Welcome to Slate Fork Country!
The year is 1978. The nation is Star Wars crazy and disco drunk, and a California band calling itself "Van Halen" has just released its debut album.
Things are a little less frenzied and somewhat more traditional in the hollers of Appalachia though. Take the Southern Railway's Slate Fork Branch, a former short line founded in the early 1920s by a Midwest steel consortium. It's been moving coal much like it has for the past 50 years. The only significant changes were a pair of SD-9s that replaced aging second-hand steam locomotives in the mid 1950s, followed by the loss of independence when the Slate Fork Railway came under the Southern's flag in the early 1960s (about the same time, but with considerably less public attention, as Southern's acquisition of the nearby Interstate Railroad).
Located like the Interstate in the extreme southwest corner of Virginia, the former Slate Fork Railway interchanged its traffic with the Southern, but it also did business with the Clinchfield, providing the Clinchfield with a steady, if not large, stream of coal traffic.
Today in the late 1970s, the Clinchfield -- part of the Family Lines -- still interchanges cars with the Southern for delivery to a tipple on the Slate Fork (a stipulation the ICC insisted on as part of the purchase conditions). But the Slate Fork's key loadout sees Southern hoppers only, loaded with a highly coveted metallurgical bituminous coal which travels south on Southern iron to Alabama's steel mills.
Demand for coal is high, and the Southern operates two mine runs a day up the Slate Fork. A smaller truck dump is located further along the branch, as well as an ammonium nitrate bulk facility. Trucks take the fertilizer to surrounding mines, where -- when mixed with diesel fuel -- it becomes a powerful explosive used to open new seams.
For more on how a guy who lives on the edge of the map in the Pacific Northwest came to be enthralled with the Appalachian coal haulers, see Saga of the Slate Fork.
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