1921; in that year the demand for coke was curtailed by the business depression, and beehive coke, which had become an auxiliary source of supply subordinate to by-product coke, felt the depression to a peculiar degree. The item of local sales includes coal furnished to the employees of the mining companies or to other domestic consumers in the neighborhood who can be served without shipment by rail. More important, it includes deliveries of railway fuel direct to locomotive tenders at the tipple. Some millions of tons of locomotive fuel is purchased in this way. Local sales also include the quantity consumed by affiliated industrial plants situated at the coal mines, an arrangement much favored in the manufacture of clay products. A recent development that promises to increase greatly is the location of power plants at the mines and the delivery of coal direct from the mine car to the boiler room or stock pile. In 1923 the local sales amounted to 3.9 per cent of the total output of the country. The consumption of the mines themselves for power and heat is a small and relatively constant part of the total production. In 1890 1.4 per cent of the bituminous output was required to raise and prepare the coal. Increasing use of power in mining operations resulted in a gradual increase in the percentage consumed by the mines, which seems to have reached the maximum about 1919, when 2.4 per cent of the total tonnage raised went for mine fuel. Since then the quantity consumed by the mines has shown a remarkable decrease, partly because of more attention to fuel economy by the engineers in charge of mine power plants, but chiefly, no doubt, because of the tendency to purchase power from central electric stations, rather than to generate it in isolated plants at the mines. Several mining districts are now receiving practically their entire supply of power from a public-utility distributing system, and the economies of diverse load and large-scale generating plants indicate that this practice will become more and more general. It is well illustrated by Logan County, W. Va., where 13,604,000 tons of coal was produced in 1923, with an expenditure of but 21,325 tons for power and heat at the mines themselves, or less than 0.2 per cent of the production. Over the country as a whole the bituminous mines required 8,765,000 tons for power and heat in 1923, an average of 1.6 per cent of the production. TABLE 65.-Disposition of total output of bitumnious coal, 1890–1923, in per cent BITUMINOUS COAL AND LIGNITE LOADED FOR SHIPMENT BY RAILROADS AND WATERWAYS According to reports made to the Geological Survey by the coal operators, the quantity of bituminous coal and lignite loaded for shipment by railroads in 1923 amounted to 488,974,496 tons. The quantity loaded for shipment by waterways was 16,884,799 tons, making a total loaded at the mines for shipment of 505,859,295 tons. (See Table 66.) The shipments by rail, which are summarized by railroads in the accompanying tables, include all coal loaded on cars at the mines. A small part of the coal shipped is carried only a short distance, perhaps only switched from the tipple to coke ovens near by or to some adjacent industrial plant, but the greater part is moved a considerable distance from the mines. As these statistics include coal used by railroads that serve the coal mines, not all the shipments furnished revenue to the railroads, as coal for "company use" is nonrevenue freight. The statistics of coal traffic published by the railroad companies usually show only revenue freight and include coal received from connecting lines as well as that originating at mines on the lines reporting. For that reason the figures given in the following table may differ from those compiled by the railroads. The railroads listed are those reported by the operators, and only a few reports of loadings on subsidiary roads have been consolidated under the name of the parent road. The shipments over the Coal & Coke Railroad have been included under the Baltimore & Ohio; and those over the Vandalia; the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis; the Pennsylvania Co.; the Ohio River & Western; and the Wheeling Terminal have been included under the Pennsylvania System. The Chicago, Terre Haute & Southeastern, over which operators of Indiana reported shipping 5,199,000 tons in 1920, was leased in 1921 by the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, and the two are shown combined for 1923 under the name of the latter road. For a number of other important groupings of railroads no attempt has been made to consolidate the several members into a total for the system. Thus the shipments on the line of the Oregon-Washington Railroad & Navigation Co. and the Oregon Short Line are shown separately from those over the Union Pacific; likewise the Toledo & Ohio Central, Zanesville & Western, Kanawha & Michigan, and Kanawha & West Virginia are shown separately. The statistics for the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad are here shown exclusive of the Evansville, Indianapolis & Terre Haute Railroad. The West Side Belt Railroad is not combined with the Pittsburgh & West Virginia Railroad. To the figures for the Southern Railway should be added those for the Alabama Great Southern, Northern Alabama, Cincinnati, New Orleans & Texas Pacific, and Harriman & Northeastern to approximate the total for the Southern System. These illustrations will indicate the compilations of individual entries in the table necessary to give the total tonnage for a particular railroad interest. The Geological Survey can give no guaranty that the relative proportions reported as loaded on the parent road and on its subsidiary are correct, for operators served by a subsidiary may sometimes report the name of the subsidiary and sometimes the name of the parent company. Coal loaded at mines of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. is here shown under the name of that company rather than under the Birmingham Southern, the corporate designation of its railroad subsidiary. The figures for the Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad include coal loaded in cars of the Elgin, Joilet & Eastern and moved by the latter road over the rails of the Chicago & Eastern Illinois under a trackage agreement. The quantities shown in the following table as shipped by waterways do not all agree with the statistics on river traffic published by the United States Engineer Office. The shipments of coal on Monongahela River, according to the United States Engineer Office at Pittsburgh, amounted to 18,344,000 tons in 1923. The records of the Engineer Office should be accepted as a correct measure of the river traffic. The differences between these records and the reports of the operators to the Geological Survey are due to various causes, in part to the fact that shipments of coal loaded in cars at the mines and later transferred to boats would be classed by the Survey as "rail" and by the Engineer Office as "river." TABLE 66.-Bituminous coal loaded for shipment, 1923, by railroads and waterways, in net tons |