These wagons are hoisted on the elevator to the mouth of the mine, and from the moment the coal sees the daylight, the work in connection with it is done by machinery.

The wagons dump their loads into a chute which sends the coal sliding down into the breaker.  This machine breaks up the large lumps in which it is brought out of the mine, and divides the coal into the various sizes, nut, stove, egg, etc.

From the breaker the coal is carried to the washer, and then back to the breaker ready to be sold.

As soon as the coal is ready to be loaded a train of trucks is brought up in front of the breaker, a lever is touched, and the coal comes pouring down into the trucks.  A whole train can be loaded in ten minutes by this process.

From the breaker the cars carry the coal to the canal-boats that are waiting for it.  The cars run on a trestle, and discharge their loads through chutes into the boats, without a shovel having touched it since the miners first blasted it out of the earth and loaded it on the wagons.

Professor Winchell, in his “Sketches of Creation,” gives a very interesting description of a coal mine.  He says: 

“Armed each with a miner’s lamp, and clad in a miner’s garb borrowed for the occasion, we step upon a platform, or “cage,” six feet square, suspended by iron rods connected with machinery moved by an engine, and, at the word, begin to sink into the darkness beneath us.  This perpendicular hole, perhaps eight feet square, is called the shaft.

“Continuing to descend, we perceive the bed of coal underlaid by clay, with abundant grass-like shoots and occasional stems of vegetation.

“We hang before the portal to a long avenue excavated in a deeper-seated bed of coal.  In some of the dark and dusty chambers which open here the miner’s pick is heard, and now and then the muffled report of the miner’s blast comes echoing through the vaulted aisles.

“But this is not the station where we are intended to stop.  Our car moves on, and we plunge through two hundred feet more of the rocky rind of the earth.  Above us the mouth of the shaft seems narrowed into an insignificant hole; before us opens a dark street, over which, on a tramway, mules are hauling carloads of coal, which is starting on its way to the surface.  Miners with picks are moving to and fro; the sound of hammers is heard, the signs of busy life are about us.

“In the seam of coal, passages are cut about eight feet wide and about five feet high.  These are shored up with timber or iron, to prevent them giving way.

“A main gangway may be half a mile or a mile in length.  From this, at suitable intervals, passages are quarried out, running at right angles with the main gangway.

“These chambers cross and recross one another, and make a network of passages like the streets of a city.

“Along the principal passages tram-rails are laid to carry the coal to the shaft.  The trams are moved over the track by mules, which often spend their lives underground.  They are stalled and fed in side rooms cut out of the coal.