This mine, and others, pumped out lumps of coal. It comes out of the mountain in different sizes. Some come out as dust, which is unusable for heating, and after that it's sorted from sizes like "pea" and "egg" all the way to a "lump" for various uses. Smaller lights easier but doesn't burn very long, large takes some time to get going, but will heat your house all night. The other thing about lump is that it was great for business in the early '40s. Usually this is a winter business, as no one needs heat in the summer, but when there's a war going on, there was so much demand for large coal that the mine put in another chute seen at the back of this structure to get the largest pieces out to fuel the war machine. Those pieces come out of the tunnel first and get loaded straight into rail cars.
Sometimes the guys in the mines were pumping out so much it couldn't all come out in one place at the same time, so it would be put into trucks who would then back into this hopper installed to have another way to get the coal into the conveyor up to the tipple where it would be sorted and stored.
And how do you get a new entrance to your mine building? Just smash a hole in it.
This is how the coal would arrive out of the mountain where the mine went back 4.5km and stretched out to 1.6km wide.
From here it went up another belt into the tipple. NO SMOKING. There was coal on the belt, coal dust in the air, and machinery all in a wooden building. That didn't stop people from trying though. There's a story of one older miner back when he was 16 trying to light a cigarette and leaning all the way out the window at -40 but having his matches blown out, and came back inside just a little bit and ignited the coal dust in front of his face and was very lucky the resulting fireball didn't burn the whole place to the ground. And yes this place smelled amazing too.
This ^^ is inside this
And inside the main building the coal runs over a series of these plates for sorting. The largest having been sent out already, they run from small to large again. There's even a magnetized sheet as the coal enters the top of the tipple to catch rogue nails and tools. This would be an incredibly loud place to work, we got a demonstration of just how loud by our guide who climbed up and shook the plates and the clapper boards around. And of course back then proper ear plugs really hadn't been invented yet. Oh, and it was pretty much the same temperature inside as it was outside. Pieces of coal are actually fairly fragile, so they were sprayed with oil to help keep them sealed up (it also helped them burn a little better) and different sizes had different ways to get from the plates down into storage. Smaller ones fell a few inches at a time and larger ones rolled slowly.
There was also provisions for pieces that got broken up near the bottom to get on another conveyor to the top again to be resorted. Oh, and the story about wildfire. To differentiate their coal from others, someone at Atlas had the bright idea to speckle loads of coal with orange paint. Made it look good as a brand, like it was glowing, and actually helped it burn even longer than they were already known for. But, it was lead based paint, and no one in the 30s, 40s, and 50s really knew about the effects. So for decades, homes were heated not only by coal fired furnaces inside, but coal painted with lead.
But at least they had these things that helped them load rail cars from the corners rather than in a big pile inside. Notice the paddles with different sizes of coal. Each one pulled cables through pulleys to doors to open chutes from each storage container to load what they wanted into each car. It really is a cool place, there were more tours than just the Tipple tour, but we loved it. Very cool history and well worth a look.
Which reminds me, back at that suspension bridge there was an older couple in a pickup also looking around. We got to talking and it turns out they had retired and gotten rid of everything. What was in the truck was what they had left. Good for them. How long was their trip? Indefinite. Excellent. They could really take their time. Well after the bridge and the hoodoos we drove past them again as we entered the mine. They had already been in the parking lot and must have at least read the sign noting when the tours were scheduled. I asked them how it was and the guy gave a little shrug and said "Didn't bother." Well sir, if you're going to sell everything and travel around in your truck, and you have all the time in the world and you drive into this place look around for a couple minutes and don't bother......why are you out here? It seems to me like exactly the kind of thing your new lifestyle lets you find and explore and learn about together. But, it's their life and I hope they found many more things they were willing to try. Anyway, we had to keep heading east to Saskatoon and neither of us had ever been to Saskatchewan. So we left the weird pocket of Utah within Canada and put in some miles.
