HOIST CABLE CHANGING AT 190 SLOPE MINE

On Saturday March 26, 2011, the maintenance crew at the Lackawanna County Coal Mine 190 Slope performed its yearly ritual of changing the main hoisting cable for the 2011 coal mine tour season.

With the tour's mantrip car safely stored in the slope with steel blocks and chains, the main hoist cable was disconnected and brought out for the end fitting to be cutoff by Tom.

1500 feet of 1" steel cable had to be removed from the hoisting drum. This was wound on to an empty reel in the back of a dump truck set up on a reel stand.

With Bob, Bill and Kyle turning the reel by hand to wind the cable, Carl and Mark pulled the cable down from the hoist house as Roger rode the brakes on the hoist drum to control the cable's slide to the empty reel.

When all 1500' was on the reel, the dump truck was used to move the used cable reel out of the way. Another dump truck containing the new cable reel was setup in the previous location, and the job of pulling the new cable about 200 feet uphill to the hoist house through a small pulley was started.

It was then passed through the hoist room cable door to Tom and Tony where they struggled to secured it to the drum. The cable makes a sharp loop on one end as it is passed through a channel in the drum and back down again to emerge just inside a shallow pocket.

You can see the blue tipped end of the cable emerge just above Tony's foot. Just below his hand on the reel, is the pocket where the cable is bent into a tight U shape to run back down into the drum in another channel.

The cable must seat correctly in the spiral grooves on the hoist drum, especially on the first layer. Here, Tony uses a hammer to keep the cable tight while Tom guides the cable in place. Roger is in the hoist engineers seat and slowly adds power to wind the cable onto the drum.

Back out at the new cable reel Mark, Kyle and Bob used a 2X6 plank of wood to add more tension on the cable sort of as a brake to help seat the cable on the drum.

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Just another day in the Northern Coal Fields of Pennsylvania……..

By Carl Orechovsky, March 26, 2011