Luscar is a

ghost town A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...

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 the ...

about northwest of

Cadomin Cadomin is a Hamlet (place), hamlet in west-central Alberta, Canada, within Yellowhead County. It is along the McLeod River in the Rocky Mountain Foothills, foothills of the Rocky Mountains, approximately south of Hinton, Alberta, Hinton near ...

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 may weigh up to ; the sheep typically weigh up to . Recent genetic testing indicates three distinct subspecie ...

(Highway 40), at the end of the CN Railway line.

History

Luscar lies in an area known as the Alberta Coal Branch, which has a long history of coal mining. The original

underground mine Mining is the extraction of valuable geological materials and minerals from the surface of the Earth. Mining is required to obtain most materials that cannot be grown through agricultural processes, or feasibly created artificially in a la ...

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 rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal is a type of f ...

, 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 whic ...

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 combustion, fire. The term is a diminutive der ...

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 that extracts rock (geology), rock or minerals from the earth. Open-pit mines are used when deposits of commercially ...

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

coking coal Coke is a grey, hard, and porous coal-based fuel with a high carbon content. It is made by heating coal or petroleum in the absence of air. Coke is an important industrial product, used mainly in iron ore smelting, but also as a fuel in stoves ...

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-fini ...

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