FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
HOW COAL CAN BENEFIT YOU
COLLIERY ARTICLES
THE STORY OF ANTHRACITE
OLD ST. NICHOLAS BREAKER
NEW ST. NICHOLAS BREAKER
THE COMMENTATOR GLOSSARY OF
ANTHRACITE MINING TERMS

History indicates that in 1790, Anthracite, or hard coal, was discovered in Schuylkill County at the southern end of the coal fields in north eastern Pennsylvania. These coal fields extend 50 miles east and west, and 100 miles north and south, and cover approximately 484 square miles, containing the richest deposits of anthracite in the world. By 1817, less than 30 years after its discovery, a number of small, individual Anthracite mines had been opened. In 1822, it was reported that 1488 tons of Anthracite had been shipped by canal from the Schuylkill Region, and the industry, as a business, had its beginning. Development was rapid, and by 1825 the Schuylkill Canal was completed, providing transportation of Anthracite from Pottsville to Philadelphia. The barges of "arks," originally pulled by men using breast bars and long tow ropes, took six weeks to travel the 108 miles. After tow paths for the mules were laid parallel to the canal, the boat or barge sizes were increased from 28 to 200 tons and the amount of coal transported grew dramatically. In 1842, the first train from Philadelphia made the trip to Pottsville to compete for the coal trade. That year, the canal and the railroad together, shipped 500,000 tons of Anthracite to Philadelphia.

But the engine whistles sounded the requiem for the boats, and by 1867, the canal was running out of business. It was only a matter of time until the railroad would become the lone carrier of coal to the major markets. The year 1865 found 170 mining operations in the Schuylkill, Lehigh and Mahanoy Regions, employing 19,000 men. In 1871, a newly formed company was chartered as the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, and Famous Reading Anthracite was born. Here in the southern Schuylkill Region are large deposits of unmined hard coal, which indicate that the commodity can be produced for centuries to come. Reading Anthracite alone, has millions of tons in its reserves. Presently, many of the Company's open pit operations are being worked to depths below the levels and elevations of its earlier underground workings. Old-timers can hardly believe what they see today. The early miners held a hand drill with a fishtail bit on one end and a chisel on the other, to drill into the rock or coal face. What would he think of the huge rotary drills on the surface today - capable of drilling 9-inch and 10-inch holes through solid bedrock at speeds in excess of one foot a minute, up to 72 feet deep? How about that scoop he used . . . compared to the 35 cubic yard "big dipper" of a Marion 7800? There is quite a contrast to the mine buddy of years ago and the 65 and 85 ton trucks we meet at the raw coal pits today. It is almost impossible to list the changes that have taken place in the preparation of Anthracite over the past century. The first preparation plants, locally termed "breakers," were constructed in the southern Anthracite field in 1844. They were capable of sizing 200 tons of coal a day. During the ensuing decades, numerous cleaning, sizing and dewatering techniques developed, culmination in plants now having the capacity to clean and size Anthracite at the rate of 2000 tons per hour. Huge investments have been made in the most modern mining and accessory equipment, that production standards might be maintained in the best tradition of Famous Reading Anthracite. All of Reading's development and coal removal is done with its own equipment by the open pit method, using shovels and trucks, or large dragline shovelsand hydraulic excavators. In 1963, the company began construction of the New Saint Nicholas Breaker near Minersville, the world's most modern heavy media preparation plant. This breaker is located in close proximity to Reading's extensive open pit operations and tremendous coal reserves. All prepared coal from Reading Anthracite's facilities must undergo close inspection, and meet the standards of Reading's rigid quality control system. Samples of each carload are subjected to a series of tests to determine the sizing and ash content. Cars failing to meet the standards are returned to the breaker for re-preparation. With its modern efficient heavy media preparation plant and state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, the company observes over 100 years of progress in the mining, processing and marketing of America's finest hard coal - Famous Reading Anthracite!

  The PENNSYLVANIA layer cake . . .where Nature changed the layers into ANTHRACITE! There is a huge layer cake in eastern Pennsylvania - a cake so big that is covers eight counties - for nearly 500 square miles. Inside this massive cake are layers of stone, conglomerate, shale, slate, and dirt... and strangest of all - fourteen separate layers of a hard, black substance, filled with the warm sunshine of many ages ago. The strange, black substance is Nature's finest fuel - Anthracite or hard coal. Geologists say that Nature mixed our layer cake over 250 million years ago. In this earth there were trees, plants and animal life like nothing human eyes have ever seen. For thousands of years great trees, giant ferns, and other plant life sprang up in the steaming jungle, grew old and fell, forming deep layers of decaying vegetation. No human beings could have survived in the atmosphere of carbonic gas that enfolded the earth. The process of growth and decomposition was repeated thousands of times, creating numerous layers or veins of decomposed matter, of various depths. Dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters and reptiles roamed over the vast expanse, and their fossils contributed to the filling of our layer cake. Because the earth was constantly changing shape, many layers of the decayed matter were pushed deep underground and the waters of the ocean rolled in to fill the void. Then mighty upheavals wrinkled the earth's crust, causing the surface to contract and expand. The combined forces of pressure and intense heat which accompanied the upheavals hardened the deposits successively into peat, lignite, soft coal and finally, hard coal or Anthracite. Where the pressure and heat were greatest, the best deposits of Anthracite were formed - veins of concentrated, nearly pure carbon, packed with long-burning, smokeless heat. The volatile matter, which produces the black smoke of bituminous coal, was driven off from the Anthracite beds during the period of stress. Millions of years after the upheavals and "folding" process came the great glaciers from the north, shearing off the tops of mountains and filling the valleys with deposits containing the "buried sunshine" of ages ago. The action of the glaciers exposed some of the coal veins to view, which same to be familiarly known as "outcroppings," and eventually led to man's discovery of Nature's finest fuel - Anthracite.