Ore Car - Homestake Slime Plant - Deadwood, SD
Posted by: 
YoSam.
N 44° 22.476 W 103° 43.847
13T E 601116 N 4914263
Now a motel, but was the slime plant
Waymark Code: WMRM8T
Location: South Dakota, United States
Date Posted: 07/07/2016
Views: 4
County of car: Lawrence County
Location of car: 1906 Deadwood Mountain Drive, Holiday Inn entrance, Deadwood
Former Homestake Slime Plant
The "bucket" on the front is what miners called a mucking skips. The car carried the ore, and miners called the rock and stuff muck and the skip was used for mucking"
After the rock was blasted, it was time to muck it out. The mucking machine was used to load the ore into an ore car. The mucking machine sat on rails that were placed about 18 inches apart, throughout the tunnels. The mucking machines basically scooped up the ore and loaded it into an ore car, which could hold about one ton of ore. The ore car also sat on the rails. the miners could load about one ton of ore per minute using a mucker. The mucker sat on the tracks in the middle of the tunnel, and off to the sides the miners would have tracks for other ore cars, they called this the “super switch”. The super switch allowed several ore cars to sit out of the way. So when the miner driving the mucking machine needed another ore car, he would push the full one off to the side and get an empty car from the other.