Coal for Heritage Railways

[melmerby]

1 minute ago, meil said:

Black Country Museum - None! It was built for the museum - there aint no coal.

I thought they did find some! They should do there's plenty around there.

The Beamish one was AFAIK also built for the museum but they found coal.

[009 micro modeller]

3 minutes ago, meil said:

Black Country Museum - None! It was built for the museum - there aint no coal.

 

Presumably the ones that are actual mines (Caphouse, Big Pit etc.) have been made safe in some way before allowing the public to go underground, which would be destabilised by reopening and working the mine.

[doilum]

15 minutes ago, meil said:

Black Country Museum - None! It was built for the museum - there aint no coal.

Almost certain that Beamish is the same.

[doilum]

12 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

 

Presumably the ones that are actual mines (Caphouse, Big Pit etc.) have been made safe in some way before allowing the public to go underground, which would be destabilised by reopening and working the mine.

Almost sure that Caphouse developed their visitor experience in what had previously been training galleries for new apprentices. These were located in shallow long worked out seams. The challenge of combining the Mines & Quarries acts, visitor Health & Safety acts, making a profit would make camel through needle a simple task.

[petethemole]

There was coal under the Black Country Museum site but I doubt there's much left. Over 40 disused shafts are shown on old plans.  https://www.bclm.co.uk/locations/racecourse-colliery/7.htm#.XUqoskfTWUk

[adb968008]

On 23/06/2019 at 21:36, rogerzilla said:

In Egypt, a country not blessed with much coal or wood, they used to burn mummies in steam engines (I'm not making this up*).   There's a possible solution - we just need to create a huge embalming industry and wait 3,000 years until the "fuel" is matured nicely.

 

*the artists' pigment "Mummy Brown" was also made from ground-up mummies. 

I read an article in Steam Railway on this years ago, from someone stationed in Egypt during the war.

 

he used the phrase “throw another pharaoh on the fire”.

i’d be Surprised there was enough mummy’s to be able to do this, setting the historical dereliction aside.

Edited August 7, 2019 by adb968008

[adb968008]

19 hours ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Perhaps we should reopen a closed coal mine for small scale extraction of coal for heritage use, with the railways serving the colliery using heritage stock and the surrounding environment and buildings also restored (perhaps including Victorian village, canal wharf to show how coal was originally transported etc etc). It will then serve the dual purpose of providing fuel for steam-powered heritage vehicles and allowing the creation of a living museum showing the industrial, social and of course railway heritage of the coal industry.

 

I originally thought of this as a deliberately silly idea but it’s actually starting to sound quite good...

 

19 hours ago, Dava said:

 

OK let's form an orderly queue of Bevans' Boys to volunteer to work in a preserved coal mine! It's been suggested but once you start looking at the regulation, safety and environmental issues it becomes much less attractive and very likely to be uneconomic. Coal mining is an expensive operation, even on a small scale.

 

There are preserved lines in Scotland [Waterside, Bo'Ness] and the North-East [Middleton to Tanfield, Beamish, North Tyne] which sit on former coal mines which closed when uneconomic. Most people no longer want to live next to a coal mine. By contrast we have a gypsum mine 1km away and you wouldn't know it's there. 

Go on let’s live the dream...

 

we we could use the nations fleet of 2-8-0’s and the wind cutters to collect the coal, and travel the country stopping off at preserved railways overnight to deliver it, and return the empties.

Plus we’d need some 100t tank wagons depositing around the system to provide water...

 

hmm... I think not, but i’ll settle for this proposed one off overnight steam hauled TPO on the Mainline in a couple of years.

[melmerby]

51 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

I read an article in Steam Railway on this years ago, from someone stationed in Egypt during the war.

 

he used the phrase “throw another pharaoh on the fire”.

i’d be Surprised there was enough mummy’s to be able to do this, setting the historical dereliction aside.

It's false. Mummies weren't used for locomotive fuel.

Based on a joke by Mark Twain.

[Dava]

3 hours ago, adb968008 said:

 

Go on let’s live the dream...

 

we we could use the nations fleet of 2-8-0’s and the wind cutters to collect the coal, and travel the country stopping off at preserved railways overnight to deliver it, and return the empties.

Plus we’d need some 100t tank wagons depositing around the system to provide water...

 

hmm... I think not, but i’ll settle for this proposed one off overnight steam hauled TPO on the Mainline in a couple of years.

 

Feel free to contribute to the $40k+ cost of the TPO stunt!

[009 micro modeller]

3 hours ago, adb968008 said:

 

Go on let’s live the dream...

 

we we could use the nations fleet of 2-8-0’s and the wind cutters to collect the coal, and travel the country stopping off at preserved railways overnight to deliver it, and return the empties.

Plus we’d need some 100t tank wagons depositing around the system to provide water...

 

hmm... I think not, but i’ll settle for this proposed one off overnight steam hauled TPO on the Mainline in a couple of years.

 

Yes, clearly it isn’t a hugely practical idea. I wasn’t aware of the TPO idea, presumably this will not involve any lineside mail collection equipment...

 

More seriously, I assume most preserved railways receive their coal by road, but is bulk transport of coal going to become a problem as well as its availability, and at roughly the same time?

[brack]

10 hours ago, doilum said:

Almost certain that Beamish is the same.

The winding house/screens at beamish are from elsewhere and reerected but the drift mine that you can go down is original.

[PatB]

Trouble is, the underground mining of coal, even today, is a dirty, unpleasant and still relatively dangerous job. I'm not sure if we have any moral right to ask anyone to do it just so a relative handful of enthusiasts can continue to play trains in a manner they consider "proper". Not without paying very substantial salaries anyway.

[Reorte]

4 hours ago, PatB said:

Trouble is, the underground mining of coal, even today, is a dirty, unpleasant and still relatively dangerous job. I'm not sure if we have any moral right to ask anyone to do it just so a relative handful of enthusiasts can continue to play trains in a manner they consider "proper". Not without paying very substantial salaries anyway.

 

Always got the right to ask, just not to insist. It's not as if anyone's suggesting forcing people down mines.

[doilum]

The real issue, carbon footprint aside, is the lack of accessible reserves. Almost all of the unworked reserves lie at great depth and requiring massive initial investment to sink a new mine. Most of the areas of shallow seams have been reworked by opencasting to recover the coal left by the Victorian miners.

[papagolfjuliet]

<deleted - beaten to it>

Edited August 10, 2019 by papagolfjuliet

[ikcdab]

On 08/08/2019 at 04:03, PatB said:

Trouble is, the underground mining of coal, even today, is a dirty, unpleasant and still relatively dangerous job. I'm not sure if we have any moral right to ask anyone to do it just so a relative handful of enthusiasts can continue to play trains in a manner they consider "proper". Not without paying very substantial salaries anyway.

This is a ridiculous point of view.  Does this also apply to dustbin men, traffic wardens, prison warders or even nurses who get beaten up in hospitals? 

[ikcdab]

So now household coal has been banned, the supply chain collapses and heritage railways can no longer get it?

What now?

[melmerby]

13 minutes ago, ikcdab said:

So now household coal has been banned, the supply chain collapses and heritage railways can no longer get it?

What now?

They will have to think of some other way of raising steam.

You can hardly expect keeping a supply chain just for steam trains.

[APOLLO]

So they let half the world in

Millions of extra people

Then they say we're lighting too many fires

So they ban us  from using coal, wood & gas

In a country that's cold nine months of the year

Please God let me die !!!!!

 

Brit15

[PatB]

55 minutes ago, ikcdab said:

This is a ridiculous point of view.  Does this also apply to dustbin men, traffic wardens, prison warders or even nurses who get beaten up in hospitals? 

I think it would be rather difficult to argue that playing with steam engines for recreational purposes is as essential as most of those professions quoted. 

[Mark Saunders]

57 minutes ago, ikcdab said:

So now household coal has been banned, the supply chain collapses and heritage railways can no longer get it?

What now?

 

In large parts of the country coal has been banned for decades as smokeless zones will only allow anthracite or other smokeless fuels!

[Denbridge]

Todays announcement will have a huge impact on heritage and miniature steam operations. Without the domestic market our last remaining coal mining operations will be closing even sooner than anticipated. The sad fact is, that even combined, our need for steam coal is but a fraction of that needed to keep even one home based pit or open cast operation viable.

The only remaining coal option will be to import from Russia, Poland or even China. These coals, while fine for industrial use, are of a much poorer quality than what is really required for steam operations.

The other serious consideration is cost. This is expected to rise considerably, having serious implications for the operating bodies and of course,  visitors and passengers.

Edited February 21, 2020 by Denbridge
Spelling

[ikcdab]

41 minutes ago, PatB said:

I think it would be rather difficult to argue that playing with steam engines for recreational purposes is as essential as most of those professions quoted. 

Um no, the original quote was about mining and the ethical issue of asking people to go underground to cut coal. My point is that many jobs are dangerous or unpleasant.

Incidentally, these days the heritage rail industry is no longer just playing with steam trains, but a vital part of the local economy. My own local line, the West Somerset, brings in huge sums to the local economy and is the most important contributor, excepting Butlins at minehead. North wales exonomy would die without its narrow gauge lines. So its more than a recreation. 

[PatB]

2 minutes ago, ikcdab said:

Um no, the original quote was about mining and the ethical issue of asking people to go underground to cut coal. My point is that many jobs are dangerous or unpleasant.

Incidentally, these days the heritage rail industry is no longer just playing with steam trains, but a vital part of the local economy. My own local line, the West Somerset, brings in huge sums to the local economy and is the most important contributor, excepting Butlins at minehead. North wales exonomy would die without its narrow gauge lines. So its more than a recreation. 

No, the original quote was about asking people to go underground to cut coal specifically for the recreational use of coal fired steam locomotives. If you are suggesting that it was meant as anything else, you either didn't read it properly or are deliberately misrepresenting what I wrote in order to be contentious. 

 

As discussed upthread, there are other ways to fire steam locomotives. They might not be "proper" in some eyes, but they work. A functional heritage railway sector is not, or should not be, solely dependent on the availability of coal. It's not as if this is really a surprise for anyone who's been paying attention for the last 20 years. 

[sir douglas]

this was on the bbc news this morning but just the headline and didnt go into it further. which got me thiking a little later. could it also cripple many dozen local economies that somewhat  rely on the visitors to their local railways, for example if the Talyllyn had to stop running steam, most people would stop going and would have a knock on effect to shops, cafes, petrol stations, hotels and camp sites in Towyn, without the railway its just another coastal town. now times that by how many towns and communities across the UK have a popular heritage railway, museum, tourist attraction or event (traction rallies for example) that need coal, the impact will go further than just those who directly need the coal