Schuylkill County
A sixth of a square mile, with a hundred and forty-six mining jobs inside a mile
This place covers about a sixth of a square mile, and the North American Rail Network maintained by the Federal Railroad Administration and the Bureau of Transportation Statistics lists a rail yard 1.14 miles from its Census centre, operated by the Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad rather than by one of the large carriers.
What surrounds it is the point. Within a mile there are four hard-coal operations carrying 41, 61, 44 and 9 people. Anthracite in this state is mostly worked by one and two-person outfits. This is the opposite: three payrolls above forty inside a single mile.
Breakers, a stripping and a cogeneration plant, all within a mile
Those four are not doing the same job either. One is a breaker, which sizes and cleans coal; one is a stripping operation, which digs it; and one is a cogeneration plant, which burns culm to make power rather than shipping the coal anywhere at all.
That mix changes the freight completely. A breaker sends finished product out by road and rail, a stripping feeds a breaker over a short haul, and a plant that burns its own fuel on site generates almost no outbound load. Three different traffic patterns inside a mile of each other.
Further out it thins to the usual scale: a stripping 2.2 miles off with 4 people, a preparation plant 2.8 miles away with 4, the Girard Breaker 4.7 miles out with 11 and the Primrose Operation 4.0 miles away with 19.
Fifty coal mines in one county, and this is the heavy end of them
Beyond the immediate ring, the county is hard-coal country: the Mine Safety and Health Administration lists 50 coal mines in it, worked since the 1820s. Most of those are small, which is what makes this corner unusual.
The nearest thing that is not coal is the Pottsville Quarry, working sandstone 5.2 miles off with 18 people, and beyond that Mahanoy City carries several more workings at 2 to 4 people each.
Where the payroll is forty or sixty rather than two, the trucks are run harder and replaced on something closer to a schedule. That is a different second-hand market from the one-man operations elsewhere in this county.
Coal is abrasive and it gets everywhere, and a body that has run culm to the Nicholas cogeneration plant shows it. Between the Blaschak Breaker half a mile off and the Girard Breaker 4.7 miles away the hauls are short and constant, so hours accumulate far faster than miles.
- Ordinary on a truck off the Ellangowan Stripping or any breaker around here.
- Most of the work here is exactly that, between the pits and the Pottsville Quarry. Low mileage does not mean an easy life.
Operations of this size renew equipment on a cycle rather than when something breaks, so trucks come off them still sound.
The rest is the ordinary run of it around Mahanoy City and Girardville 4.7 miles off — retirements, estates and contracts that ended.