CSXJOE posted:As far as the blue coal is concerned, the coal companies would spray the tops of the hopper loads with blue paint to see if anything was pilfered along the way to final delivery. If the coal was black, some of the top layer was illegally removed in travel. When I was a kid we had a coal furnace and didn't realize then why some of the coal lumps had blue paint on them.
Not anywhere around here did they do that. Heck, they probably lost more to being blown off in transit than they did having it stolen.
