Victor Vectis

3 hours ago, Ruston said:

Speaking of beer and pubs...

 

Blue Bedford HA van, PUB167G  was my Grandad's van. Apart from his main job as an ambulance driver, he made dartboards in a workshop that joined on to the meat market, in Brook Street, Wakefield. He supplied pubs all over Yorkshire and I remember often being left with him in the workshop whilst my mother went shopping. I can still remember the smell of freshly sawn wood, the dye to blacken the wood and a general workshop smell, plus some SS daggers that he'd taken from dead Nazis during the war and some rather saucy postcards on the wall that weren't really suitable for a junior school-age boy to be seeing!

 

Here's his van on the way to deliver a dartboard to the British Oak having already been to the Bingley Arms in Horbury Bridge.

 

Your Grandad sounds like a good bloke!

To continue on an off topic, but beer and coal related, theme......

Back in 1970 something I recall skiving orf from Markham Main pit, Armthorpe, to the nearest pub.

It was a Darleys, of Thorne, house. The beer, real by CAMRA's definition, was served through an electric pump. (Invincible Sphereon? A plastic cube containing a half pint sphere to meter the beer)

It was served in a 24oz glass and the sparkler on the pump was done up tight.

I was served with a pint of froth!

And as a callow youth from that there London I was not used to such things.

39 minutes ago, mac1960 said:

I was a Larger drinker back then and can say I don’t remember any of the stuff in the pubs we we went to post shift in the mines in West Yorkshire back the.
 

Mac

 

Have you shrunk since?

😀

4 hours ago, cctransuk said:

< snip >

I am thinking of what was visible at the time from the A1(M) Doncaster bypass.

On Brodsworth pit tip?

Had, ahem, fun at Brodsworth in early 1985 running away from thugs weilding trunchons.

On 17/01/2024 at 22:43, mac1960 said:

 A lot of the coal was pretty low grade, but then there was Emley Moor which had very high grade coal which all went for export, mostly to Sweden, for very high grade steel production eg suspension legs on aircraft. Ironically that pit was the most traditional I ever visited, due to seams being very small and almost Dickensian in nature. Miners lay on their sides to literarily hack it out  including timber props it was really old school. The good thing with timber was there was a warning of failure where as rams just fail. The downside was in the pit showers, where you could see the issues with bruising which with the dust stained like a tattoo.

< seriously off topic, but.....>

What was the system at Emley Moor?

I was told that it was the last pit in Yorkshire that used the three shift, hand filling cycle.

All the faces I worked on were power loaders.

SAM

ex Hatfield NUM

4 hours ago, Not Jeremy said:

Gosh, washing up…

 

My first ever non paper round job was washing up at Pratt’s Hotel, 50p per hour. I didn’t wash up any trains but went off the place when I had to persuade them to pay me - wallies.

 

Going back to Whitemans, I can report that Mr Tim Graham, who really built the business up over twenty years, (and employed CK and later on me) is still alive and well as I saw him and his wife Margaret when I dropped off a Christmas card this morning. For anyone silly enough to visit Bath, it is worth seeking out the Julian House charity shop in Walcot Street as downstairs is a wonderful bookshop, which Tim sort of presides over. Well organised, no rubbish and humanely priced, and with a transport section.

 

He is not as “Basil Fawlty” as he used to sometimes be, in Whitemans(!)

Is The Bell in Walcot Street still worth a visit (or two?)

1 hour ago, lapford34102 said:

Have family and friends in both ASLEF and RMT and when it comes to quality of life vs Toy Trains there's not much to argue though I doubt the irony of a train strike affecting a model railway show is lost on many < snip >

A former NUM member writes:

Steady on, careful what you say here!

I posted a trade union supporting comment yesterday and had it taken down.

5 hours ago, Chris M said:

Birmingham does have more miles of canal than Venice.

 

Birmingham Canal Navigations 24 hour Marathon Challenge

Sam Smiths beer and 'Big Ditch' railway pictures on the wall.

What is there not to like!

Hoo Ness.

Can't remember where I copied these from.

Racehorses owned by the Assheton Smith family.

16 hours ago, simontaylor484 said:

This happened at Lofthouse Colliery in the early 70s

The full report of the Lofthouse Disaster here:

https://www.nmrs.org.uk/mines-map/accidents-disasters/yorkshire/lofthouse-colliery-disaster-wakefield-1973/

IIRC the Precautions Against Inrushes Regs came about due to Lofthouse.

Going back to 1950 there was an inrush at Knockshinnock Castle Colliery.

The rescue of the 116 trapped miners was dramatised in a wonderful 1952 film, The Brave Don't Cry.

One of the few (or only?) films with the mining engineer (played by John Gregson) as hero.

4 hours ago, didcot said:

< snip > I think the coal came from Maxitrak. Its good stuff, burns cleanly and swells to give an incandescent mass in the firebox. < snip >

 

Sounds like its the proper Welsh stuff from Ffos y Fran. If its very shiny and soft, soft enough to break with your hands leaving lots of dust and small stuff, then I'd put money on it be so.

It burns very well in the attached pic.

Lay in a stock while you still can. The heritage sector is getting quite worried about where it's going to get its coal from in the future.

The Mines (Precautions Against Inrushes) Regulations 1979

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1979/318/made

General duty to take precautions against inrushes

3.  With respect to every working in a mine, it shall be the duty of the manager to prevent any inrush into the working of—

(a) gas from disused workings (whether mine workings or not), or

(b) water or material that flows or is likely to flow when wet from any source.

It's not Haig Pit being reopened.

The proposed mine is a reopening of a pair of drifts that were used to gain access to anhydrite deposits.

The coal measures lie at greater depth so the plan is to refurbish the existing drifts and drive them deeper to get to the coal.

Lots of info here: https://www.westcumbriamining.com/

Fen End Pit?

16mm scale, 32mm gauge.

Putting together a series 1 Toylander.

Great fun.

(But I'm beginning to wonder if I will be able to get it out of the room!)

3 hours ago, The Stationmaster said:

< snip >

Afternoon all,

Nice weather and gardening (by others) is underway although I might go out to supervise shortly.  and yes - Berrow Farm is a piggery - good news is that there are 'plenty' of recordings of 'The Archers' ready to roll but it will only be broadcast 5 days a week starting, I think, from this Friday.  So it looks like Covid-19 won't be hitting Ambridge for a while to come and we can still wait developments with the goings on of the Welsh builder.  I was hoping that they'd run out and start rolling old programmes so we'd be back to the dulcet tones of Walter Gabriel, 'me old pal me old beauty', and Tom Forrest giving us a summary of the week in Ambridge every Sunday morning.

< snippity snip >

 

Can I recommend this podcast to fellow Archers fans:

http://dumteedum.com/

Shambridge is quite good fun too:

https://twitter.com/shambridges

On 02/02/2020 at 17:46, Ruston said:

Fiddle Yard, wired up and joined to scenic board. It needs a lick of paint next. I won't attach a backscene to it; this will be attached to the wall instead.

Thats a good looking bookshelf.

(I mean the contents, not the shelf itself)

Snap?

Thats because I said all I wanted to in my OP.

I went to an exhibition in the south of england today (guess which one?)

There were:

Men who pushed.

Men who though their iPhone recording was more important than other people looking.

Men who stood in the aisles getting in the way of everybody else.

Men with excited children.

Men with bored looking (female) partners.

Men with personal freshness problems.

But there was Campbells Quarry too, which made the trip all worthwhile (even if the sandboxes on the Simplex are the wrong way around)

Tanfield has always struck me as a very 'real' sort of a place.

(But then I'm so old I can remember when there were coal mines in Co. Durham)