Mason,
As I had to tell one correspondent who had reviewed my site and
asked about a specific mine accident, accidents are so common that one
must simply accept them. While I had heard of a few spectacular
run-aways in the Sullivan, and had been involved in cleaning up after
two which were caught very quickly so were not too spectacular, the most
spectacular incident for which I personally observed the results
occurred while I was working on the track gang prior to training as a
miner.
We were called out to the "main line" (a two mile plus "tunnel"
from the surface shops to the mijne proper). Ore was still at that time
being hauled out of this tunnel to a "rock house" for loading into CPR
cars for transport to the concentrator. We used "Granby" (side dump
cars), and normally 12 ton cars were used. A few 6-ton cars were used
for underground haulage, and occasionally a few of these would be added
to a train. Even in safety school we were warned never to place these
in the middle of a train, because the normal surging of the larger cars
could lift them off the track and cause a derailment.
On this particular day a transportaion crew had inserted three
6-ton cars in the middle of the train. All went well on the way out
with the cars loaded, but on the way back. The motorman must have
applied full power as soon as he was well into the tunnel, and he
derailed the smaller cars. Even though the train was travelling uphill,
it travelled over 120 feet tearing out three 2-foot by two-foot
reinforced concrete pillars and over 100 feet of the main compressed air
line before the crew knew that anything was wrong.
Of course a large length of the track was damaged. We arrived
on the scene as soon as the compressed air was turned off to help with
putting the cars back on the track and to make other repairs. This was
not the only wreck that I saw, but it was the most spectacular as far as
damage was concerned.
In another incident (we were straightening out a curve), we had
been given the go ahead, by the mucker boss, to tear out 100 feet of
track and had just stripped the rails. Two miners were drilling the
last of the sideswiping rounds to give us more room, and the rest of our
crew were stripping the switch assembly. The straw boss and I were
planning the moving of the ties further up the track, when a train that
the mucker boss had forgotten came barreling out of the drift. The
straw boss and I grabbed the air pipes and swung ourselves up out of the
way. I don't know how the others managed, but the sight of the cars
jack-knifing beneath us was plenty hair-raising. When the cars had
stopped moving, and we had climbed down, we immediately made for the
mucker boss, but the miners were there before us. Although we would
normally have been involved with the clean-up, another shifter caught
us, before we could get to the mucker boss, and he ordered our crew to
leave our tools and report to the track boss on the main level. The
next day we went back for our tools, and another crew finished the
work. I believe the company was engaged in damage control, and they
felt it best that our crew be kept away from the scene. When we picked
up our tools, we were under the supervision of a shift boss; not a
mucker boss. No one else was around - although this was right beside
the skip station and was usually a very busy place.
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