And now there are five.


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It was announced yesterday that Daw Mill Colliery in Warwickshire would have to close immediately due to an underground fire.

550 men to be made redundant, maybe jobs for 70 will be found at Thoresby Colliery.

There are still 50 million tonnes of coal at Daw Mill but the fire has made it impossible for the pit to continue.

Personally, I think it's a terrible tragedy that this once mighty industry and major employer is now near to complete oblivion.

I believe that leaves just five deep mine collieries remaining in the UK. Meanwhile, we continue to import vast quantities of foreign coal through our east coast ports.

I've always wondered if all our coal mines were really worked out, or if it had been decided to eliminate the industry from Britain regardless.

I strongly suspect the latter, but I suppose no one will ever be able to prove it.

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as a miners daughter i too fell for the loss of the industry but surly the miners safety is paramount not knowing the mine and the ins and out of the closing very sad more miners have lost their jobs but glad they all safe

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It's desperately sad.

After my dad returned from sea, he became a miner for many years. I am a miners son I am proud to say.

I will not be getting into any political debates on here as I find them divisive amongst friends on this site but privately, I know how I feel about what happened to the mining industry in this country.

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Sad as it is, UK collieries do not stand a chance competing with coal produced at Australian, US or other countries collieries.

Last mine I worked down produced almost 50,000 tonnes of coal a week with a fraction of the manpower UK colliers employ, they now produce three times that output with the same manpower and larger equipment.

There is one colliery in Queensland that produces 8,000,000 tonnes per year from one face!! Manpower??? About 350..How can a UK colliery with over 600 men producing 1.5 million tonnes per year compete???

Then other costs due to geological conditions, gas problems, spontaneous combustion problems, Daw Mill is famous for it's spontaneous combustion, which has caused this major fire underground.

Spot coal prices have dropped to 50% of their levels from two years back when steam raising coal was around $150 a tonne.

The only way the UK can have a viable coal industry is under government ownership.

One poster asked how much coal does the UK have??

Try a couple of hundred years at todays extraction rate with several large collieries operating, BUT, saying that, most of the coal is under some of the most scenic areas of the UK, Yorkshire. There are also huge reserves under Lincolnshire heading under the North Sea, but alas, it is so deep we don't have the technological expertise to extract coal that deep safely, plus the Lincolnshire countryside would be lowered to sea level.

Cotgrave had many of the upper seams that could have been mined untouched, mainly because they didn't have the market of that coal.

Most of the eastern collieries in Nottinghamshire could have driven eastwards, but like I stated, the seams as they progressed eastwards get deeper, the approximate angle is a dip of 5 degrees. Doesn't sound very much, but when you consider Wollaton had an inclne drift between it and Radford, both worked the same seam when that drift was driven to provide ventilation and an emergency egress for Radford.

And back to cost, when I first started working at Angus Place Colliery in NSW, Australia, we sold coal to a local power station at $A13 delivered!!! That was the cheapest coal in the world in the early 1980s!! UK collieries couldn't cut coal for less than $A26 a tonne, let alone get it to the surface, wash it and get it to the customer in that price.

There's a colliery in Colorado that produces over a million tonnes of coal a month now!!! From two faces, cutting is only done on one face at a time, but production is 24/7/365. The faces alternate between cutting and maintenance. Their workers earn many times more than a UK collier too!

It's sad I agree, I was brought up learning my trade down two Notts collieries, but the reality is, coal is no longer "King" in the UK anymore, as the "Area Director in Brassed off said Coal is history"

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As a concerned trade unionist during the miners strike, I collected money to buy food and other items needed for the families of the striking miners in the north Notts' area.With the help of two buddies, we managed to fill a transit van every week, and I mean 'fill' to the roof.

We set up shop at the local miners welfare to distribute the food with the help of a local strike steward, to see fair play.

One miner, who was Polish had received a newspaper from his sister in Poland,(Krakow).The editorial explained how the government had signed a deal with the UK to supply coal at 6 pounds a ton, delivered.

It was(supposedly)costing the British government four times as much to extract a ton of coal from a local pit.

ChrisB there is evidence of this, but like so many things it is stashed away in a vault,only to see the light of day when we are long gone.

My mothers five brothers were coal miners,three were killed in accidents and two died of related illness,commonly called 'black lung',by the old miners.

My heart goes out to the miners and their families,will this redundancy of working people ever stop?I don't see this as a political issue any longer, all the parties seem to share the same ideals.

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Two longwall faces 1000 feet below the surface. If my memory is correct, two Joy Manufacturing face installations, I believe the shearers are remotely controlled from the surface control room. Good job as the haulage speed is too fast for a driver to keep pace.

There are some faces now that operate in thick seams by the LTTC method, where there is a conveyor located behind the face shields, as the shields are advanced the goaf caves in, comprising of several feet of top coal which falls on the goaf conveyor. (These faces are producing in excess of 5 million tonnes per year with 80% plus recovery of the coal seam)

There's a couple of these faces operating in China and one in Australia. The system was started in Europe in thick seams but dropped. The Chinese have perfected it together with Caterpillar who now own what once was Anderson Strathclyde.

There's some photos and information from John, who works for the above company in Australia.

http://coalmine.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=LW&action=display&thread=135

Underground coal mining has gone in leaps and bounds with larger and larger equipment over the last 30 years, Joy has a shield with a yield capacity of over 1000 tonnes now for use in thick seams with over lying heavy sandstone.

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ROLF never worked, technology wasn't far enough along for it ever to achieve success. I took a course on ROLF in the mid 60's during my apprenticeship. ROLF was permanently abandoned around 1970's as a failure.

One of it's main problems was sensing the push over distance of the rams, they got dirty and wet and caused major errors with faces so out of line to cause chain failures in the conveyors.

Setting sensors for the hydraulic chocks was also poor causing serious roof problems.

These have all been overcome now with modern computerization of working faces. As one of the chief developers stated, "we didn't have the computing power necessary to monitor all the shearers functions in real time"

Both DBT and the present company Caterpillar have taken longwall mining to the level only the NCB could have dreamed about..

DBT sold out a year or so back to Cat.

There are two major longwall coalface packets available in the world, Joy and Caterpillar, there is also Eichoff who produce shearers
and a Japanese company, Mitsui, still making shearers. The Chinese
have two companies producing longwall packages, but quality is an issue,
so not really great competition at the present time. There is also a Polish and a Russian company who produce longwall packages.

The
mine in Colorado is the Twentysix Mile Mine, there are some old
writeups on the internet when they were producing 6 million tonnes from
one face a year. I'd love to find the latest writeup I found of them, as
they have set some incredible records over the last couple of years.
Highest face output per shift, highest yardage cut, highest retreat in a
24 hour period, highest face OMS. Highest safety record for a year without any serious accidents...List goes on and on with that company.

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