Name/Title
S02.15.046Description
The 300-ton coal tipple at the Muskingum Electric Railroad's loading loop area south of Cumberland, Morgan County, Ohio. The Muskingum Electric Railroad was the first truly automated railroad in the United States. It was operated by the Central Ohio Coal Company, a subsidiary of the Ohio Power Company, to transport Meigs Creek (No. 9) coal that was developed from the strip mining operation of the Big Muskie. The coal from the mines was trucked to the Muskingum Electric Railroad's loading area south of Cumberland, dumped at trestle, then cleaned and put on surge pile for loading at tipple where the railroad's remote controlled diesel was kept. The two Muskingum Electric locomotives, No. 100 and No. 200, were built by General Electric at Erie, Pennsylvania in June 1968. The coal cars were 100-ton hopper cars made by the Ortner Car Company of Cincinnati, Ohio. The automatic train control system, by General Electric, was based on previous automation work and utilized two types of control communication: continuous and intermittent. Continuous control was used at the loading and unloading areas. Intermittent control was used along the main line. Ohio State Geologist Horace R. Collins visited the area being mined by the Big Muskie dragline with Russian geologist Petr Petrovich Timofeev (Timofeyev) and geologist James Morton Schopf when this picture was taken on May 24 1969.
Identifications of Dr. James Morton Schopf and Dr. Petr Petrovich Timofeev confirmed by Dr. James William Schopf, of the University of California, and Mikail Alexandrovich Fedonkin, Vice-Director of the Geological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in e-mail exchanges with Lisa F. Long during July and August 2016.
Location of the tipple at the loading loop given is approximate to south of Cumberland, Ohio (see Ohio's Robot Railroad article).
For more information about the Muskingum Electric Railroad, see: Corns, John B. (March 1979) Ohio's Robot Railroad; Trains Magazine.
This slide image included in the USGS National Digital Catalog for NGGDPP Grant G15AP00115 in FY2015.
The Times Recorder (Zanesville, Ohio), Thursday, 22 May 1969, page 29. The giant dragline soon will start filling an important role in the economic progress of the Muskingum River Valley. Big Muskie will have a down-to-earth function—literally. The 27-million-pound machine is destined to prowl Central Ohio Coal Company’s 100,000-acre field for the next 35 years uncovering the earth overburden form the rich veins of coal. The coal, which will be extracted by other, smaller machines, will feed the Philo and Beverly plants of the Ohio Power Company. The coal fires the boilers to produce steam which is used in giant turbines to generate electricity. Big Muskie will be part of American Electric Power system’s electricity-making complex on the Muskingum River. The plant near Beverly will soon put into full use a new 615,000-kilowatt generating unit. The plant, with a new capacity of 1.5-million kilowatts, will be the largest power plant in Ohio. Big Muskie’s task will be to strip away the overburden on an estimated 185 million tons of coal—about 5 million tons a year—in the counties of Muskingum, Morgan, Noble, and Guernsey. The $20.8 million machine, which stands 32 stories high, will greet the earth-and-rock covering on the coal with a bucket which can hold 12 automobiles. Its walking shoes are 20 feet wide and 130 feet long. Figures on its actual work chore amount to this: It will be charged with peeling back 235 tons of earth every minute, or 150,000 tons a day. Big Muskie will be teamed with a totally automated railway (Muskingum Electric Railroad) and a recently added-to fleet of huge trucks which run from a complex near Cumberland to the tipple and service center near Unionville. From there, coal is transported overland by a conveyor beltline to the Beverly plant. A bonus asset for this area of the state is Ohio Power’s land-reclamation efforts. Strip mined land in other areas of the nation lies in desolate contrast to the lake-studded and green-clad CentrContext
Tall building structure next to railroad tracks; train cars seen in the foreground. Muskingum Electric Railroad loading loop south of Cumberland, Ohio.