I wish I could provide you some info on what's happening, but I'm just enjoying the photo. Really interesting and different.
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It's a coke plant. The flaming load from the doors on the right is the coke. It is loaded into the car and taken to be quenched, or doused with water.
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It looks like a coke cooking oven, though someone with more knowledge of the subject can hopefully correct me.
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What is seen here is the final part of the process to make coke from coal. The strange car in front of the locomotive is called a quinch car. If one looks very closely in the area of the open door of the locomotive, flaming coke is being pushed from the oven cell into the waiting car. The car will be pushed under the stack and given a heavy water bath which quinches the fire. The steam resulting from putting out the fire is blown up the stack, and the locomotive will pull the quinch car back to the angled apron in the foreground where it's load will be dumped. The car will be lined up with another oven cell and the process will be repeated. The black structure does move from cell to cell and may serve more than one cell, but both it and the quinch car must operate together. If what I have stated here is not enough information, then I would advise Googling the entire Coke oven process, as a lot of other things have to happen to get to this point.
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I believe what was happening was coke (made from coal for use in steel production) was being moved from the battery to the quencher...
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