Somerset County
The quarry is ten miles out of the borough
The Bakersville Quarry works crushed stone with 20 people on the books at Mine Safety and Health Administration under New Enterprise Stone and Lime.
It lies 10.27 miles from the centre of this borough, and the road figures below are measured at the quarry rather than at the town.
A county where the townships hold the restricted crossings
Those figures are worth reading carefully. Eighteen are posted for load and 17 are coded below legal loads — one county-maintained and 13 on township roads.
The nearest is 1.48 miles out, the lowest operating rating is 7.3 metric tonnes, and the lowest that clears the commercial floor is 12.7 tonnes, about 14.0 US tons. That admits roughly 1.7 tonnes of stone over the 11.0-tonne tare of an empty tandem dump.
Across the county as a whole 21 of 63 county-maintained structures fail the load field and 13 of 60 township-maintained ones do, and the township stock is the larger. So the office that posts a lane here is usually a township, and a ten-mile run may answer to several of them.
Mining that goes into the hill rather than down through it
Those crossings serve an unusual concentration of underground work. This county holds eight underground operations within twenty-five miles employing 261 people, against Fayette County’s nine and 354.
The reason is the rock. The Loyalhanna and Vanport limestones lie flat under a thick sandstone and shale cover, so driving into the hillside beats stripping the top off, and the mined-out rooms have a second life as conditioned storage.
For equipment that matters more than it sounds. A room-and-pillar operation runs at a stable temperature and out of the weather, so a machine from one shows less corrosion and less thermal cycling than an open-pit truck of the same age.
Coal in every direction, in small crews
Those underground mines sit among a lot of smaller coal. The Acosta deep mine lies about 7.0 miles north with 22 people, the Romesburg Quarry about 7.4 miles south at Garrett with 13, and the Cambria Fuel Plant about 6.8 miles east at Shanksville with six.
South and south-east the crews get very small: the Westgren Mine about 8.7 miles at Garrett with seven, Fieg Bros about 8.3 miles at Berlin with two, the Good Hill Mine about 9.6 miles with two, and the Rockwood Quarry about 7.8 miles south-west with eight.
The larger operations are further out — the Maple Springs Mine about 15.0 miles north-east at Jerome with 48, Rustic Ridge about 17.5 miles west at Donegal with 89, and the Eichorn Mines about 19.3 miles south at Addison with 28.
A truck that ran the surface lanes carried part loads wherever the 12.7-tonne crossing fell on the route.
- Around the Romesburg Quarry and the Eichorn Mines we see machines with far less corrosion than the year would suggest, and we read them that way.
- I am out towards Berlin or Garrett.
A two- or three-person operation that finishes a contract has one truck too many rather than a fleet, and it moves on quickly.