R. Saunders - Underground and Radioactive

All those supplies couldn’t stay on the track for long, so it was my job to assist in getting the materiel up to the stope. More often than not, I would work with the miner’s helper to accomplish this task. We did it with a winch installed at the top of the raise. The helper would send the cable end down with a clevis attached, and I would fasten and cinch up everything as best I could. Of course the helpers weren’t in a great mood either, having to stop production to haul up supplies, so they wanted it done as rapidly as possible.

With no experience attaching anything to a clevis, I would sometimes find supplies coming crashing down the raise. I soon learned to never look up a raise as supplies were being lifted. If it happened often enough, meaning more than once, I’d find myself face to face with the miner’s helper, being asked in a colorful way what kind of clown Frankie had sent to deliver supplies.

Then there was Frankie himself to occasionally contend with. He did manage to materialize on a few supply runs, and he too sometimes was wondering what clown he had hauling supplies. In this way I soon learned to haul and deliver supplies quite efficiently.

Soon, and I put soon at about a week, I was doing a very efficient job delivering supplies to the work areas. The people who mattered seemed to notice and appreciate it, in that I wasn’t being cussed at nearly as much. It was around this time that Frankie began calling me “pard,” which I interpreted as more personal progress.

One motorman suggested to Frankie that I drive my own motor full of supplies, saving him, the motorman, valuable time and thus increasing overall mine production. Frankie thought this was a great idea, so I was told to use an idle motor to drive the materiel back myself. Of course my having no idea how to run a motor made little difference to Frankie. I was just expected to do it.

If I could remember who it was, I would have someone to blame by name for what followed, but I don’t.

There was an idle motor with a few cars sitting just beyond the dump station, where ore is delivered to hoppers that take it to the surface. It turned out to be quite an easy machine to operate. It had one forward and one reverse gear and was all electric. How much pressure was applied to the handle determined the speed of the train.

Couplings on ore cars are the same as on any train—not real difficult to figure out, but it did take a certain amount of finesse to make the connections by touching at just the right speed. That was the real learning curve: hit a car too hard attempting to couple, and it could and usually did make the car hop off the track. I managed to derail many ore cars trying to figure out the finesse component.

Ore cars were not light, so when they derailed they couldn’t simply be lifted back onto the track by hand. They could be jacked up and, when high enough to clear the rail, simply nudged back onto the track. At first that’s what I did, but it was time consuming and frustrating.

I’d noticed another method used by motormen that was much easier and considerably faster. It involved placing a wedge under the derailed car at a slight angle to the ground. The motorman would then use the motor to gently push the car, which would then lift itself onto the wedge, after which the motorman would run back and just push the car back onto the track. It was a simple system that any good motorman could use. Through my many derailments, I soon learned how to do it.

After managing to get my ore cars attached to one another and the motor, I moved out of the dump station. That’s where I learned about switches.

Exactly as on any railroad, the mine track had a series of switches to move ore trains from one track to another, depending on what drift a motorman needed to go. There were also switches near the station and the ore dump depot. They were fairly easy to operate, but without frequent maintenance they didn’t work properly, and then an ore car or a motor itself would derail.

Through a series of derailments, I did learn how to properly maintain and use the switch system to get my train back to the station where supplies waited to be delivered. I was very fortunate never to have derailed a motor or a full ore car, as due to their weight they were extremely difficult to get back on track.

While I was learning these valuable lessons, I had miners’ helpers running back to the station to find out what was holding up delivery. Soon I was delivering supplies back to the stopes with fewer and fewer problems.

Just as I got really good at supply delivery, there were new hands showing up to work in the station area, so Frankie decided I should be back in the mine performing other tasks. First new task: latrine duty.

Mine sanitation was interesting in that it was more or less minimal. If a worker needed to relieve himself, he stopped and did so anywhere. No problem. On the other hand, if the relief included other than urination, there were latrines built for that purpose in cutouts along the main track drift. Lovely areas.

When a cutout latrine was no longer serviceable, it was simply filled in, and a new cutout was constructed further down the drift. So my new job along with Grimm was to fill in old latrines. There was a lot of dirt, sand, and rock around, so it was easy to accomplish.

The best part about this job was there were a lot of latrines in Section 35, so I started to learn my way around. I began to appreciate trip lights too, as several times during this assignment I was either running for a cutout or riding on a coupling. Fortunately, latrine duty was short lived, and I moved on to more exciting work.

Frankie sometimes assigned Grimm and me to hang vent tubing along the track drifts, up manways, and into stopes. The tubing was made of a light, flexible, reinforced yellow plastic material and was about three feet in diameter. It was attached to a blower used to get fresh air from the main track drift back to otherwise unventilated areas of the mine.

Vent tube was required in all production areas of the mine, and nobody was supposed to work further than several feet from one. “Take your vent tube with you” was something every boss told miners as production advanced in their stopes.

Hanging vent tube slowed down miners and didn’t pay much, so they were not especially good at following that rule. If Frankie, in making his rounds, noticed insufficient vent tubing, then Grimm and I would be dispatched to the area to correct the problem.

I had to experience an unventilated area only once to learn the value of vent tubing. It was an uncomfortable, stuffy environment that I refused to work in if I could help it. When I had my own production areas, I never worked without a vent tube close by.

For me, vent tube hanging didn’t last long, though, as more exciting adventures were on the horizon.

I had been underground about four weeks by now. I had learned a  lot, mostly through the colorful encouragement of irate bosses and miners and by trial and error as opposed to actual instruction, of which to date there had been approximately none. That was just the way things were done with new hands. Either learn the job, show you can do the job, or get out. Some got out. I hung around.