Making Noise in Tunkhannock
We trekked up to Tunkhannock, PA to meet up with Chris Murley, Director of The Underground Miners Group and restorer of original mine equipment. Our goal was, capture some authentic sounds of the coal cars and mining tools that we could use for Foley and also as some percussion for the soundtrack. We pulled into Chris’s back yard where I was amazed to see he had an actual working coal car engine, 3 cars, and railway tracks. We climbed onto one of the cars, went for a few rides, and banged around with some pick axes and old mining car axels. We were able to capture some great sounds and had a lot of fun in the process. We even got a featured on IronMiners.com. Thanks Chris!
Homework
After hitting the ground running with some great interviews we decided to devote a day to research. We picked up Eric Bella (Anthracite history expert/high school student) who led us to the Office of Surface Mining. There, buried in an unmarked drawer we found a massive archive of old Knox related newspaper articles. With scanner and laptop in-hand I began scanning away. We got a good start but there was too much to get through and the joint was closing in an hour. Everyone in the office was really helpful and supportive of the project. In realizing that they should have a digital copy of these articles for their records, we were able to request scans of the articles we didn’t get. Obtaining these scanned headlines are essential to the project and finding them (for me) was on par with discovering one of the 12 crystal skulls!
