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Ironstone Working In Britain


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20 hours ago, Warspite said:

 

Ian

 

Not sure whether you saw my post on the Rocks by Rail DIG IT day. 

 

Are these still available? They are still shown on the website and I can really recommend them.

 

Stephen

 

I elieve that they are still available.

 

The Quarry day on August B/H Monday just means that we will be running a very intensive service, with 3 diesels and thae Barclay in action, along with the Face Shovel, and possibly the Dragline, too.

 

I will keep you posted.

 

Regards

 

Ian

 

 

 

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On 28/05/2019 at 05:56, Mark Saunders said:

Dave

 

Thanks for the link, just need to persuade some manufacturers to produce the wagons!

 

Mark

Aren’t they already available? Parkside do the 27 ton ones that look like 16 ton minerals, Wizard models offer two different ironstone hoppers, and there are two other hoppers offered by David Bradwell.

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The rtr selection leaves a lot to be desired!

The Bachmann tippler has a nice body shame about the chassis off a 16 ton mineral and appears as a Lancashire Steel/MSV/ZKV Barbel .

The Charles Roberts hopper is really a reissue of the Mainline one which is 4mm too long.

 

The BR hoppers diagram 1/163 and 166 hopper as a kit are available from Wizard, while the LNER 25 ton one was available in etched brass from Falcon .

The Consett hopper is available in kit from Dave Bradwell and also Alexander models!

 

Really quite dismal as there are many pre and postwar ones to produce.

 

Mark Saunders

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  • 3 months later...

Afternoon everyone, I am a now retired digger driver and was brought up on and around farms in North Yorkshire, My and I moved here 6/7 years ago, I have a massive intrest on the old Sundew W1400 dragline, I have a copy of the very rare and hard as hell to get hold of book dedicated to the machine, I would love to of lived locally around Rutland in the 50's 60's and 70s when it was all happening.

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1 hour ago, idance4upgrades said:

Afternoon everyone, I am a now retired digger driver and was brought up on and around farms in North Yorkshire, My and I moved here 6/7 years ago, I have a massive intrest on the old Sundew W1400 dragline, I have a copy of the very rare and hard as hell to get hold of book dedicated to the machine, I would love to of lived locally around Rutland in the 50's 60's and 70s when it was all happening.

 

There is this one conserved ex opencast and probably worth a visit!

 

http://www.walkingdragline.org/

 

Mark Saunders

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A former friend of mine's family lived in the village of Gretton (at the Corby end of the Harringworth viaduct) in the 70's and I was invited to spend the Easter of 76 with them. 

It was an extraordinary experience.  The friend had told me about the draglines and how massive they were but one thing he hadnt mentioned was the noise they made - a vast sighing and groaning that carried for, quite literally, miles.  I can only describe it as sounding like the kind of noise you'd expect from some huge prehistoric monster, definitely not something mechanical.  When we arrived there was no sign of the the source of the noise but it was clearly coming from just the other side of the low hill behind their house and sounded so close that in bed that night I had a nightmare involving a crazed dinosaur that came rampaging over the hill and trampled the house to dust!

The next day we were taken out to see the dragline in action and I was staggered to find just how far away it actually was -  all of three miles, nothing like the 'just the other side of the hill' I had assumed.  We parked as close as we could get and began making our way across the fields towards it.  On the way we passed what I was assured was its small bucket - easily big enough to accommodate two, possibly three Transit vans.

By then the dragline itself was standing huge and awesome right in front of us but still quite clearly some distance away, on the far side of the vast trench it was digging.

Then, suddenly, the jib swung round to land the bucket it was using alongside the one in the field, which was by then some distance behind us!  I nearly shat myself!

The sheer size of the thing distorted its surroundings, making it very difficult to even guess just how big it was or just how far away it was.  I'm afraid the quietly decaying cab they've got at Cottesmore cannot even begin to convey the vast majesty of the whole from which it came.

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44 minutes ago, mike morley said:

I'm afraid the quietly decaying cab they've got at Cottesmore cannot even begin to convey the vast majesty of the whole from which it came.

 

Happily the cab has now been fully restored with the help of donations and grant funding - we've recently fitted the last two remaining gauges. Photo below shows part-way through restoration. 

 

 

2139040975_SundewW1400cab.jpg.99c7629930a2d44ceba62c7344fa895a.jpg

 

Also extant at Cottesmore are the hefty cast W1400 RAPIER alloy plates worn by Sundew and a replica nameplate along with a couple of other fittings. 

 

Paul A. 

 

Edited by 1whitemoor
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3 hours ago, Mark Saunders said:

 

There is this one conserved ex opencast and probably worth a visit!

 

http://www.walkingdragline.org/

 

Mark Saunders

I had a look around that about 13 or 15 years ago. They had an open day and we were allowed inside. It has some strange control system where the incoming power from the National Grid was used to run motors that were connected to generators ,which provided power for the motors that actually did the work. Something to do with not just turning AC into DC but that the drive motors needed whatever they use in the U.S, rather than UK 50Hz.

 

My old Land Rover gives it some scale.

 

drag1.JPG.4b1fa9456cff98d8e5744ee0df22b905.JPG

drag2.JPG.6510a54d37111a271efd9c4ddd0ba5d2.JPG

drag4.jpg.901e95e97c7fc357cd088b607748875d.jpg

 

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On 21/09/2019 at 17:44, mike morley said:

A former friend of mine's family lived in the village of Gretton (at the Corby end of the Harringworth viaduct) in the 70's and I was invited to spend the Easter of 76 with them. 

It was an extraordinary experience.  The friend had told me about the draglines and how massive they were but one thing he hadnt mentioned was the noise they made - a vast sighing and groaning that carried for, quite literally, miles.  I can only describe it as sounding like the kind of noise you'd expect from some huge prehistoric monster, definitely not something mechanical.  When we arrived there was no sign of the the source of the noise but it was clearly coming from just the other side of the low hill behind their house and sounded so close that in bed that night I had a nightmare involving a crazed dinosaur that came rampaging over the hill and trampled the house to dust!

The next day we were taken out to see the dragline in action and I was staggered to find just how far away it actually was -  all of three miles, nothing like the 'just the other side of the hill' I had assumed.  We parked as close as we could get and began making our way across the fields towards it.  On the way we passed what I was assured was its small bucket - easily big enough to accommodate two, possibly three Transit vans.

By then the dragline itself was standing huge and awesome right in front of us but still quite clearly some distance away, on the far side of the vast trench it was digging.

Then, suddenly, the jib swung round to land the bucket it was using alongside the one in the field, which was by then some distance behind us!  I nearly shat myself!

The sheer size of the thing distorted its surroundings, making it very difficult to even guess just how big it was or just how far away it was.  I'm afraid the quietly decaying cab they've got at Cottesmore cannot even begin to convey the vast majesty of the whole from which it came.

Gretton had three “big diggers” as we knew them, within three miles, the Bucyrus Erie 1150 at Park Lodge/ Kirby Hall quarries was the nearest but also the smallest of those three. Stewarts and Lloyd’s experience with this one led to the realisation that something even bigger was needed to strip up to 100’ depth of overburden and make open casting of deep ore beds viable. This led to the development of the purpose built W1400/ 1800 machines. To the south, Priors Hall quarry, nearer to Weldon, had a W1400, the first of the home grown Ransome and Rapier machines. Sundew was to the east at Shotley where it could clearly be observed going about its duties from the A47 on the opposite side of the Welland Valley, looking to all the world like a toy.

 

The dinosaur analogy sums up the majesty of those machines perfectly, anyone who witnessed them at work and who’s seen Jurassic Park will recognise the analogy. Sundew’s cab doesn’t quite capture the scale of them, and incidentally exceptional though it is, even the BE1150 featured earlier in this thread doesn’t quite illustrate that either, it was little more than half the size of the W1400, but both help illustrate how these machines worked and maintain the memory of a key part of our industrial heritage now passed.

 

An interesting view of the industry is in “Double Harvest”, a film produced by Stewart’s and Lloyd in 1960 which told the story of farmland being turned over to ore mining and its subsequent return to agriculture. Details here but it doesn’t appear to be viewable on line anywhere - https://www.bfi.org.uk/films-tv-people/4ce2b70e255f9

 

 

Edited by RANGERS
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