Coal is usually hauled to the loading tipple by huge haul trucks.

In some mines, it is moved to the tipple by conveyer belt.

The coal is then crushed to appropriate size and loaded from silos, 100 tons at a time, into hopper cars of the mile long unit train.

The typical coal train is 100 to 110 cars long-a mile of coal! Each hopper car holds 100 tons of coal which lasts only 20 minutes fueling a power plant. Bigger surface mines may load two or three Unit trains of coal a day. Currently, eighty unit trains leave Wyoming every day. In 1999 we shipped out 25,882 trains. That's almost 25,882 miles of coal-more than the circumference of the earth.