Page 427 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Life Magazine photographer, Andreas Feininger, shot pictures of the Coal Twin at Tanners Creek Power Plant in 1953.
While written documentation on the Coal Twin is scarce, there are two photographs of it work- ing on the live stockpile in Lawrenceburg, Indi- ana. Famed Life magazine photographer, Andreas Feininger, shot the Coal Twins working in 1953. They never made it into Life magazine, but one appears in his book, Changing America.13
Tracking the history of the Coal Twins was fair- ly difficult until Providence stepped in. The Retro Twin was sitting at Ed Akin’s ranch in Placerville, California, in the fall of 2016 when a chance en- counter happened. “I was getting my garage door replaced one day by a local guy, Dave Baxter, who came down to the yard to see me afterward. He saw the Twin sitting there and said that he remem- bered having one just like it near the farm he grew up on in Indiana—at a coal plant,” explains Akin.
According to Baxter, he got to ride on that big Cat Twin when he was ten years old. “My dad knew those people real well because of trucking. He used to buy coal off their barges and haul it to his customers. Sometimes he’d take me. And boy, that day I thought I was king of the world riding on that thing. It had two operators on it, and we were stripping the dirt off to get down to the coal. I rode that tractor three times but saw it working a dozen—sometime back in 1951 or ’52 at the latest. They called it the Big Boy.”
The Twin that Baxter remembers was owned by Rubin Coal Company, with offices in Cleves, Ohio and a strip mine in West Virginia thirty miles south of Charleston. “The one I rode on looked exactly like the one Akin built. It needed two oper- ators because you had two sets of levers—one ran one track, the other ran the other track. And it had a big blade. It looked forty-five feet wide, but I’m guessing it was probably fourteen feet. Maybe six- teen with the side wings on. And it could push a big pile of dirt. I remember that! They’d back that sucker up and make two or three passes, and then
13 Andreas Feininger, Changing America: The Land as it Was and How Man Changed It, New York, Crown Publishing Group, 1955, p51.
CHAPTER 26 | 425