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Meets and Outings
[11 - Centralia adventure Part I] [21 - Centralia adventure Part II]

How-To Articles
[3 - Overhead Console Install] [4 - Overhead Console Wiring] [5 - MAF mod] [6 - LED switch mod] [8 - Homebrew Remote Bass Control] [12 - Headlight/4x4 Switch LED Mod] [13 - General LED tutorial] [14 - EATC install how-to (pages 14-19)] [20 - IAT Resistor Mod (older engines only)] [22 - Automatic Power Windows] [23 - Cruise Control Pod LED's]

Centralia Meet of October 8-10, 2004

NOTE: PAGE UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

Another meet with Ranger's from multiple clubs met up yet again in Centralia. They came from the north, south, east and west! From the midwest, New England, Florida, and the midatlantic states. Male and female. Quite a diverse collection of folks!

Well, we had a great time and it's hard to know where to start. We had fellowship together, exploring the area, I led tours both by day and by night, offroading also by day and by night -- just a great time. We met new people from the area and visiting the area. We even did a little "industrial archaeology! Wow, I mean, wow! It was great.

I have a "sponsor" for doing measurements of subsurface temperatures. It is National Basic Sensor (or NBS for short) and they supplied me with a custom built, heavy duty probe; and a meter to process and display the data. The probe is constructed specifically for rough service and can be hammered into the ground. This meet was not focused on ground measurements -- but the equipment was tested and some interesting information was obtained. More on that farther down the page. Click here for the National Basic Sensor website.

Below views of the probe's construction. It's about 1 meter long, thermocouple type J grounded junction, stainless steel probe, all welded and the head backfilled with epoxy! It can be hammered.

Some of the trucks

We had fewer trucks, and I arrived with mine clean, and went home with it very dirty. Just like it should be.

Here's some shots of some of the attending trucks, starting with mine, of course!

Me to the left, and my friend Tom's truck to the right.

Bill to the left, Brian to the right.

Rand to the left, a bunch to the right. No space or patience to show everyone!

Opening moves

Some of the group went to Pottsville to tour the historic Yuengling brewery (and get some free beer) and the rest of us hung out in the parking lot get acquainted or re-acquainted. It was my job to conduct a tour of Centralia and we decided to do a "tour before the tour" and head out from the Holiday Inn in Frackville and head for Centralia.

About half of us went to Centralia and took a quick look at the area just above the town. What we found were some changes. It seemed hotter in places, cooler in others, and some mounds which used to be there had sunk. Some places that had been cool and showed no sign of activity were now active. Looking at a USGS or DEP vents that stud the area, this one was actually hot and I don't believe that was the case before. I wasn't looking to do a real survey, but I never walk in the hot areas without a pyrometer in my hand. Rubber soled shoes don't like 400+ degree F temperatures and neither do my feet after awhile! Below left, the temp at the vent, to the right a hot spot on the surface.

One thing I would like to do is go up and make some baseline measurements in specific spots and start tracking changes. Right now I'm not recording the data in a very scientific manner and it may be time to do some disciplined observations. Mostly, it's been "gee whiz, look how hot it is here now" without real numbers to compare. I will post some more on our temperature measurements farther down the page.

A bit of a climb

But, we went up the hill on some back trails and had a good look down in the valley where Ashland is. Here's the view from up there to the left below, and a view at night to the right. Not quite the same pan angle, but you should be able to figure it out. You can see Ashland as the detailed lights in the foreground. In the background to the left, you can see the lights of Frackville and Pottsville "painting the sky". [CORRECTION: Brian (wowak) has informed me he believes that the other lights are the Coal-generation and correctional facilities out towards Frackville. He's from the area, so that's most likely what they are.] The low cloud ceiling showed the lights of the distant towns (or facilities) pretty well. What astronomers would call "light pollution", I suppose! The night shot is a 16 second exposure at F4, 400 DIN equivalent speed on my Olympus C-4000.

Industrial Archaeology

This is a serious study field, and we weren't doing real industrial archaeology obviously. But Bill (03EdgeMan, in the picture to the lower left) found a structure just off the overlook where the above pictures were taken and I've made a stab at identifying it.

You can see it below to the left and right. It appeared to be the top of a conveyor line that used to run down the side of the mountain. When you looked downhill you could clearly see that there used to be a line cleared. All wood construction suggests something older, probably using leather belts with wooden "bucket" construction. If you know of these structures and can confirm my guesses about the use of them, please email me. The right hand shot is deliberately overexposed to reveal the shadowed interior.

Back in the early days of anthracite mining -- it wasn't mining as such. The coal was lying around on the surface. At first nobody wanted anthracite coal and until the railroads and the canal were built the only way to ship it was to take it down river on wooden rafts. The rocky "rapids" often broke up the rafts and a lot of coal ended up IN the river. Anthracite was hard to light, and the stoves and boilers of the day weren't set up to use it.

So anthracite coal got a slow start. But when it took off finally because of it's advantages, industry would have done what it could to supply the need. What I THINK was going on was that the coal was collected from an exposed seam up on this slope somewhere, and was then transported down to the railroad using the conveyor. The railroad would probably have taken it to the canal, or transported it directly. When the exposed seam "petered out", the structures would have fallen into disuse and disrepair and eventually ended up as the ruins we found.

There must have been quite a bit more of the top structure -- there are heavy timbers and boards quietly rotting EVERYWHERE up there.

I proposed that such a structure would be too weak to anchor the top of the conveyor line and that there must have been anchors and cables to counter the downward pull of the line. So, we turned and walked straight back away from the downslope, over the trail, and back into the woods and found the anchor points (I love it when I guess right, lol). Here's a view of two of them, but there were a BUNCH of them scattered in a pattern that would have provided bracing from different angles for stability. The left hand picture shows one of the array of concrete pilings presumably buried deep into the ground. The right hand picture is a detail of one of the anchor points on it complete with a scrap of old iron or steel rope. "Any old iron?"

I remember reading that the coal was washed after breaking. If this was an early breaker and processing area, then there should have been water handing structures and we think we found them also. Below left, water filled foundation just upslope of the anchors, about on level with where the top of the conveyor structure would have been. Below right, anchors for something fairly heavy imbedded in the concrete.

Below left, what looks like a primitive "gate valve" that would have had a slab of wood or iron in it and been raised and lowered to control water flow from or to underground channels that ran through the area. Below right, a pipe upslope of this structure that may have sourced water from a pond or spring (thanks to Djaye, my "hand model"). Gravity was usually used in early systems wherever possible because energy sources were more "dear".

Truthfully, though, I don't know if this was a very old colliery of some sort or a cement plant or what. We found lots of stuff but I'm guessing at all of this. I'm working on getting some more historical and technical information on the early industry in Schuylkill county -- but it's going to take awhile. There are some more things we saw though and speculated on.

To the left, below, you can see an inverted cone made up of steel or iron sheets. It's probably 4 to 5 feet wide at the bottom. I think it was used to wash coal and it would have been "point down" in use. Put some raw, broken coal in it, and run water over it -- the small pieces and dirt sieve out the bottom. Don't know. On the right below you can see a large drainage pipe that exited from a deep basin cut into the side of the hill. That's a standard 4x6 piece of plywood someone had obstructed the pipe with to give you some scale. It was like that when we found it.

The area was also patterned with concrete lined "tanks" or basins whose upper lip suggests they may have had "lids" or covers. What are they? Don't know that either! They may have been for some kind of processing, or sedimentation tanks, -- we need more information. They had drain pipes coming into one side and out the other at the very bottom, though some were so filled with debris you couldn't see that well. Note the one has trees growing out of it and one tree grew up, died, fallen, and the stump is rotting in the tank. I think it's been a LONG time since it was used!

We found another area where there was clearly a "right of way" up/down the hill side. It looked like a "road" that might have been there which I noticed back in February. However it now looks pretty much to have been a utility feed right of way. The evidence for this is a the rotted remains of a timber structure and an earthen berm at the top, and some electrical insulators that look to be a very old style to me. You can see one in Djaye's hand to the lower left. One hazard of trying to figure out what was going on is the "dump piles" up there. You could easily get yourself in trouble by thinking what you find up there is relevant to activity up there. For instance, to the right below you see an old Coca-Cola sign -- gosh, was there a diner here? A filling station? Actually, this sign looks like it was sanded and repainted on the bottom and I THINK it looks like the remains of a gas price: 41 and 9 tenths. Not sure. If you look for when gas was in that range, you might know when this sign was in service last. However, it's very unlikely that it was in use up where we were -- just dumped there.

Below, just a couple of shots from the end of that exploration. To the left, yet another gratuitous shot of my truck, and to the right some of the folks who went on this little jaunt in the brush and the woods. You can see the mighty "Q" standing on the old logging road you use to get up there, holding his video camera. He taped lots of stuff from this trip and will eventually be posting a video of it. I'll link it here when it happens.

PATIENCE! UNDER CONSTRUCTION! :-)