Steve Stolarik takes the Lions for a train ride.

“What was it like for our dads and our granddads to work in a deep coal mine?” asked Steve Stolarik, guest speaker at the Cambridge Lions Club. “We are reliving their history when we act as coal miners on the Byesville Scenic Railway. It’s surprising how many people have never touched a lump of coal.” (Pictured left, Lion Matt Dolan and Steve Stolarik.)

Stolarik, recently retired from the highway patrol, spoke of the effect that the train ride’s volunteers often have on people who ride the train. “One older lady came up to me after riding the train and asked me for a hug. She was all dressed up. I told her it wouldn’t be a good idea since I had black coal dust all over me and on my face.”

“I don’t care,” she said with tears in her eyes. “I never new what my dad and my granddad did for us by going into the mines. They never talked much about what it was like.”

“We are reliving that history for our ancestors,” Stolarik said. “We don’t know what it was like to work with a four foot top. My dad told of how miners would sometimes sew old inner tubes together to keep from getting their backs cut up. They cut up old tires to use as kneepads as they used their picks to get the coal out.”

“We know we are getting that message across when we have school children draw accurate pictures from our descriptions,” Stolarik said. “We can’t show them the actual mines because they are all closed up and the buildings are gone. We can show them where the foundations were.”

“We show them pictures of a train wreck that happened just outside of Byesville,” said Stolarik. “You can’t fool the laws of momentum. If you go too fast the train will wreck. That’s why the train goes so slowly.”

“We try to educate people and make the train ride fun. We try to get them involved. We have one of them put on an engineer’s shirt, a red bandana, and a hat. I wear my dad’s carbide light and hat and carry his lunch bucket.”

Coal mining in Guernsey County was hazardous work. Many miners were injured or killed in area mines. “What would it have been like for the wives of those miners?” Stolarik asked. “They would never know if their husbands would come back at the end of the day.”

“The miners contributed to the war effort with a pick instead of a gun,” Stolarik said. “The coal would be used to make the steel that went into the tanks and the guns. Without them there would have been no way to wage a war.”

“I got started doing this one day when the train first started running. I dressed up like a miner and stood next to the track. When the train got back to Byesville the people were all talking about seeing the coal miner. The train crew didn’t know what they were talking about because they said there were no more coal mines operating.”

“The next time the train went by I hopped on and started to talk about the miners. I’ve been doing that ever since,” Stolarik said. “In the last few years I haven’t even put my boat in the water.”

“We are trying to raise funds to put up a bronze statue of a coal miner,” Stolarik said. “There is no monument to the miners in Ohio. We want to make sure those guys are not forgotten.”

The Byesville Scenic Railway is a not for profit organization dedicated to presenting the life, heritage and culture of the coal miners who worked in the underground deep mines. For more information go to http://www.bsrw.org/.