COAL TIPPLE

This week’s Appalachian word is COAL TIPPLE.

Crummies Creek Coal Tipple

Some of you may never have heard of a coal tipple, so I’ll try to explain it to you.

Wikipedia defines a tipple as a structure used at a mine to load the extracted product (e.g., coal, ores) for transport, typically into railroad hopper cars. In the United States, tipples have been frequently associated with coal mines, but they have also been used for hard rock mining.

Courtesy of Wikipedia

 If you’ve ever driven through coal country, you’ve probably seen a tipple and didn’t know what it was used for. I’ll let Wikipedia help in the explaining again.

Basic coal tipples simply loaded coal into railroad cars.^[1] Many tipples had simple screening equipment to sort coal pieces by size before loading.^[2][3]:20 Today, a coal mine facility usually includes a coal preparation plant which washes coal of soil and rock, before loading it for transport to market. The term "tipple" may be used interchangeably with coal prep plant.

I remember seeing lots of coal tipples in Harlan County. My granny lived across the road from one in Crummies, KY. I sat rocking on the front porch of her house, watching as the train cars slowly rolled under the tipple. They opened the hatch on the tipple and coal filled the train cars as they continued to roll underneath.  

 Because they kept moving underneath, the coal filled the cars a mound at a time. I often thought it interesting that the result was a mountain range of peaks and hollers, just like the mountains around me.

Tipples don’t only fill up train cars. They also fill up pick-up trucks (really big pick-up trucks) so coal can be delivered locally to vendors who sell coal to local businesses and residents.

Also, coal doesn’t come in just one size lump. Different sizes are needed for different uses. Big blocks are used mostly commercially—like in plants. When I was a little girl, we had a pot-bellied stove for heating the house. We used smaller chunks of coal for that so the fire wouldn’t burn too hot and burn the house down. I do remember, however, a couple of times when the fire got so hot that the stovepipe between the stove and the fireplace flue glowed bright red. Those were the nights my mom stayed up all night to watch after the fire.

Later, when we bought a Stokermatic stove, smaller pieces of coal were required. They had to be small enough to fit through an auger that took coal from the built-in coal bin and into the firebox. These stoves had a thermostat and monitored the heat produced by the stove. Much safer. They also didn’t burn you if you accidentally touched them. And they had a fan inside to blow the warmed air so it traveled further into the house.

Imagine today on a cold winter day and you only had one vent from your furnace. One vent in the living room. All the other rooms in the house had to depend on that one vent to receive any warmth at all. I love progress!

If you ever wondered how the coal got to the tipple, stay tuned for next week’s word. If you don’t want to miss it, then sign up with your email address on the right side of this post and I’ll send you a link each week to the new posts.

Do you have any stories about coal tipples? How about scary nights with your coal-powered stoves? Leave a comment below and share.