 Coal miners in Pike County are in their second day of protesting against their employer, QuestEnergy, near Kemper. The miners claim the company has not paid them in weeks and is continuing to put off paying them. In protest, the miners have taken a page out of the Black Jewel protest playbook and have blocked a loaded coal train from leaving the mine. I spent some time at the side of the protest and spoke to some of the miners. On Monday, QuestEnergy miners blocked a 120-car CSX coal train from leaving the company's operation at Kemper. The men claim they haven't been paid since December 27th and are due nearly three weeks' pay. They say they will not leave the tracks until they are paid. I told them my fire is getting ready to get cut off. I need $207. I said, you know, I need my money. You can't wait until Wednesday or Thursday. I've been waiting for three weeks for it now. And all they could say was, well, I'm sorry, we don't know what to do, you know. And I'm like, well, yeah, you can pay me what you owe me. So we're not going to leave until we get paid in full. The longest we've went without a payday is two weeks, but they always did pay us. We're all out to slander them or their name or nothing. We just want our money. How much is it going to take to get you off these tracks? All my money. How much is that? Oh, three weeks' worth. But now my youngest is in cheerleading. It's hard to get them back and forwards and to do our games and everything. I mean, I gotta keep borrowing money to do it. My oldest is two. They're wanting stuff. I can't even put an entrance on my daughter's car that I just bought her for her 16th birthday, so she didn't grab because no money coming in. Stick this out as long as I can. I just wish they'd pay us. And I'm pretty sure all the other miners wish that they'd get paid. As long as that train sits there, it's $10,000 a day. So I mean, we can play as games as long as they can. The protest is the second in six months in eastern Kentucky, where miners have blocked a train from leaving a mine. The previous, the Black Jewel Mining protest in Harlan County that went on for more than three months. Like the Black Jewel protest, the quest miners let CSX take its locomotives from the area. On the condition they leave their train loaded with 12,000 tons of metallurgical coal at the mine. Engineers and CSX people asked us if we was going to, you know, hold the train up. We said, yeah, you know, they got our coal on there and they've not paid us. And they said, well, do you care if we unhook our engines? We said, no, you can take your engines. We said, but I reckon 20 cars belong to Billy Smith. We told them they could take those if, you know, if they want to take those with them engines. And they said, no, that them cars was already hooked to that unit and it was one unit and they was not going to food with it. That they told us that they would not pull them cars out of there until we was gone. Quest Parent Company, American Resources Corporation disputes the claims about the back pay. In a statement, the company acknowledged that there is an issue resulting in late payments. But those payments as of Monday night were between one and eight days, not the three weeks the miners claim. We ain't out here for fun or to be on TV or nothing like that. We're here to get our pay days. On Tuesday, the miners began seeing blips on their mobile payroll app. Adam Jensen, an executive with American Resources, said he anticipated the miners being fully paid by Tuesday evening or at the latest Wednesday. We've submitted the payroll already through Paycheck, that's our payroll provider. They have told us they are going to do everything in their power to get employees same day APH today. Worst case scenario, it will be tomorrow morning. Jensen also said the miners protesting against Quest will not have to worry about losing their jobs over the action they've taken in blocking the train. We apologize for being late on the pay and there will be no recourse taken. For the ones that were just out there protesting, blocking the train, there will be no repercussions. Now once all this is over, do you plan on going back to work for them? No, not for them. The miners tell me that the back-pay situation which sparked this protest affects around 50 miners. It's still unclear where the loaded coal train is destined and whether Quest has already been paid for it.