Luscar is a

ghost town Ghost Town(s) or Ghosttown may refer to: * Ghost town, a town that has been abandoned Film and television * Ghost Town (1936 film), ''Ghost Town'' (1936 film), an American Western film by Harry L. Fraser * Ghost Town (1956 film), ''Ghost Town'' ...

in west-central Alberta, Canada that was once a coal mining community. It was in the foothills of the

Northern Rockies The Northern Rocky Mountains, usually referred to as the Northern Rockies, are a subdivision of the Canadian Rockies comprising the northern half of the Canadian segment of the Rocky Mountains. While their northward limit is easily defined as th ...

about northwest of

Cadomin Cadomin is a hamlet in the west-central Alberta, Canada within Yellowhead County. It is located along the McLeod River in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, approximately south of Hinton near the Bighorn Highway. It is served by a spur of th ...

along the

Bighorn Highway The bighorn sheep (''Ovis canadensis'') is a species of sheep native to North America. It is named for its large horns. A pair of horns might weigh up to ; the sheep typically weigh up to . Recent genetic testing indicates three distinct subspe ...

(Highway 40), at the end of the

CN Railway The Canadian National Railway Company (french: Compagnie des chemins de fer nationaux du Canada) is a Canadian Class I freight railway headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, which serves Canada and the Midwestern and Southern United States. CN i ...

line.

History

Luscar lies in an area known as the

Alberta Coal Branch The Alberta Coal Branch is the name given to a segment of the Canadian National Railway (originally the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway) and the region through which it passes. It is located within Yellowhead County in west-central Alberta, Canada. ...

, which has a long history of coal mining. The original

underground mine Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic via ...

at Luscar opened in 1921, and by 1922 the community consisted of about 25 or 30 homes, a small cottage hospital, a school, a general store, and other shops. The mine worked the strongly folded Jewel Seam and produced

steam coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as stratum, rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen ...

, primarily for railroad markets.

Surface mining Surface mining, including strip mining, open-pit mining and mountaintop removal mining, is a broad category of mining in which soil and rock overlying the mineral deposit (the overburden) are removed, in contrast to underground mining, in which ...

began in 1945 and underground mining had ceased by 1954. Fire destroyed the

briquette A briquette (; also spelled briquet) is a compressed block of coal dust or other combustible biomass material (e.g. charcoal, sawdust, wood chips, peat, or paper) used for fuel and kindling to start a fire. The term derives from the French word '' ...

plant in 1956 and later that year all mining ceased due to lack of markets for steam coal, after which the community was abandoned. In 1970, the old Luscar townsite became the headquarters for an

open-pit Open-pit mining, also known as open-cast or open-cut mining and in larger contexts mega-mining, is a surface mining technique of extracting rock (geology), rock or minerals from the earth from an open-air pit, sometimes known as a Borrow pit, b ...

coal mine owned jointly by Luscar Ltd. and Consolidation Coal Company and operated by Cardinal River Coals Ltd. It produced

coking coal Metallurgical coal or coking coal is a grade of coal that can be used to produce good-quality coke. Coke is an essential fuel and reactant in the blast furnace process for primary steelmaking. The demand for metallurgical coal is highly coupled ...

for export to Asian

steel mill A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel. It may be an integrated steel works carrying out all steps of steelmaking from smelting iron ore to rolled product, but may also be a plant where steel semi-finish ...

s.Tribe, John 1980. Luscar's coal mining operations. Bulletin of Canadian Mining and Metallurgy, January 1980, p. 97-100. That mine closed at the end of 2000. Coal from the Cheviot Mine near Mountain Park is currently trucked to the Luscar site where it is cleaned and loaded into rail cars.

History

References

See also