John broke down in the right place with you close by.We should all be so lucky. Did the coil have the necessary ground strap in place? The reason I ask is they will run for little while with out it before they burn out. At least that was my experience when the dang thing fell out as I replaced a defective one.

Yesterday, I was doing some these days rare paying work, and my wife called.
There was a 26' GMC stopped on the shoulder of the local interstate and it was clear that they were having difficulty. I abandon what I was doing and got in the car and pulled up behind their coach.

John and I discussed things for just a moment and He mentioned that he could not easily check for spark because of both the noise and shake of the passing trucks. He also mentioned that it just shutdown. No studder, not slow loss of power....

We opened the air intake and it was obvious that fuel was not the issue. Now with two of us, he cranked the engine and I held a plug wire (on a screwdriver) near a cylinder head cover and there was nothing....
He had an ignition module in spares. He screwed that in. Still Nothing.....

We got in my car an ran about a couple miles to the nearby parts store and he bought both a coil and a module.
When the new coil was in place and things closed up. A twist of the key and the right sounds came out.

As a side note, by the time the existing coil was removed, they had been stopped for over an hour and the removed coil was still very warm. This was also a relatively new distributor.

Matt