Where was Kenallen?

[BR&P]

I have a waybill from October 1947 for a car of coal shipped to the Sodus Point NY docks. Shows originating at Kenallen, billed at Scully Scales PA. The closest OPSL I have is from 1955. The station number for Scully Scales has been changed from 5818 on the waybill to 23107 in the OPSL. The WB shows station 9904 for Kenallen, no mention of it at all in the OPSL neither do Google nor Google Maps come up with it today. Shipper was Distributors Fuel CO, if I can find my 1948 Keystone Coal Buyers manual it may help but it's in a box somewhere.

Where was that? An actual town, or a mine with its own station number? Any info?

[BR&P]

Here's the waybill in question:

PRR Waybill 1947 - Copy.jpg (1.36 MiB) Viewed 1680 times

[pumpers]

Probably you have found this: https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_pa/185910

Kenallen Coal Company, incorporated 1946, just in time for your paperwork.
Address was Greensburg PA (~20 miles ESE of PIttsburgh), the seat of Westmoreland County, which was a center of bituminous mining back in the day, and on the PRR main line I believe. Of course, that is probably the corporate office, not the mines or loading point, but it's a start.
JS
EDIT: Here is some wild speculation: I found a Google Book: https://www.google.com/books/edition/In ... 22#f=false
from 1961, from the US Dept of Interior. Page 17 says the company address was 543 Locust Valley Rd, Greensburg, and they had beehive coking ovens in Carpentertown (which Google maps says is ~8 miles south of Greensburg) and Humphrey (there is a Humphrey St today in Greensburg). 543 Locust Valley Rd today on Google maps streetview is a modest house which could easily be that old - maybe Mr. Ken Allen ran his business out of his house.

I looked at the 1964 USGS topo - it shows a PRR line running N/S right next to Carpentertown (which is just ~ 2 streets) and an abandoned (already abandoned in 1964) spur going to a few buildings there. So there's a good chance that was the location of the coking plant. I guess you could go on PennPIlot and look at the aerial photos - not that I would recognize coking ovens if I saw them...

Can't find anything obvious quickly about where the Humphrey plant might have been.

What all of this has to do with the shipper, Distributors Fuel on the freight bill, I have no idea. Maybe they shipped from the Kenallen siding or spur?

[pumpers]

Well, I completely ignored the "Scully Scales" part of the waybill. A 1975 book of US Transportation zones put out by the US government shows a "Scully Scales" a few miles west of Pittsburgh on a map, a few miles south of the OHio River, along a PC (Penn Central" line), probably previously PRR.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Un ... ly#f=false

How that is or is not linked to the "Kenallen" I posted about above, about 30 miles to the east near Greensburg, I have no idea.

That's all for today. JS

Edit: Presumably Scully Scales was near or in Scully Yard - which was on the PRR "Panhandle line", one of its two main lines heading west of out of Pittsburgh (the other being the Ft. Wayne line). The Panhandle line is the one heading south and then west in the diagram. Although back in the day, the Panhandle line , coming from the south and west, took a more direct line (lightly colored line just to the east of the short section that Scully Scales is on in what I attach) to get up to the Ohio River. Around Penn Central time that more direct section was from what I read downgraded (or abandoned) due to a tunnel problem just north of Carnegie, and then the Scully Branch was used to bypass it (the dark line on the map going north to the river)

[BR&P]

Pumpers, thanks for the reply, only took me a year to check back and find it! Interesting, the small-time operators must have been very numerous.

As for the Scully Scales, back then freight moved under complex tariffs which had to be filed with, and approved by, the ICC. Almost everything was billed according to weight. If you were loading boxes of widgets, you knew how much you loaded immediately. But for bulk commodities the car had to be weighed.

So the railroad would move the car to a yard with a scale on a movement or memo waybill. After weighing, a clerk would apply the rate per ton or per hundredweight or whatever, and prepare the actual waybill to destination. So in this case the 9904 Kenallen was where the car was loaded, and the B/A (Billed At) Scully Scales was where the official waybill was created.

Hope this helps! I have a friend by that name, and this has prompted me to print off a copy to give him next time I see him, he'll get a kick when i start saying he's a coal baron.