My FAVORITE Abandoned Coal Mine in 20 years of Exploring Mines. Bituminous Heaven! Part 1 of MANY!🇺🇲

This video is dedicated to one of my longest continuing RUclips subscribers, YT handle Leeturner1838. He was a former Bituminous Coal Miner & asked for a Soft Coal (Bituminous) mine video. So, I dug deep into my archives & made it happen for him. Got to make my loyal viewers happy, right?! Thank you Lee for your former service as a coal miner. You helped keep the lights on in this great State of Pennsylvania.🫡
This mine, even though it's not an Anthracite Coal Mine, is my favorite mine. It just is. It's pure eye candy when you're down there. It's incredible as to how SMALL it actually is. It's like a toy mine! The rail gauge (width of the tracks) is so small that it's almost the size of the little live steam trains you can ride on at Knoebels Amusement Park! It's so little in scale that it's impressive. Don't let this fool you however, this mine is huge! I read reports in a book years ago that said there were OVER 40 miles of laid track in this mine in the year 1880! That's gigantic, let alone for a Bituminous mine! This mine was driven (constructed) by pure muscle power & animal power. There was NO mechanization down here. This mine was NEVER electrified. It was abandoned for the first time before the dawn of the 20th century. From about World War 1, all through the Great Depression, and through World War 2, this mine was bootlegged. This means miners just came here by themselves or as a small collective group to mine in order to survive. They went into old abandoned workings & took the coal pillars. This was dangerous work.
Sit back, relax & enjoy this tour of this lovely coal mine. There will be many follow up videos to this first one. Thanks again Lee for asking for a soft coal video, I've been wanting to upload this one for a long time now. This is my favorite video edit I've done so far. This mine has subsided shut due to ice forming at its portal. The ice/freeze thaw cycles from the Winter/Springtime cause most mine openings to collapse. This is why you see the more modern mines encasing the mine openings with concrete. Mother nature has taken this mine back in a sense. It's come full circle for this mine unfortunately.
DISCLAIMER: Stay Out & Stay Alive!! As you can see from this video, abandoned mines are treacherous. I've worked with the Pa. DEP/Pa. Game Commission (civilian non-employee reporting dangerous mines) over the last 10 plus years to bat gate mines, backfill open vertical shafts that were threats to people & animals, etc. I NO LONGER ACTIVELY EXPLORE ABANDONED ANTHRACITE COAL MINES. I HAVE NEARLY 2 DECADES OF EXPERIENCE & AM TRAINED, HAVE OXYGEN, FLAME SAFETY LAMPS, MAPS, MEDICAL TRAINING FROM THE MILITARY, ETC. YOU CAN EASILY GET HURT OR KILLED IN OLD MINES! Black damp can kill you in mere moments & it is something you cannot smell or see, without training & proper equipment, you will succumb to this. No locations will be given or discussed anywhere on my channel; I will delete them if comments as such arise. I always carried a closed-circuit oxygen self-rescuing apparatus that miners carry. I always a had a ridiculous number of batteries & multiples of flashlights themselves, glow sticks, hard hat, tourniquet, maps of the specific mine, a safety party on standby should I not come out at a predetermined time, etc. I kept my explorations as professional as one possibly could. I also had an extensive knowledge as to how & why miners did what they did underground. I knew what could possibly happen to the roof/walls before it happened in a sense. My geology knowledge was something I worked hard at & most people could miss what I often saw thus resulting in collapses, etc. PLEASE STAY OUT & STAY ALIVE!
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