Very interesting post and education about the mining. Thanks.
Thanks for the comment!....I enjoyed mining coal, but the mines later closed down & they paid for use to go back to school....So i took truck driving school & drove a truck through several states, and really liked that.
Uh oh. . . now Eddie's gonna ask you if you ever saw any dinosaurs down there turning into oil.
Sorry Eddie.
I just couldn't resist kidding you a little.
Jim,
That would be so cool to find something like that down deep underground....I have also seen tree branches that was bigger than my arm or leg, but they were in the top & hard to get out.
JohnDeere4300,
Thanks for the information about the coal and your personal account of what it's like working in a mine. I've never been in a mine and probably never will. One of these days I'm going to be someplace where I can buy some coal. I want to bring it home and set it on fire just to see it burn for myself.
Eddie
Coal mining is a different world down there....It's dark, loud, dusty, small rocks falling from the top all the time.....I have worked in coal that was 12ft high before, and a small rock could fall & hurt you pretty bad....Then i have worked in low coal that was 36-inch high and be in as far as 2 miles, and that is really hard to get use to...Some places you couldn't even sit up to eat....But the biggest problem for me in coal that low was not being able to stand up.
If can find you some coal some day like you said & burn it, you will really be surprised on how much heat it puts out.
Eddie, like you, I grew up where I'd never even seen coal; that was just something you read about in books. But then I married a gal from West Virginia in 1965, so my first trip up there, two years later, we visited an exhibition mine. I guess it was the one at
Beckley, WV. I guess I usually think of the softer, dirty coal, but as Johndeere4300 mentioned, the anthracite is pretty hard, glossy black and the gift shop at
Pipestem has had some really pretty carvings made from coal. I bought one carving of a steam engine for a Xmas present for a son-in-law a few years ago.
Bird,
You married a gal from my neck of the woods
.....I grew up in West Virginia & moved to Kentucky in 1985 after i graduated from high school, and i moved here to work in the mines.
I have a lot of family in Beckely and go there all the time....My brother worked in the mines in that area for a while....After i quit working in the mines & started driving a truck, my brother bought me a truck that is carved from coal.
Good Mornin Bill,
Thanks, that was a very informative
post ! I tried burnin
coal a few years back, and it does throw incredible amounts of heat, but I found it kind of dirty and dusty. I ended up going back to just burnin wood, and if we have a real cold nite I will throw in a shovel or two into the stove !
Thanks for giving us some insight about mining !
Hello Scott,
Yea coal really puts out the heat.....The coal that people used around here to heat their houses wasn't dirty or dusty to handle.....You must have had the "bituminous coal" and the "anthracite coal" is hard and isn't dirty or dusty to handle.
Thanks for the comment!
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Something that i forgot to mention about mining coal....Was when we mined a panel that was pretty big and it went towards the river, and the coal went under the river.
We did mine under the river and went about 1/4 mile past the river....Water came in from the top all the time just like it was raining.....We had to set a lot of pumps and i remember that we was off work for a holiday for a three day weekend...When we came back the pumps had been shut off & the mine had 2ft of water in some places, and we had to wear hip-waders to mine coal.
The water started coming in from the top harder each day, and the mine superintendent finally got scared and we pulled all the equipment out of the panel.
Bird,
Here is my carving from coal.
