I live in an old mining town in Pennsylvania. There are lots of little mine areas designated by numbers. There is still some coal mining that happens from one active mine area in our town. At any given time during a regular work day you see many a coal truck carrying loads of coal or returning to the mine to reload.
Our town was built on mining. It was big business many years ago. In fact, both of my grandfathers were coal miners in the same mine. Also a melting pot area, we had Italians, Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks, and lots of other people from different nationalities. My grandfather used to talk about how the Hungarians (which is our heritage) use to group together. The same with the other nationalities. He’d talk about how the mine bosses used to use it as a competition who would get more loads done the Hungarians or the Italians? The Slovaks or the Irish?
Those days are long gone now. In a town where many people worked for the mines in some capacity, now only a handful do. The coal trucks run along our small town roads. More than once have I been behind a coal truck to have a chunk of coal fly off the back of a truck and strike my windshield. More than once have I had to call my insurance agency to have the chip in my windshield fixed before it became a bigger problem. But it doesn’t cost any thing if it’s not too big to repair rather than replace the the glass. Just a small piece of vehicle maintenance that is better taken care of early than to wait for it to become a bigger, more expensive problem.
We actually have trains that run through town fairly often loaded with coal two. Twice in the last few years the train has derailed. Even with some of the issues it is kinds of nice to see our town still doing some of the work that it was built on. Though I don’t think coal is the future.
