> summer as an engineering summer student at the Scranton Electric Co power > plant they were still trying to deal with a fire in a coal storage pile. I think you'll find that the culm pile fires were rarely -- if ever -- spontaneous cumbustion. But it sure made it easier to handle liability claims if one could posit that notion and get away with it <g>. > Coal could be bouth in the summer months for about 75% of what it coast > once the heating season started. Problem was that very few homeowners had > coal bins big enough to take advantage of these prices. Not did retail > coal In 1915, the railroads were seriously considering 150-ton and even 300-ton hoppers. But the colliery managers couldn;t figure out how they'd manage to load that tonnage and keep quality and size consistent, and certainly none of the line customers could figure out where they'd store the stuff. > The whole indutry was very complex and unfrtunately not too well > documented in the later eyars. I used to think that as well -- but I've found huge amounts of stuff. I think the reason it's hard to find is that lots of it involved studies of how to bring the industry back -- and the executives and academics and government agencies who wrote and documented it all sort of buried their work the moment it proved, at best, another harebrained bit of nincompoopery <g>. But the details are there buried in certain mining-related libraries. The AAR library (when they were in the Transportation Building, Washington, 6, DC <g>) had lots of post 1936 stuff that, sadly, seems to have disappeared when they went to 1900 L Street; The ICC also had tons of this stuff right up until the 1950s, because every so often, some crank would come along (as late as the early 1950s!) claiming the railroads were "monopolizing the business" and "conrolling the mines" and their "high rates" and "interlocking directorates" were the only reason anthracite was in decline. I don;t think the ICC's stuff made it to Denver -- I haven;t seen in in the catalog there; perhaps its in the National Archives (but not where we find the Valuation stuff -- which is where the railfans seem to stop doing research <g>). Cheers, Jim Guthrie ELHS #1296 The Erie Lackawanna Mailing List http://EL-List.railfan.net/ To Unsubscribe: http://Lists.Railfan.net/erielackunsub.html ------------------------------
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