I spent today out in the fresh air collecting some coal for Legge lane II. 0 Gauge requires 5.36 times as much coal as 00 gauge to fill the same tender and, the coal has to be in bigger scale lumps. My nearest source of real, natural coal is 85 kilometers to the north at Camplong in the Mountains of the Orb, north of Béziers. Here the coal was mined underground but later by open cast methods which ultimately meant removing mountains. Eventually the mines became uneconomic and were closed. All the equipment has gone but what remains is quite a sight.

(I should stress the danger of visiting such places without taking due care and consideration for loose scree, cliff faces and so on. The rocks can and do move from time to time because they are unstable. Keep away from any area that could be unstable even if that happens to be where the best coal outcrops remain. The good news is that there will always be loose pieces of coal lying around far from such dangerous places)

I used the northern end of Camplong as my starting point and hiked up the mountain, following the zig zag roads that were constructed to bring the coal down. Initially I was very disappointed but eventually realized that I had been looking at areas long since abandoned and now grown over. Only the latest area of mining revealed the true size of the project. I found one safe small outcrop of coal seam and collected some from it. But most of my load came from loose blocks, selected for the purity of the coal and therefore the ease with which it should break into scale sized lumps.

I took lots of photos and here are four of them:

Two distinct phases of "mountain removal" shown, first one east west, then one north south:

The last coal face to be mined (very unstable, I got no closer!)

A small outcrop of coal seam

And where I collected some of the coal

My next post will be about my technique for breaking the coal into pieces.