Coal Operations: Prep Plant

 On AIR1 I planned but never built a prep plant. The Prep Plant is a facility that cleans impurities from coal; rock and dirt that is mixed in with some coal during the mining process. Larger tipples often perform this cleaning process or coal seams are large enough that very little additional “spoil” is in the run of the mine coal. 

However when this is not the case coal companies will transport coal either by conveyor, truck, or train to a plant that cleans the impurities from the coal and reloads it into hoppers for transport to its final destination. A prep plant might take in all the coal from one area, several mines and loaders feeding the plant, or it might be associated with one large mine operation.

On AIR 2 a major feature of my coal operations is the Prep Plant. I hope that it will produce 90-100 coal loads a sessions. To over simplify the operation of a prep plant it is as follows:

1) Dirty loads in

2) MTYS out

3) MTYS in

4) Clean loads out

Additionally the “gob” or “spoil” removed from the inbound coal is usually dumped, by conveyor, nearby. This dump is known as the Gob Pile or Spoil Pile.

On the AIR 2 my prep plant will be on its own branch, and it will be fed by two additional branch’s. These two branch’s will simply be concealed staging tracks.

The prep plant  will receive coal from these branch’s, by conveyor, and by train off the two branch’s.

The “Prep Plant Job” will classify these inbound dirty coal loads, spot them on the inbound tracks, pull the MTYS, spot the MTYS on the outbound loading tracks, pull the loaded clean coal, make those loads into a train and transfer these clean loads to Pettigrew. 

The prep plant will have an associated yard where additional loads and MTYS will be stored. The Prep plant job will keep this yard organized as well.

I am assuming I will stage a large number of “clean loads” in the outbound storage yard as well as on the outbound tracks of the prep plant. Since the prep plant is a static model, obviously no additional loads would be produced during the session. It is possible that the Prep Plant Job COULD place loads into MTY hoppers, in a sort of live staging function, but this does not appeal to me.

Not only would MTY hoppers have to be loaded, but they would have to be billed, the prep plant job would have to remove the prep plant bill and add a double sided PETTIGREW mine tag. I view this procedure, by operators of unknown ability, with gloomy foreboding.

The prep plant will have to have a scale track as well as a RIP track.

My plan is that the switch engine for the Prep Plant will be a F-7 B-Unit, copying the Haysi railroad’s cabless B-Unit off the Clinchfield.

Coal loads from around the layout will be billed to the Prep Plant with an action bill that simply reads “Prep Plant”. I could arrange it so that the prep plant action bill was in front of the Pettigrew double sided mine tag, and this would eliminate the need for the inexperienced prep plant job holder from doing that. He would only have to remove the action bill from each car card when the cars get spotted on the plants unloading tracks.

I had envisioned a lot of coal from off-layout foreign road interchange going to the prep plant but I have since changed that plan. The foreign road coal will travel west off-layout, carrying so called “Lake Coal”, or it will be billed to a trans-loading facility that loads coal onto River barges.

More on that later.

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