By Roger Alford
The Associated Press

SIDNEY, Ky. - Long before daylight, Carolyn Lott is jolted awake by the rumble of trucks hauling coal from a mine near her home in the Appalachian coalfields.

"I've had pictures fall from my walls when they roll through here," she said. "I don't need an alarm clock."

Roaring trucks, not crowing roosters, have been ushering in mornings so long here that most people just take the noise for granted.

But a new day has dawned in some communities, where 18-wheelers have been replaced by conveyor belts that quietly carry coal for miles through isolated underground mine shafts to rail yards.

It's the coal industry's equivalent of the pipeline, and in the Pike County community of Sidney, the conveyors have drastically reduced the number of coal trucks on the roads.

Sid Young, president of Sidney Coal Co., watched last week as coal arrived outside his office by conveyor belts from mines up to nine miles away. The chunks poured from conveyors into funnel-shaped piles, ready for shipment to electric-generating plants.

Conveyors transported about 90 percent of the 17 million tons of coal mined by Sidney in the past year, Mr. Young said. Trucks haul the remaining 10 percent.

"Without these conveyor belts, there would have to be an 18-wheeler pull in here and unload every 45 seconds," he said. "Frankly, it gets the trucks off the road."

From Kentucky to Colorado, large coal companies that are tired of the expense and hassle of coal trucks are increasingly looking at long-distance conveyor systems as an alternative.

Cathy Prothro, spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Mines and Minerals, said at least 20 mines in Kentucky now transport coal five miles or more on conveyors.

The 3-foot-wide conveyors, powered by electric motors, move a continuous flow of coal primarily through abandoned mine tunnels, where it is neither seen nor heard by residents. In isolated places where the conveyors surface and run above ground for short distances, they sometimes rumble and screech, but not nearly as loudly as the coal trucks they've replaced.

The toothy machines that dig coal in underground mines funnel it automatically onto the conveyor belts. Initially, those conveyors were only long enough to dump the coal outside the mine where it was loaded onto trucks to be hauled to processing plants, rail yards or river ports.

Mark Alspaugh, a partner in Overland Conveyor Co. of Denver, said mining companies across the nation use the conveyors for transporting coal over distances of 10 miles or less. For longer distances, he said, trucks or trains are more feasible.

"One of the biggest advantages of trucks is their flexibility," he said. "You can change course. You don't have that with conveyors. Once you put them in, they're fixed."

Sidney has spent more than $30 million for 30 miles of conveyors. Without them, Mr. Young said, 425,000 more loads of coal would have had to be transported by truck on public roads last year. That would have been more than 1,100 additional loads every day.

While that may be good news for motorists who get caught behind slow-moving trucks and for homeowners who deal with the dust the trucks create along rural roads, it's not good for the truckers trying to grind out a living in the mountains.

"The coal industry has had a history of mechanization," said Tom Hansell, an Appalachian filmmaker who recently completed a documentary on coal haulers that will air next spring on public television. "This belt line is just one more blow to the truckers, and another step in the mechanization of a highly mechanized industry."

In Appalachia, overloaded trucks, some hauling more than 120,000 tons of coal, have been blamed for inordinate numbers of traffic accidents. Even so, truckers want to be allowed to haul even heavier loads to help cover the costs of fuel and maintenance on their trucks.

Ms. Lott said conveyors would be a godsend to her neighborhood, where the road has cracked under the weight of the trucks and fallen coal is strewn along the shoulders like gravel.

"Conveyors gets the trucks out of the neighborhoods," she said. "They mean less maintenance on the highways, and they mean safer highways. We need that."