Indiana County
A yard named for a power station
The North American Rail Network maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics lists a rail yard here called the Homer City Plant, run by the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad, about 2 miles from the centre of the place. The name is worth reading carefully: it is a generating station, not a factory that makes anything.
Within about ten miles of here the mines run at every size at once: Lucerne with three people, Brush Valley with sixty-eight, the Lowry Mine with thirty-five at Lucerne Mines, Knob Creek with twenty-one at Jacksonville, Dilltown with ten at Armagh, Fulton Run with eighteen at Shelocta, and the Crooked Creek mine with fifty-seven at Creekside with its preparation plant alongside.
When the destination is the neighbour
A coal country with a generating station in the middle of it hauls differently from one that ships out. When the customer is a few miles away rather than a railhead in another state, the loaded leg is short, the empty leg is the same road back, and the truck does that turn again and again in a shift.
That is a duty cycle rather than a journey. It puts hours on an engine that has barely moved, wears brakes and a clutch at a rate the odometer never shows, and leaves a frame and a suspension that have been at gross weight far more often than a mileage figure would suggest.
The stone is close too. The Torrance underground limestone works about 8 miles south-west and the Sewickley Mine about 11 miles north-west, both on their own routes.
Coal haulers and tri-axle dumps, tractors and trailers off the mine roads, lowboys that shifted plant between operations, rollbacks, service bodies and the pickups every strip carries.
Between the mines at Homer City and Lucerne Mines and the preparation plant at Shelocta, most of what we see has spent its life on short heavy turns. High hours against modest mileage is the normal shape of a truck here, and it is not a mark against one.
- Do you come out to a village this small?We can come to you, or buy it remotely and arrange the tow, whichever suits the place it is standing in.
- It is up a mine road behind a gate.Around Knob Creek and Brush Valley we do it regularly — give us a contact for the gate and we sort the rest out.
An operation closes, a haulage contract ends, and a truck built for one short lane finds there is no second lane like it. In a county this concentrated that is the usual story.
A retirement, a one-truck outfit stopping, a machine parked at the edge of a yard for a season that became three.
Those stand between the Crooked Creek mine about 11 miles north-west and Fulton Run about 10 miles north-west, on ground where nothing is pressing anyone to move them.