Two lines ran west from near the wash house to slightly (150') beyond the barn as storage for empty cars. These lines were switched to four to go east under the tipple.

When Dad started at the mine (1945) there was a steam driven winch in a winch house south of the power plant to start the boxcar moving if it was on the flat spot just west of the wash house. Cars further west were up a slight slope so it was only necessary to uncouple them, release the brake and climb aboard before they were rolling too fast. They would ride the car down and use a pick handle as a lever to control the brake wheel on the end of the car, stopping with the door next to the chute. In 1948 this was changed to an electric drive winch. Later a John Deere two cylinder tractor was used for this purpose. A bull wheel was mounted west of the wash house beside the tracks and if a car had to be hauled west past the first switch to change tracks the winch cable was looped around it. If a car had to be moved only a few inches or get started rolling on a slope a "pinch bar" with a long wooden handle and a lever device which fitted over the track was used to pry on one wheel.
Organizing the car movements could be complex as there was only one track under the three bins. There was more slack coal and stoker than nut coal in any given screening run so these bins would fill up first. The partially loaded nut car would be hooked to the winch cable and run down past the switch point east of the plant, it would then be switched to the egg track and pulled back while the slack was dumped into open cars and the stoker bin was loaded into a boxcar. These loaded cars would be run down past the switch and the nut car switched onto the bin track and winched back to continue loading. This was a two man operation, one on the car to run the brake and the other operating the winch.

The two north tracks were switched back together about 150 feet east of the bins and the two remaining tracks switched into one about 200 feet east of that. The loaded cars were stored on these lines until they were shipped.

It could be a noisy business when the trains were shunting cars into storage. There was always the puffing of the steam engine, the squeal of the brakes and the whistle signals. If the engineer backed a string of cars up the slope into the storage area and stopped before he got to the end, the steamers were not powerful enough to start the cars backing again. The engine therefore had to make some slack in the couplings by pulling the whole string east a bit. The brakeman tied the back car brakes on and with a slam, slam, slam as each coupling eased off there would be enough slack so that when the engine reversed west again the inertia of each car was taken off one at a time, with another great chorus of slams as the couplings tightened.

The whole excercise was better than any physics class on inertia and momentum, and all accompanied by the loudly iterated vituperation of the conductor calling to mind the probable ancestry and certain eternal damnation of all the "hog-heads" in the Dominion, if not the world. A deeply religious experience for a lad of tender years. In the engineer's defence, he was backing around a blind corner with no radio communication to the back end.

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