Page 428 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

they’d use other dozers to move the spoil bank away so it could get down deeper to the coal.”
Baxter’s memories were confirmed when he went back home for a visit in October 2018 and talked to a number of people who had heard of the Twin. One was John Schwartzmiller, the seventy-five- year-old son of the operator who ran it for Rubin Coal Company in West Virginia. “He told me that for the first six months, that machine ran with two operators,” says Baxter. “Then they converted it to a one-man machine. And his dad always said that it came from New York. They got everything ready in New York and then shipped it to the strip-mine and assembled it there. And then in 1953, when one of the owners died, the other brother decided to shut down the business, so they took the Twin apart and shipped it off by rail. Unfortunately, John didn’t know where it went. But he did say that the Rubins did a lot of business with the Lawrence- burg plant. And he’d bet money that it went there.”
Since the Rubins sold plenty of coal to the pow- er plant near Lawrenceburg, Indiana, known as Tanners Creek, it seems highly likely that the Coal Twin ended up there. And while the trail of own- ership isn’t solid yet, operators from both compa- nies say they spent plenty of saddle time on that Twin D8 as part of their career.
COAL TWIN–PART TWO (1952-1960) TANNERS CREEK POWER PLANT
In 1951, the Tanners Creek Power Station— owned and operated by Indiana & Michigan Electric, a subsidiary of American Electric Pow- er—went online with its first generator. Subse- quent Units 2, 3, and 4 were added in 1952, 1954, and 1964, respectively. They were all coal-powered and required continuous fuel to meet the electric- ity demands of the area, which covered northern Indiana to southern Michigan. And that required a large machine that could push the massive quan- tities of coal into the feeders and keep the reserve coal pile at capacity.
“When all four units were in operation by 1964, the need for huge machines was clearly evident,” says Andy Siekman, a thirty-six-year veteran of Tanners Creek who helped spearhead the hunt for Buster’s Coal Twin and its operators. “Those generators consumed 2 to 2.5 million tons of coal yearly. At the time, it was one of the largest pow- er plants in the United States, if not the world. Unit 1 rated at 150 MW, followed by its identi- cal twin Unit 2. And more plants followed. These were deemed super plants, and that big Cat fit into their plans of being one of the biggest and most
Left to right: Two tractors (twin on the right) pushing coal as it is diverted onto the pile from a conveyor; Tanners Creek Power Plant in Lawrenceburg, IN on the Ohio River in 1992
426 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG