Moving Coal Downhill

Moving Coal Downhill. New River Gorge National River. The large structure that climbs the slope in front of you was a conveyor that carried coal from the mine entrance high up the gorge wall to the tipple behind you. It was an innovative-and expensive-device for moving coal downhill. At 1,385 feet long, it was one of the longest such conveyors ever built., At New River Gorge, engineers faced the challenge of transferring coal from the mine entrance to the bottom of the gorge with minimal breakage. New River coal was prized for its quality, but it was very "friable," or breakable, which increased operation costs. This conveyor minimized breakage. Completed in 1926 during the period when Henry Ford upgraded facilities here, it employed a state-of-the-art "button and rope" technology that replaced an obsolete, more-dangerous, labor-intensive system., Button-and-Rope , The conveyor consisted of an upper and a lower wooden trough, each lined with steel plates, enclosed in a steel gallery. A heavy wire "rope" with iron disc "buttons" spaced at 4-foot intervals moved coal slowly down the lower trough and returned empty on the upper. An electric motor started the conveyor, but the weight of the coal, pulled by gravity and governed by sprockets and gears, was sufficient to power it once it got going., The conveyor had a speed of 80 feet per minute and could deliver 125 tons of coal per hour., The builders of Nuttallburg's conveyor, the Fairmont Mining Machinery Company of Fairmont, West Virginia, promoted their button-and- rope system in this 1924 Coal Age magazine ad., In 2010 the conveyor's long-abandoned "buttons" and "rope" lay in a heap on the ground beneath the conveyor. The rope was a 1-1/8-inch wire cable. The buttons were cast iron disks.