Page 429 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Coal Twin keeps stacks fed at Tanners Creek Power Plant circa 1950s
advanced plants in the world. Tanners Creek was known as an experimental plant; many industry firsts happened here.”
Siekman was a coal equipment operator, unloading barges on the Ohio River and running Cat equip- ment before his retirement in 2015. Due to costly EPA regulations, the last day of generation at Tan- ners Creek Power Plant was May 31, 2015.
Despite some minor discrepancies, it is fair to con- clude that:
• there was only one Coal Twin D8
• it was an assembly kit sold to H.O. Penn of New York for assembly
• it was first owned by Rubin Coal Co. of Cleves, Ohio
• it was sold to the Tanners Creek Power Plant sometime in 1952–53.
All those that know the entire story have since passed away. But there are still a few who remem- ber pieces. Rollin Manford, who retired from
Tanners Creek in 1994, ran the Twin from 1953 to 1958. “It was a real easy piece of equipment to run. You could really move a lot of coal with it. Once you got a blade full of coal, you could kick your power unit out of gear, and it would hold a perfect level as you went across the pile. Almost like a road grader had laid it out. You did a lot of the steering with the throttles. You’d speed up one engine or the other unless you had a real sharp turn, and then you’d use the steering clutch.”
Hilbert Keith ran the Twin D8 at Tanners Creek from 1956 to 1961. “We unloaded coal every day. It was an economical way to get the coal into the plant because we could push about twenty tons at a time with that big blade. And you could keep up with the conveyor belt going into the plant.” Around 1960, they decided to take the Twin apart and turn it back into two singles. “They ended up trading those two D8s in on an International TD- 24, which was a big mistake. I drove that TD-24, and it screamed like a jet engine all the time. It was just terrible. And you had to work on it all the time. That big blade was just too heavy for the power units. On the Twin, we ran that blade and everything out of the rear power unit, and that made it a lot easier.”
Jack Tandy was a master maintenance-repair welder at Tanners Creek from 1951 to 1959. “As far as I know that Twin was there when I got there and still there when I left. They used it mostly to push coal to the stack but also to control the coal pile. I don’t know how many acres that live coal pile covered, but it was huge. I don’t remember the Twin ever being off the coal pile. You could push two or three times as much with it as you could a single dozer.”
Jim McDaniel Sr. worked in the coal yard from October 1953 to May 1954 and spent ten years total at Tanners Creek. “I wasn’t an operator, but I worked on it and around it a lot. We had to make sure the coal kept moving because there were three boilers back then. The Twin’s job was to keep the
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