Wordless Wednesday #108

Adena Branch MP 7.9 Forest Mine, Reiss near Maynard, OH

Wordless Wednesday #94

 Hanna Coal Truck at the Georgetown Prep Plant, Cadiz, OH. Facebook: Historical Stripping Shovel Archive, Rachel Frew Collection

Kenwood - Milepost 189.4

After posting Wordless Wednesday #84 I was surprised to have a few people express interest in the little Kenwood depot. This got me digging through my collection for more info and photos to share regarding this obscure spot on the Wheeling.

For starters the Nickel Plate Road's 1954 Databook on their W&LE District contains only the following on Kenwood.

Kenwood (M.P. 189.4)

• Controlled passing siding - capacity 57 cars.
• Storage sidings (2) - capacity 82 cars.
• Main lead to Heil Coal Co. tipple. Tipple not in operation in 1953. Turnout has been removed.

Not even a mention of the little depot but it was certainly still there up until the mid 1970's as seen in Wordless Wednesday #84.

I would bet the area once had a small mining community that gave this location the name of Kenwood, much like the long gone villages of Herrick or Robyville that once dotted the valley along the Short Creek. Areas that are only marked by a unused siding near a "gob" pile or small yards that once served the nearby mines.

Here's a track diagram of the area circa 1960.

NKP 1963 W&LE Toledo Division Track Diagrams from RailsandTrails.com http://www.railsandtrails.com/TC/W&LE/index.htm

The Heil Coal spur would've started off the mainline and just to the right of the Public Road in the middle of the map. There the spur crossed the Short Creek where you can still see the bridge mark on the map and extended to the tipple near mile post 190. In fact the USGS aerial image of that area from April 18 1958 still shows the Heil Coal tipple standing (see my "How to use the USGS EarthExplorer website" post for more info) but the track is long gone.

While the only tipple at Kenwood ended production before 1953 there was still plenty of coal mining nearby during that time period according to the NKP 1954 Databook. For easy reference I consolidated all the mining info in the Databook into a spreadsheet named the NKP Wheeling District Coal Production in 1953 that can be found in the upper left under Useful Links.

To the north was the large strip mining operation of Hanna Coal's Kenvale Mine responsible for 16,000 car loads and the Y&O Nelms Mine also pulling 16,000 car loads of coal from its deep mining operation. Nearby to the south was the short Hurford Branch supporting the Fremont Mine, a small strip mine run by Tasa Coal that dug up over 700 hopper loads of coal in 1953. Because of all the nearby activity, Kenwood still had use as a place for hopper storage.

In the below photo (possibly a JJ Young Jr. photo) Berkshire 712 pulls a cut of hoppers out of the storage tracks while its caboose waits on the siding.

712 works the storage tracks at Kenwood, Ohio 1950's. Photo is looking SE toward Adena.

For another photo of the Kenwood station in the 1950's check out page 10 of the 1984 Fall edition of the Nickel Plate Road Magazine by the NKPHTS. If you are a member of the NKPHTS you can access past magazines for free at http://www.nkphts.org/members/

At one time however, Kenwood did host to two maybe three mines in the 1920's. Close examination of the next two photos reveals three potential coal mines. Two mine spurs, one in front of and one behind the depot and a hilltop mine in the distance that might lead to a third tipple (This also seems to be where the Heil Coal tipple is located). Let's not also overlook the great views of the Kenwood Depot in its heyday!

Kenwood Depot, Kenwood, OH 10-19-1925 (CSU Archives,W&LE Collection) Photo is looking NW to Brewster/Toldeo.

Kenwood Depot, Right of Way and Mine Branches at Kenwood, OH possibly late 1920's - early 1930's(CSU Archives W&LE Collection) Photo is looking SE toward Adena.

Fifty years later in 1975 the small depot has fallen into disrepair as seen in the Wordless Wednesday post. I haven't discovered when it was torn down.

Kenwood Depot 1975. Photo from http://www.west2k.com/ohstations/harrison.shtml

Recently while browsing a railfan group following the modern W&LE on Facebook, I ran across a photo taken at Kenwood in the years before the Norfolk & Western would sell off the old W&LE.  The photo looks westbound (NW toward Brewster) and the CTC signals still guard the tracks. Based on the other photos in this post I figure the photographer is standing right next to the depot or where it once stood.

W&LE Signals Kenwood Siding 1980s, Gene P. Schaffer Photo, W&LE Facebook Group

The new Wheeling & Lake Erie's Valley line now ends just a few hundred feet north of the old Kenwood Depot where Unionvale-Kenwood Road crosses the tracks. A gravel facility has been built next to the track but a unloading ramp now buries the mainline severing from Adena and points east.

I've made a link in Google Maps to near the spot where the depot once stood. If you explore the maps link, notice also all the natural gas pipeline construction in the area. Perhaps the gravel facility built on the mainline supports this operation. Once coal mining ruled this area, now Natural Gas from fracking has stepped in to fill the economic void.

I hope you enjoyed this look at Kenwood, one of many spots on the Wheeling now slowing being reclaimed by nature.

Eastbound looking toward Kenwood at the Unionvale-Kenwood Rd crossing. 4-9-2014 Chris Ellis Photo

Wordless Wednesday #62

On the Adena Railroad, Hanna Coal Co.'s Willow Grove Mine No. 10 near Neffs, Ohio 1930s

NKP Wheeling District Coal Production in 1953

A vast majority of my railroad research is on my computer, which is backed up to a network attached storage device and one other location(back up your data!). I do have a small pile of the real important stuff printed out and clipped together for easy access and portability. 

The one thing I tend to look at the most is the mine data. The best source of this information comes from the Nickel Plate Road's own book, "1954 Physical Data and Other Information of Interest: Wheeling & Lake Erie District and the Lorain & West Virginia Railway Company". This is more than just a good source for the mines but also bridges, online facilities, rail weight, grades, curves, interchange data with other railroads and other info. I found this on the Nickel Plate Road Historical & Technical Society's great website at http://nkphts.org/databooks/

Instead of constantly paging through my copy of the NKP Physical Data book looking for a particular mine, I decided to compile all the mine info in one nice spreadsheet.

Here's the link for spreadsheet below, I also added it to the left on my blog's front page under Useful Links.

Nickel Plate Road - Wheeling District Coal Production, Brewster to the Ohio River in 1953

As you can see the from the spreadsheet, this small chunk of the Wheeling District had an output of almost 195,000 hopper cars of coal in 1953. The tiny 10 mile long AC&NA Branch accounted for almost half that production alone!

Hanna Coal Co.'s Georgetown Preparation Plant on the AC&NA Branch. Nearing completion in this photo it will be responsible for loading almost 72,000 cars of coal for the NKP and PRR in 1953.

Now I need to figure out how many days a year a typical mine was in operation to figure out how many cars per day on average would've been produced. My hope is to get a close representation of how many cars the different mine runs would handle and help plan for each mine's track work for car capacity.

If you can offer any insight into that area feel feel to contact me or leave a comment!

Using this data I can see how much coal was being produced and where some of it was going. Coupling that information with other aspects of I've read about operations, I can begin to construct the larger operational picture without having all the needed details from station books, train order forms and stories from real railroaders all of which I'm sorely lacking. Although these would still be extremely useful if anybody has anything to share, stories, paper, etc!

Overlooking the Obvious in Research

On Thursday fellow Nickel Plate Road modeler and friend Tim Moran stopped by with a magazine article about the Bucyrus-Erie Shovel Plant in Milwaukee. Why? Hanna Coal had several giant stripping shovels that were built on site near the open coal mines where they would work.  At least several of these shovels were built at NKP served mines, like the "Mountaineer" on the AC&NA Branch. The pieces, some huge, would most likely be shipped by rail on the NKP and would make for some really interesting loads for flat cars or gondolas. These loads could provide the occasional special movement during future operating sessions.

All I needed were some photos for future reference when I was ready for such a project. The article in the April 2006 issue of Railroad Model Craftsman didn't disappoint, as it contained several great photos of pieces of Bucyrus-Erie's Huge Shovels loaded onto flatcars for shipment.

After reading that article I felt I should try again to see if the Marion Power Shovel Company had any photos of their loads, so off to Google I went.

I can't say I found exactly what I was looking for but I did stumble into some great photos of several different shovels being constructed. There were many exciting shots of the shovels at work and a few "new to me" pictures of the Goodyear Mine and locations along the AC&NA Branch like Tipple "E". There was even a 1940's color picture of a giant shovel in Hanna's grey paint scheme where in the background I'm pretty sure is a W&LE 2-6-6-2 working a cut of hoppers.

Where did I find all these neat photos? On the Harrison County History of Coal Museum's website.

A place that I've VISITED in person, not once but TWICE, and never thought to see if they had a website...

I always suspected they had a larger archive of photos but nobody in the Puskarich Public Library above the museum was able to help with further information or who to contact when I inquired.

Lesson learned to always check for a website for a place you visit for further info, you never know what you'll find.

So if big shovels mining coal interests you at all check out the Harrison County History of Coal Museum's website, you wont be disappointed. The physical Museum is pretty neat and is also worth a visit if you're in Cadiz, Ohio.

Harrison County History of Coal Museum, Cadiz, OH

A Model of the Marion Shovel "The Mountaineer"?

A couple weeks ago we took a family trip and along the way ended up in Marion, Ohio for a couple hours of railfanning.

In front of the Marion station is a restaurant called "The Shovel". My wife commented that was an odd name for a restaurant. After thinking about it and noticing the cartoon machine shovel on the sign, I told her it was named for the old Marion Power Shovel Company which probably had it's factory nearby.

For those who don't know, the Marion Power Shovel Co. and the Bucyrus-Erie Co. produced some of the largest earth moving shovels in the United States. Some were used by mining companies, including Hanna Coal, to strip the earth away exposing the seams of coal below. Many of the Hanna mines on the Nickel Plate Road's AC&NA branch, were actually strip mines excavated by these types of monsters.

The Marion Shovel, "The Mountaineer" was built in 1955-56 for the Hanna Coal Co. At 16 stories tall and weighing 2750 Tons, this machine supposedly started the super shovel era. Hanna and its successor Consol would later have several more of these types of shovels prowling the southern Ohio coal fields in Harrison and Belmont Counties.

"The Mountaineer" is best known to some NKP fans by publicity photos taken by LIFE Magazine and the railroad's own photographer Willis McCaleb.

Shortly after it's completion on site near the Hanna Coal offices and shops on the AC&NA branch, the shovel was poised next to NKP (ex W&LE) Berkshire 819 and it's coal train. The opportunity was used to show the massive proportions of the shovel next to the now tiny in comparison steam engine.

Hanna Coal's Marion Power Shovel "The Mountaineer" on the  AC&NA Branch with NKP Berkshire 819  LIFE Magazine

Here's a link to a Google search that shows a couple dozen views from that day that I had never seen before.

Marion Power Shovel "The Mountaineer" LIFE Magazine photo shoot

After coming home from Marion, I wanted to search online to see if anybody had made a model of "The Mountaineer" in any kind of scale, mostly out of curiosity. Trying to fit an HO scale model of one on the layout would take a ridiculous amount of space. When building these shovels however, the parts were shipped by rail and any models or sources for model parts might make interesting freight car loads for the layout at least.

The only model I found was an all brass HO scale model of one of the giant Bucyrus-Erie shovels for $6000! It's limited run of 125 was sold out too!

But for a "The Mountaineer" model there wasn't anything. Well almost...

One person had made "The Mountaineer" out of LEGOs!

LEGO Hanna Coal "The Mountaineer" www.engineeringwithabs.ch

I grew up on LEGOs as a kid, and my son is also growing up on LEGOs. So we were blown away enough to somehow have to post it here. Plus anyone reading this with a connection to Hanna Coal or the Cadiz, Ohio area hopefully will get a kick out of it as well.

A young man from Switzerland, Beat Felber, built this huge functional 1/28 scale model of the Marion shovel from nothing but LEGOs. You can read all about his methods and find more pictures at his own website.

http://www.engineeringwithabs.ch/

LEGO Mountaineer main page

http://www.engineeringwithabs.ch/mountain.htm

Comparing his work with the real thing I think he did a fantastic job!

Thanks for sticking around and reading this short diversion from pure trains and modeling talk!