book Cliffs and Wasatch Plateaus.
D&RGW's Utah Fuels Co. was the biggest mine operator in the Utah fields until the 1930s. The second largest was United States Smelting, Refining & Mining Co., which owned the Lark silver-lead-zinc mine near Bingham Canyon and the large Midvale Smelter. USSRM built the Utah Railway to supply its smelters, mines, and other customers with coal. Biggest coal mine operator in the Colorado fields was Colorado Coal & Iron Co., later CF&I Steel, whose steel mill at Minnequa near Pueblo began as a sister company to the D&RGW. Other big coal mine operators were Kaiser Steel and U.S. Steel, beginning in WWII.
So, to answer your question, the minerals attracted the railroads. There was meager other reason for a railroad to be there. Row cropping is not a viable pursuit in mountains and deserts innocent of irrigation, and the territory for the most part is too dry or too cold, or both, to sustain forests worthy of large-scale logging.
Railway Man wrote: Must ... use ... fewer ... words. OK. That's out of my system. Placer gold discoveries along Cherry Creek in 1859 became the genesis of the city of Denver, and careful prospecting by experienced Georgia miners soon led to very rich lode gold discoveries at what became Central City, nearby in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. RWM
Placer gold discoveries along Cherry Creek in 1859 became the genesis of the city of Denver, and careful prospecting by experienced Georgia miners soon led to very rich lode gold discoveries at what became Central City, nearby in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains.
DANG! I'm impressed! Not many people know the first gold rush in the U.S. was in north Georgia, near Dahlonega. Am not sure of the year, believe it was in the 1820's or 1830's. The dome of the Georgia Capitol is covered in gold mined or found in Georgia, as is the steeple (don't know the proper term) of some public building in Dahlonega, either county courthouse or admin building at North Georgia College I think.
And please, don't use fewer words. I always learn something from your posts, usually several things.
Georgia Native
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