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Old machinery and diesel loco(S) at Coking Plant Auction

Think of the millions of tons of Gray Iron (for castings) melted in coke fired Cupolas by means of this fuel from such suppliers
 
Here we had Solvay Coke:

Solvay Coke, Milwaukee, WI

What a brutal place to work. My dad took me there once as a kid. Maybe he wanted me to see where I might be working if I didn't finish school.

I got that same trip when I was about 10. Except in my case it was a stamping plant. Dad made sure I shook hands with all the men that had lost fingers and parts of there hands.

Things like that make a big impression on you when your 10 years old.
 
Not a whole lot TO re- purpose, how many tons of that junk could be brought back to life? A few lathes and mills, IF not clapped out, some of the steam plant? But where would that go? A locomotive or two? That’s all just a drop in the bucket, it is a scrap opportunity, an a crappy one at that, they got that right.
Antiquated doesn’t describe that shithole. The guy in the interview says he worked 100 hrs a week in PPE, sounds like fun.
 
Yup, yup, I know better than no job attall, and overtime, but that place was poisoning the whole area, and it’s workers no doubt about it.
Having said that, I would LOVE to have a wander about! Try to guess how long some of those lathes were sitting idle, as they ran that crapheap into the ground. How about the shaper, how long since THAT ran? :)
 
Auction inspection day and sale day are always a good opportunity to have a wander around unsupervised,and with a bit of BS,they likely will let you start and drive the locos...........I love the big three day cleareances.....you can basically do what you like away from the sale location.
 
Erie Coke: Plant closure would cause 'irreparable damage' - News - GoErie.com - Erie, PA

This is the sister plant to the one in the auction.

The environutz are circling and licking their chops.

A recent interview was with a chemist from a buffalo college, brought in for the Tonawanda plant analysis.

She didn't give the environutz the sound bite they wanted.

She said once the ovens are shut down, they don't get restarted, and the place in Erie is very contaminated, much the same as the Tonawanda plant.

However....she went on to say, if the plant is kept going, the management is working on cleaning it up..... somewhat.

If they close it, the state and federal government are tasked with cleaning it all up.

And 135 employees lose their jobs.
 
I too thought it a shame as another pc of America gone. Agree most of the infrastructure will go to scrap and a lot of smaller pcs too. I am so glad I can't go to this auction as the distance and "want" of what I would want is not in line with need or space to put it. GM owned a coke plant in Waukegan, Ill at one time and was running when I was a kid. Pretty secure place and us kids never found a way in. I have to laugh {or cry} at how our society views heavy industry now. No I am not against mother earth. But on the same token there seems to be a distance in acknowledging what we have today and how it all got here. Without heavy industry we would be scratching the ground like third world chickens. Oh the travesty of it all. I guess society was just supposed to know everything and do something about it instead of evolving to a more thoughtful society. I see what has been traded away in terms of skill, employment and willingness to work along with some semblance of common sense for all the great things our society has now. Of course I am being sarcastic. Rampant pollution, race discrimination truly were not good things. But on the other hand people took care of their families and themselves and prospered. Somewhere some how we needed to find the middle and do better on both sides of the perspective. I would of loved to have experienced work in a coke plant like the one in OP. My first job was on a tourist railroad working on rail equipment, my second job was at a foundry. Didn't want to work at the foundry my whole life but the experience was wonderful. Was not my cup of tea and maybe the coke plant wouldn't of been either. But I would of loved the experience of it. And if I was out of work and ended up getting a job in a coke plant I would of been grateful until I could find better. I hated the foundry, but as the war in Vietnam was winding down jobs got tight. I learned to take what you could get and be happy to be working. When I drove Chicago or when I pass through that cesspool I am saddened by the decay of the once mighty industrial strength of the city. Suppose I should rejoice that some people can now eat fish out of lake Michigan and in a few years maybe lake Erie? The air is so much cleaner now. Regardless of my love of heavy industry this is a good thing. But what we have lost in the last 50 yrs in our society relating to being able to produce any kind of product or a workforce with the skills and drive to produce hard products is scary and sad. Again did we throw the baby out with the bath water in a cotton candy approach to being more responsible? we have legislated decency but have not developed decency. For the most part I do not think we have evolved into anything better in the last 50 yrs? But I am glad to see our concerns for the environment and safety in the work place. But often feel it is too much so to the point of squashing productivity and creativity in the work place. Some middle ground or common sense could of gone further and accomplished more in the long run. IMHO anyhow. My story and sticking to it. Places like these coke plants being shut down are harder and harder to find. They may have been big polluters as they were old technology and built long ago, but I still think it a shame that the powers that be are not on the same page to keep these places running or upgraded instead of closing down because of outrageous EPA or other governmental regs. Do we already import our coke from China.

And while were at it lets relocate and repopulate wolves and big cats to these industrial wastelands. Both could survive in the urban ruins. But that would be inhumane and we would have to build shelters for them and start feeding them so they wouldn't have to be responsible for their own survival. Sorry to rant I am just bummed out that I can't go to this auction and bring a trailer load home. Regards, John.
 
A bit of irony:

In February of 2019, I was at the Arcade & Attica RR in Arcade, NY to inspect their locomotive number 18's boiler and decide on what repairs would be needed. Subsequently, we had a conference call with the Arcade & Attica people, the US Federal RR Administration, and myself to discuss the current condition of that boiler and what repairs would be needed. The main issue was the fact the firebox on that boiler has to be replaced. In the course of discussion, the FRA men asked Arcade & Attica about their "firing practices" and the Arcade & Attica RR disclosed they'd had some problems with complaints to the EPA and similar about the smoke from Locomotive Number 18. Apparently, some people bought a house along the Arcade and Attica RR right of way. When the season opened for the tourist train (A & A RR moving revenue freight with a GE Center Cab diesel locomotive), the steam locomotive's coal smoke sent the new neighbors into a complete shit fit. The new neighbors sic'd the authorities on the A & A railroad, filed a complaint and some kind of violation or citation resulted. The arcade & Attica RR asked both the FRA and myself if we had any ideas as to how to move that locomotive and train past those neighbors with no smoke from the stack. There is a slight ascending grade leaving town, so the locomotive is worked a bit. I suggested they get up steam in their yard on soft coal as they always do, carry a thin bed with a heel (heavier area of the coal bed) back against the door sheet of the boiler and throw on a thin bed of coke. When the coke was going good and holding a good head of steam, make up onto the train and leave town firing on coke. Coke is smokeless. The next issue was where Arcade and Attica RR could get a few tons of coke to experiment with. Previously, Bethlehem Steel had a coke works in Buffalo at their Lackawanna Works. That Lackawanna Coke plant closed probably in the 90's. I found Tonawanda Coke's website on-line and forwarded it to Arcade and Attica RR. Tonawanda, NY is not all that far from Arcade, NY. Now, the Tonawanda Coke Plant is to be scrapped out.

I suspect the demise of the Tonawanda Coke Plant has a number of contributing factors. The owners of that plant probably were faced with a reduced demand for coke, and also saw the handwriting on the wall as far as being required to bring the plant into compliance environmentally. Those two factors combined to spell the end for the Tonawanda Coke Plant, I think. The major demand for coke would have been blast furnaces in steel mills. Another set of factors combined to spell the near-extinction of blast furnaces in the USA. An interesting factor is the move from steel mills that started with iron ore to the "re melt mills" which start with "processed scrap" (shredded scrap steel). The US has reached a kind of "critical mass" in which we produce enough scrap steel for recycling through the re-melt mills such that very little steel made from iron ore is needed. The principal need for steels made from iron ore is in the automotive and appliance industries where very ductile steels capable of being stamped or deep-drawn are needed. However, cars along with pickups and SUV's are getting lighter and using less steel (and going to composite materials, aluminum, and ever-thinner gauge steel). Add to this the fact that a new process is in use at the iron mines, which reduces the iron ore to a kind of raw iron. This process is fueled with natural gas, and the result is the taconite pellets that previously were produced at the iron mines are either exported, or used in smaller quantities in the USA. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the iron mines are almost completely shut down with only one or two still working. This points to a drop in US mills with blast furnaces (aside from a drop in export sales of the taconite). Only a few blast furnace mills remain working in the USA, so the demand for coke is very small at best.

The owners of Tonawanda Coke saw the downward spiral in the steel industry's demand for coke, and they knew it was only a question of time before the environmental protection agencies and their regulations caught up with them. I think once those factors were converted into the economics of running the coke plant, the management opted to run it into the ground and declare bankruptcy. There are some hints as to how things were headed at that coke works. I noticed in the auction lots, there is a 2.5 megawatt Allis Chalmers steam turbo generator. It is an old unit, as A-C got out of steam turbine building after the infamous failure of "Big Allis" in the 1963 northeast blackout. I suspect the coke works management stopped maintaining the steam plant, making steam only for process rather than for power generation. The result is the large number of diesel generators listed in the auction. My guess is wherever the plant power buss supplied power, localized diesel generators were brought in and wired into the plant substations or directly into the motor control/load centers.

Interesting to note is the GE center cab locomotive was set up for remote operation (radio controlled). My guess is the bulk of the plant equipment will be scrapped where it sits. The auctioneers showed pictures of hopper cars, but listed them as "gondola" cars. At some point, Tonawanda Coke may well have been shipping the coke in railroad carload lots. I would not be surprised if the railroad equipment is cut up for scrap right where it sits, being too costly to move over mainline railroads (assuming it has roller bearings on the axles).

The coke plant site is likely a "brown field", having contaminated soil and plenty of hazmat to deal with. Bankruptcy may be a convenient way for the owners to escape or lessen the economic hit for the cleanup and remediation of the underlying soil.

40 + years go, when I was working in Marquette, Michigan, there was an abandoned charcoal and wood-chemical plant. It had been owned in joint by Cleveland-Cliffs Iron and Dow Chemical. It was known as the "Cliffs-Dow" works. A friend and sometime outlaw biker was renting (or so he claimed) space in the old plant complex. That plant covered acres, had railroad access, and many buildings. It included a boiler house with two pre-war Riley Stoker watertube boilers. Those boiler had been setup to run on wood tar, pulverized coal, or fuel oil. The boilers had supplied steam to a steam turbo generator, with extraction steam being sent around the complex for use in the various process. The turbo generator was long gone, but boilers were intact. In the generator room, the foundation for the generator and bus ducting was still there, and a blackboard still had a one-line diagram of the plant power distribution network. Men's work clothes were still in the lockers. Various railroad cars were still on the in-plant tracks. Piping ran between the various buildings, both above ground and in flooded tunnels. Some equipment remained, but anything of scrap value was long gone. I remember taking a mis-step on what looked like solid ground. It was actually wood tar and my work boot went in and got stuck. I pulled out and never could get that wood tar entirely off my work boot sole. Paperwork for what the mill had produced was blowing all over the landscape. In reading random pieces of office paperwork, I discovered that plant had made: charcoal made as briquettes, activated charcoal sold for filtration purposes, wood alcohol, creosote, sulphuric acid and a bunch more chemicals.

The plant site was an environmental hot potato. It sat adjacent to Northern Michigan University's campus for many years. Eventually, it was cleaned up and the college took some of the real estate to expand the campus onto. A buddy of mine told me his relatives had worked in that plant. The worst job in the plant was working the retorts, and it was a job new men were usually stuck with. My buddy said uncles of his had worked the retorts, and the smoke and dust were so thick they could not see a 100 watt lightbulb a few feet from them. Plenty of men died young from working in that plant. In poking around that plant, I found an actual "asbestos suit". It was a "boiler suit" or coverall made of woven asbestos material- the stuff used at that time for welding blankets. Evidently, conditions were such that men had to work wearing asbestos suits due to high temperatures and probably glowing charcoal when the retorts were opened.

Corporations did not care a hang for the overall health and well being or their workers or the adjacent communities in those plants. At the time, I was working as a mechanical engineer on a powerplant construction project, and firing a steam locomotive on a tourist railroad on some weekends. One Saturday morning, I was at the locomotive early to start raising steam. A man whom I only knew as "Cecil" appeared and gimped out of his old car and made his way to a bench. He called me over. His old car was brush-painted, and covered with religious stickers. Cecil told me to sit down, and I figured he'd try to get religion into me. Instead, he proceeded to give me a lecture about safety around railroad equipment, tracks, switches and the like. It turned out Cecil had been a brakeman on the Soo Line in the 1940's following WWII. One winter day, he was on a freight train that was working the Cliffs-Dow wood chemical plant. Conditions were icy, and Cecil lost his footing and his legs slid across the rails between the trucks on the train they were switching. Just that quick the wheels passed over his legs, taking them right off. Luckily for Cecil, his conductor had been a medic in WWII and kept his head. The conductor got torniquets on what remained of Cecil's legs and saved his life. Cecil lost both legs above the knees. Because the accident happened on the Cliffs-Dow trackage, they were responsible for his medical bills and aftercare. Cecil said that he got prosthetic legs every so many years, and Dow Chemical's attorneys bitched about that. He also said the stumps of his legs would become chafed and infected, and he had to see doctors and get prescriptions filled. The result was at least once a year, Dow Chemical's attorneys would contact Cecil and try to get him to take a one-time settlement. He would tell the attorneys and Dow that he hoped they burned in hell, and probably kept refusing the settlement offer until he died.

Cecil went from being someone who appeared as a down-at-the-heels religious fanatic to someone I listened to. He told me about ice in the flangeways of a crossing on the Dow property and gave me quite a lecture about how to get on and off moving railroad equipment, watching my footing and plenty more. What also stuck with me was the fact that a huge corporate would bother with trying to avoid paying recurring medical costs for a man injured on their property in the line of duty.

I watched a youtube about the environmental issues surrounding both Tonawanda and Erie Coke works. As easy as it is for me to side with the coke works, I tend to side with the citizens who live nearby and have their health affected by the coke works. If a coke works is to remain in operation, it could be done with proper environmental controls. The health hazards from stack emissions and liquid seepage into the acquifers from coke works is a well settled thing. Running a coke works or any plant producing toxic wastes or having hazmat that might seep into the acquifers can be done responsibly, but the economics and regulatory oversight are unwieldly. The result is not unlike the robber barons of an earlier age. Run a plant that pollutes and affects the health of the surrounding population as long as possible; have attorneys handling violations and answering summonses and subpoenas and getting continuances and extensions; pay fines if they are "chump change" and consider them the "cost of doing business" rather than putting things to rights; when all extensions and delays are exhausted it is time to run the plant into the ground (and probably take some kind of depreciation or tax write-offs); then cut and run, hiding behind bankruptcy or some other corporate maneuvers. It's a predictable M.O. and what corporate thinking is the world over. Of course, the other side of the coin is to simply import coke from countries where there are minimal-if any- environmental regulations. I tend to be quite cynical about corporate thinking. Corporations will put on a good song-and-dance about wanting to "go green", being environmentally responsible, and all sorts of similar blather. When it comes to their bottom line, all the mission statements and slick website information about their wanting to be a good neighbor, save the planet and similar is just so much BS.

The cokeworks are small potatoes in this sort of game. I kind of doubt there was any significant demand for the coke anymore, so it was time for the management to cut and run.
 
The cokeworks are small potatoes in this sort of game. I kind of doubt there was any significant demand for the coke anymore, so it was time for the management to cut and run.

Funny that.
I was talking with the owner of a local trucking company about 5 years ago.
he said he hauls (8) semi loads out each day (not very much by any standards)
and that they go to Philadelphia.
He also said, that customer owns a coke plant in China, but this coke (from Erie coke)
performs much better.
 
30" ATW is pre 1927. Pacemaker ATW is 1949 - with hard outer vee ways. Monarch is Series 60 or 61

Coke....there is coke and then there is Metallurgical Coke - the ne plus ultra of the stuff. Light, Dense, Silvery
 
30" ATW is pre 1927. Pacemaker ATW is 1949 - with hard outer vee ways. Monarch is Series 60 or 61

Coke....there is coke and then there is Metallurgical Coke - the ne plus ultra of the stuff. Light, Dense, Silvery

Yes, they called it "Met coke" they said is it short for Metallurgical coke, made in Erie.

Isn't that what's used in a blast furnace ?
 
I watched a youtube about the environmental issues surrounding both Tonawanda and Erie Coke works. As easy as it is for me to side with the coke works, I tend to side with the citizens who live nearby and have their health affected by the coke works. If a coke works is to remain in operation, it could be done with proper environmental controls. The health hazards from stack emissions and liquid seepage into the acquifers from coke works is a well settled thing. Running a coke works or any plant producing toxic wastes or having hazmat that might seep into the acquifers can be done responsibly, but the economics and regulatory oversight are unwieldly. The result is not unlike the robber barons of an earlier age. Run a plant that pollutes and affects the health of the surrounding population as long as possible; have attorneys handling violations and answering summonses and subpoenas and getting continuances and extensions; pay fines if they are "chump change" and consider them the "cost of doing business" rather than putting things to rights; when all extensions and delays are exhausted it is time to run the plant into the ground (and probably take some kind of depreciation or tax write-offs); then cut and run, hiding behind bankruptcy or some other corporate maneuvers. It's a predictable M.O. and what corporate thinking is the world over. Of course, the other side of the coin is to simply import coke from countries where there are minimal-if any- environmental regulations. I tend to be quite cynical about corporate thinking. Corporations will put on a good song-and-dance about wanting to "go green", being environmentally responsible, and all sorts of similar blather. When it comes to their bottom line, all the mission statements and slick website information about their wanting to be a good neighbor, save the planet and similar is just so much BS.

I quite often enjoy what you have to say Joe, but damned if you didn't just hit this nail right on the head... well said.
 
Good reads:

Henry Clay Frick The Man, by George Harvey

Triumphant Capitalism - Henry Clay Frick and the Industrial Transformation of America by Kenneth Warren
 








 
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