Train-hopping couple buried alive under coal

You would think sitting on top of the coal in the car they’d be able to see the coal dropping out the bottom of the cars ahead of them (that’s what was done here). Feel it too as it got closer. Unless they were in the first car of course.

Maybe they were asleep. Who knows, but man how stupid. Doesn’t seem like it’s the first time they hopped a train.

You would think, but I see so many people who are so situationally impaired these days with their silly cell phones, their iPods and earbuds, etc. They wander the planet in their own little world of self-induced noise isolation. Then again, maybe they were asleep.

The train might also have unloaded in the dark. They can certainly be loaded in the dark. I drive past coal mines in the Powder River Basin here in Wyoming every month and there are times you see the light of a train going into the coal loading area... and the only light is on the engine. The train just slows to a crawl as it goes under the coal loading tower and automation handles the rest. Out comes 100 to 105 cars loaded with 100+ tons of PRB sub-bituminous coal...

All you really hear is a “whoosh” sorta sound. There’s no clanking and banging. The coal is often already pre-ground, so it isn’t like a load of rocks dropping out the bottom - it is more like a load of damp granules. Not as fine as sand, but - let’s see if I can give you a comparison. Imagine a load of coarse rice would be a good comparison for some of the coal transported for power plants. Some of it will be a bit coarser than that - maybe about the size of your thumbnail at the largest. The power plants want the coal as fine as possible, because they blow it into their burners; the trains want it a bit coarser so it doesn’t create coal dust. So they sorta compromise - a coarser-than-coffee grind up to thumbnail sized coal.

The air activated mechanism for the bottom doors on the cars sounds just about like the air brake system, which if they’d been riding on trains as much as indicated, they grew pretty accustomed to.

The net:net is that when the bottom opens up, all you hear is an air mechanism like the brakes, the clamshells open up on the bottom, the load just drops out. Whoosh, and it’s gone.

So I can see someone sleeping through that, and even if they were awake in the middle of the night, they might not have known what was going on. And right after they’d have gotten dumped with their load of coal, the next car dumps on them. They’d be dumped and buried in less than, oh, a minute. The elevated unloading stations at some power plants often have no human in the operation - the cars’ unloading mechanism is triggered by an electrical signal device as they pass over the correct section of the track.

Exactly.

The mines here in Wyoming can load a train so fast it makes your head spin to think about what is going on. These trains have 100 to 105 cars of coal, three engines up front, two in back, and they get those trains loaded in less than 90 minutes. The mines south of Gillette will have one train in the loading chute with two more waiting on the rails behind it most all the time.

Dozens of trains enter and leave the Gillette-area mines per day, every day. They’ve got this coal-handling business down to a very efficient process.

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