Archive for the ‘Coal Mining’ Category
Kinney and Lila
I have created two new pages covering recent developments in Utah coal mining, and the railroads that serve them.
The Kinney No. 2 mine is being developed at the location of the former Union Pacific mine that dates back to the 1880s. The location is just north and east of the town of Scofield, in Pleasant Valley. The site is already served by Union Pacific’s Pleasant Valley Subdivision, and the mine owners have said that they plan on shipping coal by rail from their Kinney mine to West Coast and Gulf Coast ports for export to customers worldwide. Mining is expected to start in late 2013.
The Lila Canyon mine is a new coal mine located on the edge of the Book Cliffs, just south of Horse Canyon where Carbon County Railway served the Geneva Mine from 1942 to 1982. Small-scale mining started at Lila Canyon in 2010, with the coal being trucked to existing loadout facilities near Price, Utah. Large-scale mining is expected to start in 2014 after a longwall mining machine is installed in the Lila Canyon mine.
When Kaiser Came to Sunnyside
The first coal mine was opened in Whitmore Canyon in eastern Utah in 1896. At about the same time, that mine became known as the Sunnyside mine. (Sunnyside at Wikipedia) (Sunnyside at OnlineUtah.com) (Photos at Western Mining & Railroad Museum in Helper, Utah)
In 1899 the mine was purchased by Utah Fuel Company, as a subsidiary of Rio Grande Western Railway. For the years following, the Sunnyside mine was a major source of coking coal, and coked coal (also known as metallurgical coal, or met coal) for the entire Western United States. By 1909 the Sunnyside mine was mining 3000 tons of coal per day, with most of it feeding the 650 coke ovens that were located adjacent to the mine. During 1914 alone, the coke ovens at Sunnyside furnished over 300,000 tons of coke (7500 car loads, or about 20 cars per day), with most if not all of it being shipped to the copper smelters at Anaconda, Montana.
During the 1920s and 1930s, smelters were updating their processes to allow the direct use of coal, and several iron and steel plants were built that could also use coal directly instead of using coke. By 1942, the coal from Sunnyside was being shipped to either the new U. S. Steel plant at Geneva, Utah, or to the new Kaiser Steel plant in southern California, all to support the war effort.
In 1943, Kaiser Steel directly leased the entire Sunnyside mine from Utah Fuel Company, and in 1950 Kaiser Steel purchased all of Utah Fuel Company, which owned coal mines at Sunnyside, Castle Gate, and Clear Creek, all in Utah. The beehive coke ovens remained in operation until 1958.
Kaiser was one of the first companies to make a deal with the railroads for the movement of coal in a dedicated train set, known as a unit coal train. In mid 1968, three railroads (UP, D&RGW, and AT&SF) got together with Kaiser Steel to move full trains of Sunnyside coal to the steel company’s mill at Fontana, California. The production of Kaiser’s Sunnyside mine, as much as 5,500 tons per day, was matched to the steel mill’s capacity of two 11,000-ton unit trains. The mine loaded an 8,400-ton train every other day, and each train ran on a four-day cycle. The trains continued to run until the the steel manufacturing portion of the Fontana mill shut down in 1983.
