End of deep coal mining in Britain

Just different seams AFAIK. There was a thread on Model Engineering Clearing House a few months ago where someone with local knowledge explained the relationships between the seams of dry steam coal and anthracite within the S.Wales coalfield. IIRC the latter lay to the west of the former but could have it the wrong way round!
Ray.

 

I always knew anthracite was mined. What Ffos y Fran is not, though, is anthracite.
Edited to add a lot more info:

Traditionally, coal is generally classified into three categories, in order of carbon content:

• Lignite (or brown coal) - Low carbon content
• Bituminous - containing bitumen and othe tar like substances as volatile matter
• Anthracite - generally with a carbon content > 92% and little volatile matter. Anthacite is generally hard to light and will generally not burn without a forced draught.

Bituminous coals can be further graded into caking and non caking coals. Some caking coals are suitable for coke making and are known as coking coals. All other bituminous coals are generally known as steam coals. (The fact that it is known as a steam coal does not make it suitable for use in a steam locomotive.)

There are no hard and fast cut-off points in this classification and there are many different classification schemes (try Googling Coal Classification)

It gets more involved when you consider whether it is a hard or soft coal. Soft coals are technically lignites and bituminous coals are hard coals. However, we tend to refer to coals as being soft if they are friable (Welsh, Kent) and hard if they are less friable (Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire)

Ash content is another complication in determining suitability for use in a loco firebox. Ash fusion temperature is important. A coal with a low ash fusion temperature will invariably clinker (moltern ash that has solidified) whereas a coal with a high ash fusion temperature is less likely to form clinker, but still possible, depending on the antics of the fireman.

 

Perhaps you should contact Arthur and ask him whether he would go back and talk with either party if he could or stick with the present complete demise of the industry he always purported to represent.
The man put 200,000 workers out of a job (my guesstimate)and as someone has already said he is now living the life of Riley at their expense.
I often think of the opportunity I had at KX during the miners' stike to nudge him under "Tulyar" as she came in with the stock for the down Yorkshire Pullman which, of course, Arthur and his cohorts were going to return north on!

 

Yep, that's a fair description of what we use. A technique often used for deadening the fire and avoid blowing off is to cover the fire in coal with about 15 minutes to go before departure.

 

A bit like a mate of mine who was ship's barber on HMS Tiger drink the Wilson/Smith talks. Gave darling Harold a shave and there he was, a life long Tory with a cut throat razor and a Labour PM at his mercy.
I digress so apologies for an OT post.

 

So the initial plan to close uneconomic pits was "an obsession with destroying the industry" was it? Scargill couldn't even carry his own union with him after defying its rules on a ballot and ended up splitting it asunder.

 

IIRC from my school days - if you write A S H across the Welsh valleys it tells you roughly where you get Anthracite (in the West), Steam coal (in the centre) and House coal (in the East)

 

That's about it, although in coal classification terms, there's no such thing as house coal, even if that was the main use for it. See my earlier post.

 

So would you have worked down a pit or sent a son to do likewise? If neither then why expect others to risk life and limb to do it? The Miners Strike simply hastened to closure of many pits that would have closed anyway or would you suggest protectionism to prevent the import of cheap coal and thus prolong the life of otherwise uneconomic pits? And where does it all sit in the face of driving down the use of fossil fuels?

 

I did work in the coal mining industry and like most who did, I'd go back to it tomorrow. (Except I'm a bit too old, now!) Without getting into the politics of things, there was virtually a whole years coal production 'on the ground' and growing by the day. The industry was producing massively over what was needed and something had to be done to balance supply and demand. What I don't think Maggie or anyone else expected at the time, though, was the dash for gas of the privatised electricity industry.

 

Britain powers on without coal for three days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43879564

David R

 

I think it is very sad that Britain's Coal mining industry has gone. The first thing is that the NUM from at least the 1970s became too political and trying to oppose governments, so consequently governments particularly the Tories turned against it and deliberately didn't support it, particularly after the miners strike. I wonder if they had been less political in supporting Labour etc whether things would have turned out differently. ?

Then you have the economics of being able to buy coal from other countries cheaper and finally the use of coal in Britain has basically stopped.
When you think about it in the past

1 Houses were heated with coal
2 Ships were fueled with coal
3 Power stations
4 Steam locos
5 Factory steam Engines
etc etc

All of these are no longer using coal. The last to do so was Power stations and even these are now switching to Wind power, nuclear etc
So even if you were mining coal in Britain now, there are few real customers today who want to buy large qualities. Even the amount of imported coal is declining.

I have been down the Big Pit in Blaenavon and it is well worth a trip, but it shows how difficult and dangerous the job must have been. Standing in a space 4 foot high all day.

 

Unless you're a pygmy, you'll have difficulty in standing in a four foot high space! Coal faces where you could stand were few and far between but they did exist. At the other extreme, coal faces two foot high were about as thin as you could mine. That left about 18" to crawl through when you allowed for the supports. During the '84 strike we got a lot of police asking if they could have a look underground. At Ledston Luck we usually took them to a coal face about three foot high and made them crawl the 250 metre length of the coal face. No knee pads provided, though! Try that for fun.

 

They didn't have an "obsession with detroying mining" for its own sake - what they did have was an imperative to ensure that the country's power supply could not be held to ransom by a tiny minority of the workforce, so they pursued a policy of energy diversification including up to 30% nuclear power. This inevitably meant that the least economic pits would close unless huge investment was made. It's all very well Arthur talking about 300 years of reserves but getting the stuff out involved massive investment (or "subsidy" as some might call it). For the railways a small investment in Speedlink might have been better strategically than 20 times that figure spent in transporting coal but they didn't even get that.

 

An interesting juxtaposition…

Simon