Heritage steam under coal threat

A fire at Warwickshire's Daw Mill mine and the collapse of Scottish Coal in April has left many steam railway owners struggling to find supplies.

**LINK**

Considering the quantity of coal apparently still buried under the UK, what is going on?

Also seem to remember a report that we are importing coal, what a strange situation to be in.

We enjoyed a couple of trips on the Foxfield Light Railway today anyway.

Edited By V8Eng on 27/05/2013 20:58:49

A friend who is a loco fireman mentioned last week they had switched to welsh anthracite and it was much better once he got used to it. Perhaps more expensive though. I think I have enough in my shed for a few years ....luckily for a 5 in usage is measured in buckets per year not tons per day.

Maybe all the preserved railways will have to switch to 5" gauge.

North Yorkshire Moors Railway would be entertaining at that scale.

Gary

or burn logs made of compressed old newspapers...you can get em on ebay

Hi.

i seem to recall. Not so long ago, they said there was enough coal in the ground to last at least 150 yrs, and they are thinking of re opening some of the pits that's were closed. I think they were in the Notts Area.

Best regards.

Dave

...or make your own. Get the grandkids to tear up the paper and then 'cast' them next time over.

Dave
The Emerald Isle

Was at the Elsecar Heritage Musuem over the weekend and got to drive and stoke a Steam train for an hour. What a brilliant experience, highly recommended......

Anyway while there the guys running the event commented that they had to buy their coal from Russia.....the track used to connect coal mines but none exist now......they are also sitting on the largest seam of coal in Britain.....crackers or what.

Another note of irony, the Russian coal burnt better that the English and Welsh......

Trevor

Hi Trevor

the reason that is. The best coal we mine is sold abroad so we are left as usual with the rubbish.

England is floating on several layers of coal including anthracite and 'best steam coal'! It's a fact that most of our present inferior coal supplies are imported from the USSR and other eastern block countries as well as 'some of Mr. Magregors' ( remember him? ) coalmines. It's correct that there are well over 150 years worth of coal left under GB and that just a few mines where ' mothballed ', Assuming that we now have the technology to BURN coal rather than just set fire to it doesn't it make sense to open the mines again. Apparently we are running out of petrol,but, didn't the Germans crack petrol from coal during the war? and this is just one by-product!

Much, if not all of the remaining coal is in geologically challenged seams. We have run out of money, remember? So the costs of a simple reopening (even if that was possible) are too much. In any case, who in their right mind would want to work underground in those conditions?

its h and e mostly killing it and these green campaigners

If they actually do run out of coal I wonder how difficult a gas or oil burner would be to fit into the firebox to replace coal.

**LINK**

Worth a watch, very emotional towards the end. I come from a mining area, in fact a childhood friend of mine was killed at the mine the program is about. It's hard to comprehend that such a massive and dominant industry could vanish virtually overnight.

Maybe, when the rest of the world has run out of fossil fuels, it may be economically viable to reopen some of our mines? It was said, at one time, that US was using Middle Eastern oil to save their "Strategic Reserves"

If the world ever runs short on tin or copper, Cornwall may yet become a major economic area!

Howard

Yes, I watched the programme about the last British coal mine, the Big K, a bloody disgrace. I havent been so angry in years. How on earth can it be cheaper to import coal from Russia !. From what Ive read, theres a lot more than 150 years worth of it left. We are run by morons, including the green brigade......theyre green alright !!!.

I was told, when we visited and went along the working face, that Bolsover colliery never ever mined below the castle and that,there alone was a million tonnes of coal in undisturbed seams.

A lot of the mining problems were caused by 'grandad', who removed the best/easiest single seam, leaving the rest to eventually collapse/produce gas pockets, etc, thus making life more difficult for any later safe mechanical extraction.

The coal we used from Dawmill was much higher in pyrites than that from Bolsover. Cheaper, but caused us a lot of 'headaches' in that the higher sulphur content led to more potential blockages in the process.

It is a simple fact of life that unfortunately it is cheaper to import coal from abroad than use our own deep mine resources. Very few locations in the UK are suitable for opencast methods. The Ffos y Fran opencast mining at Merthyr Tydfil can produce decent Welsh steam coal, and can do so for another 5 years.

I have a shed full of Welsh steam coal which will see me out on my miniature locos.

My home sits above coal mine workings, but where I live in the South Wales Valleys this was not steam coal but decent house coal.

Cardiff ceased to export coal in 1963. In the severe winters of the post war era in the late 1940s there was a severe shortage of UK produced coal for domestic demand. This continued to be the situation for many years after and was a factor in election strategy as we tried to pay off the huge USA government loans during WW2. UK coal was exported to try and solve the balance of payments deficit. The UK domestic market prices were fixed, but UK supply was insufficient to meet demand.

Instead we imported USA cheaper coal!

What did this lead to?

It resulted in the Government in 1955 deciding to phase out UK steam locomotives, so that there would be no electoral pressure from Domestic consumers (voters) in cold winters having insufficient coal to burn to heat their homes.

Cheers,

Julian

Should be able to be done. I worked on a few stationary boilers in the US that has originally been underfired coal-burners and had been converted to run on gas without problems.