A Mine Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

People from all over the world pay big bucks to see Larry Brown play in a sandbox.

Brown doesn’t build sand castles, and the people who come from as far away as South Africa and Australia aren’t in the mood to play games.

Coal miners who drive 13-million-pound tractors want to know how to do their job quicker, safer and more efficiently. Brown shows them how with hand-sized replicas of their behemoths, which scoop spoonfuls of dirt in his sandbox.

Welcome to “Coal Digger” school.

Part of the Coal Research Center at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, the course combines the unconventional with the latest technology. Students move from the sandbox to the wheel of a computerized driving simulator to practice what they’ve learned.

“A very tangible result of this training program is that we can increase the amount of coal exposed, with greater safety and with less stress on the machine,” said center director John Mead. “That results in more profit for the mine operation.”

A dragline is the 110-yard-long cable that swings a massive claw from the end of a tractor’s crane. It’s the heart and soul of any mining operation.

Paying out too much dragline can rocket the claw into the ground, damaging it. Worse, the claw can get stuck, halting an entire mining operation at an average cost of $6,000 for each hour of downtime, Brown said.