Text 12983, 47 rader
Skriven 2008-03-15 07:14:14 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
  Kommentar till text 12765 av David Drummond (3:640/305)
Ärende: Bush Vetoes Waterboarding Bill
======================================
Replying to a message of David Drummond to Bob Ackley:

 DD> Bob Ackley -> David Drummond wrote:

 DD>>> Hence their pollution record.

 BA>> Actually the pollution in the big cities here was much worse long
 BA>> before automobiles when coal was the primary source of heat for
 BA>> homes and businesses and horses were the primary means of
 BA>> transportation.

 DD> Do they still mine and use coal there?

Not *in* the cities.  There are underground coal mines throughout the
Appalachians
from Pennsylvania down to at least eastern Tennessee.  The coal mines in the
Wyoming Rockies are strip mines.

The BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) Railroad moves 100+ car trains (at 50
tons
per car excluding the weight of the car) eastbound past here at the rate of at
least one
an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  The Union Pacific Railroad does the
same
thing on its east-west line about 70 miles north of here.  At present those two
railroads
are the only ones serving the western coal fields, but note that not all of the
trains coming
out of there go by here, some go southeast through Kansas and Missouri.

So yes, we still use coal here.  The overwhelming majority of it goes to
electricity
generating plants.

Occasionally one of the railroads will have a derailment and dump a few cars of
coal
(the cars are usually totalled in any sort of derailment.  I've found it
amazing how
quickly that much coal evaporates.  When BNSF dumped five carloads of coal in a
derailment just north of Plattsmouth, NE, several years ago the coal - 250 tons
of it -
was gone within five days - long before the wrecked cars were - and most of it
vanished
at night.

--- FleetStreet 1.19+
 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)