Coal Power Generation

Back a ways in history, coal was discovered to help generate power. The most prominent use of this was through steam power. Coal power generation helped to power locomotives for decades. Hundreds of people had to stand on their feet in the bellows of trains for hours sweating their life away, constantly throwing shovelful after shovelful of coal into a giant furnace just to keep the train running. Obviously as you can see, coal power generation was not an easy job. People would probably be inclined to look at these guys and think that it wasn’t such a big deal doing all of that work. Sure they might get sweaty, but how awful can it really be. Many coal miners were actually people that used to do that as a job and quit because they couldn’t handle it. It takes a strong steady hand, an ability to stick to doing monotonous activities, and a person that can handle heat up to thousands of degrees at a time in order to be able to operate one of those locomotives.

Some trains even got to be so large that no matter how much man power was hired, or how big the furnace, it was literally impossible for enough people to throw enough coal into the furnace at once to keep the train going strong. This is when the coal industry has reached almost a state of decadence. It was foolish to think that coal based products could be able to power a whole train going at that speed for that long of an amount of time. The extra weight added to the train in coal alone would be enough to ground the engine to a halt better than even breaks could. There was simply too much coal needed and not enough space to put it all in. This was not the most efficient design, but I bet it never occurred to people that there was a limit that coal had to stick to because it simply couldn’t progress anymore. This is in part what led to the remarkable increase in oil usage, once we realized that coal had limitations to it that could be surpassed by things like oil. Since we didn’t have that issue with oil, we effectively switched our business there, and though coal remains one thing that we do use a lot in our lives, coal power generation is no longer the way we receive and convert the majority of power supplied anywhere on the globe.

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