Word: coal
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...freights make up all but a percent of railroading today, both in dollars and distance. Commodities such as grain, forest products and coal are still the underpinning of the rails, but railways are nibbling more into consumer products such as Nikes and Chevrolets. Rails transport two-thirds of the new cars from factories to dealers and piggyback 6.5 million truck trailers a year...
...well. There are 410 short lines, fragments of old roads that have been reconstituted by adventuresome rail buffs and entrepreneurs to hook customers up with the main lines. The Maryland Midland is one. Nestled in the hills below Camp David, the presidential retreat, it serves 34 customers who need coal and raw materials to turn out cement and lumber products. Paul Denton, 51, a refugee from the Baltimore & Ohio in Baltimore, Maryland, is president, commanding a fleet of 200 cars over 67 miles of track. From a tiny office in the quaint 1902 depot in Union Bridge, he listens...
Back east, out of the hills of West Virginia and Virginia, endless strings of coal hoppers of the Norfolk Southern and CSX roll toward the gargantuan coastal terminals where the cars are grabbed and rolled upside down, spilling their cargoes onto belts that pour the coal into ship holds. Those trains travel on lines first plotted and built to rush the troops of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson into Civil War battles. Confederate General William Mahone, an engineering genius, felled trees so skillfully in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp before the war that today's trains still rush over...
...water made visual navigation difficult by submerging the landmarks pilots usually look for. Long stretches of highway and railroad tracks were invisible; river islands had disappeared; the river channels themselves could not be distinguished from the water that had spread onto once dry land. Mountains of strip-mined coal that usually glisten in the sun south of St. Louis poked only their very tips above the water. At the Kirkwood Athletic Association complex in Kirkwood, Missouri, only the dugout roofs could be seen above the water covering baseball diamonds, and a nearby golf course looked like a series of small...
...United Mine Workers expanded its four-week old strike against coal producers last week, bringing to 9,200 the number of miners who have stopped work -- a far cry from the 1950 walkout when 370,000 striking U.M.W. members crippled the nation's industries. As the chart below indicates, few strikes of any kind occur anymore...