Somerset County
A preparation plant east
The working site closest to this borough in Mine Safety and Health Administration records is the Mine 78 preparation plant of the Rosebud Mining Company, 1.63 miles east with 6 people on it, taking bituminous coal.
The rest of the coal ground is close. The Bird refuse pile is 5.34 miles north-west with 10 people, and the Maple Springs mine of LCT Energy is 7.47 miles west with 48 — the largest working crew inside ten miles of here.
The first posted crossing is four hundred yards out
Those lanes start restricted immediately. Within 10 miles the National Bridge Inventory records 187 structures, 10 of them below legal loads, and the nearest is 0.43 miles south on a borough-maintained bridge clearing 22.7 tonnes.
Four hundred yards is close enough that it is not a routing question, it is a loading one: a truck leaving south from the middle of this borough is under a cap before it has reached open road. North-west the first restriction is 6.58 miles out at 39.9 tonnes, which a working load clears.
The tight one is south. A county bridge 7.01 miles south rates 5.4 tonnes, below an empty tandem dump, and a borough structure 7.86 miles out is closed rather than posted with an operating rating of 0.9 tonnes recorded against it.
A third of the county’s own bridges carry a restriction
Those figures sit inside a county network that is heavily posted. Somerset County maintains 63 structures of its own and posts 21 of them — a third, which is a high share for a county road department.
Inside the ten-mile circle the authority is mixed rather than dominated: 3 municipal, 3 county, 2 township, 1 state and 1 carried as another local agency. A lane out of here can therefore pass through three or four different posting offices in a few miles, and each posting belongs to whoever maintains that structure.
For a coal truck that is the whole practical picture. The general weight figure is almost never what decides a load out of this borough; the borough bridge 0.43 miles south, and the 5.4-tonne county crossing 7.01 miles beyond it, are.
Coal, and the short haul to a plant rather than a market
So the load out of the Mine 78 plant 1.63 miles east is not headed for a builders’ yard. A preparation plant is where raw coal is cleaned and sized, so the trucking around one is feed in and product out over short distances, to a loadout or a rail yard rather than to a customer.
The rail is right there for it. Four yards sit in the cluster 7.89 to 8.06 miles north-west, and another is 8.92 miles north. Short heavy shuttles onto rail is a different job from long-distance hauling and it wears a truck differently.
Coal is dense and abrasive and it rides in dump bodies, so the life goes into the body floor and tailgate hardware, the hoist, the suspension and the brakes, while the odometer stays low. Wet, unpaved ground does the rest, to the frame, the air lines and the brake gear underneath. All of that is normal here and none of it is a mark against a truck with us.
A coal truck looks worse than it is and we are used to that.
Between the Mine 78 plant 1.63 miles east and the Bird refuse pile 5.34 miles north-west they turn up steadily.