This 1991 December shot is of the conveyor bridge over the Ashtabula River, Ashtabula, OH. Built by the Penn Central in 1969, it is apart of the Ashtabula Coal Dock facility operating on both sides of the river. Coal is brought to the east side of the river by hopper cars (see on right side of picture across the river), dumped onto the conveyor belt and moved across the river and stored in huge piles to await arriving coal boats that load on the west side of the river. Because the PRR (then PC) also owned and operated an older coal dock in Sandusky, OH, the ICC ordered the PRR to sell it if they wanted to build and use the Ashtabula dock (this avoided the PRR having a monopoly of the coal business on Lake Erie). The Pennsy sold it to the N&W RR and PRR trackage serving it from Portsmouth, OH, through Chillicothe, Columbus, Marion and north to Sandusky. Today both the Ashtabula dock and the Sandusky dock are very busy moving coal to the electric power plants on both sides of the Great Lakes.
P.S. The piles across the river are iron ore dropped there from lake freighters using self-unloading conveyor belts. This ore is shipped by rail to steel mills in Youngstown and Pittsburgh (Conway Yard). Hauling coal to the lake by rail, and transporting iron ore to steel mills south of the lake, has been the heart of Ashtabula rail traffic throughout its railroad history.
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