Canadian Coal Mining

[BertB.]

A number of years ago before our daughter was born we went on a long holiday through three Canadian Prairie Provinces in to the Rocky Mountains and on our way back through Saskatchewan we stopped in the town of Estevan an area known for coal mining, and oil drilling. Coal is mined in this region mostly for producing electricity but one of the mines also produces charcoal briquets for things like barbecues amongst other things. These are large strip mines, topsoil and subsoil is stripped by large Caterpillar scrapers and Overburden is removed with very large walking draglines and one large crawler dragline. At one time coal was mined by underground coal mining techniques much like everywhere else in the world. During the summer the mine does tours of both the generation facility and the mine itself but you have to get there early. At the tour site just at the north entrance to the town are some older retired equipment on display including a dragline bucket as you can see in the photo with my truck parked in front of it. They also have an early electric shovel that was used to load coal in to belly dump style trucks and an early walking dragline and a diesel locomotive once used to shunt rail cars at the mine site.

 

[BertB.]

The beginning of the tour was the Boundary Dam which holds up water used at the plant for making steam it was hard to photograph from the tour bus but we did get a few pictures of the Generating Plant quite a massive place and sadly has an uncertain future with all the 'green' bullshit going on these days and something that could really hurt the local economy.

 

[Grahams]

Great pictures. Those machines have an amazingly long working life. I dread to think how many hours are on them. I guess it is a relatively simple technology that can cost effectively keep getting bits replaced as they wear out rather than the rather than the computer or wiring failing and being too expensive or difficult to fix.
Graham

 

[BertB.]

Yeah they're all electric but not computer controlled unlike the equipment of today, they were also and continue to be built for the life of the mine at least till the technology changes. They are something to see in action, this past summer we drove by on our way west again and one of the biggest ones was working close to the highway in a spot we could easily pull over and watch it in action. Any time I'm going west and staying in the southern part of the Prairie's I try to go that way to see where they are digging and its not hard to see the action with how big the dragline's are and how spread out the mine is. Many of the gravel roads in the area criss cross around the mine site. At one time the coal was loaded using electric shovels but is now loaded by large wheel loaders like Cat 992's and 993's in to large belly dump trucks. There was until earlier this year one electric shovel still sitting at the mine site but it apparently has now been scrapped. It was too far away for me to get a decent photo all this time sadly. As you can see in the photo's they have a number of large graders for haul road maintenance as well large dozers like Cat D9's and D10's and large 10,000 gallon capacity or more water trucks for dust control. They also maintain a large stockpile of coal at the plant in case heavy summer rains prevent the belly dumps from accessing the loading area's.

 

[Mogman]

Cracking pictures Burt

 

[Stock]

Yo Bert what da craic??

 

[BertB.]

Yo Bert what da craic??

Hi stock, busy as f$%ck with a big ditching job almost need one of those long reach excavators or a long reach on pontoon tracks at times but somehow I still manage to get it done without getting stuck. Back to utility installation work next week which makes me pretty happy.......hopefully less track shovelling too.

 

[BertB.]

We got to go right in to an active pit where a Cat 992 wheel loader was loading a coal truck, and just behind the pile was a Cat 345 peeling off the last layer of coal on top of the clay. And on top was Big Lou stripping overburden.

 

[BertB.]

 

[BertB.]

Got to see the shop area a little bit while in the tour bus, pretty neat to see.