An old coaling tower that once served Chesapeake & Ohio locomotives moving through Hinton, West Virginia. A coaling tower or coal stage is a facility used to load coal into railway steam trains. The towers used gravity to slide coal down a chute into the waiting trains' coal storage area in "tender" cars immediately behind the locomotives. The bulk coal was often loaded INTO the tower from wagons positioned on hillsides or ramps above them. With railroads' switch from steam to diesel locomotives, the need for coaling towers ended, but many such as the one in Hinton remain in place due to the high cost of demolition of these massive structures. Photo by Carol Highsmith.