Angus Place Colliery.

[John]

Here's a picture of the AM500 shearer being readied to go underground, taken in the mid 1980's outside the fitting shop.
It was going to the new LW9 face.








A few of the Dowty chocks set up for training the staff on, picture taken outside the lamproom sometime in the mid 1980's

[dazbt]

Seeing John’s photo of the AM500 in Australia reminded me of a catastrophic incident sometime in the mid 1980s involving two similar machines being transported to Australia in the hold of a ship, nothing unusual in that really, hundreds of complete shearers had been similarly dispatched from Anderson’s Motherwell factory over the years, transported by ship to all corners of the world, without any major incident ……… well apart from one that was being unloaded at a dock in the USA when it slipped from the lashing chains and fell into the hold of a ship that was carrying maize flour, lucky that it was really otherwise the twenty ton plus machine would likely have gone straight through the bottom of the ship, as it was the machine was recovered intact and after a good dusting down was found to be in working order, not quite the same happy ending for the two that were on their way to Australia. Apparently the ship was sailing fairly happily around the African Cape when a massive and unexpected storm blew up (“Unexpected” storm off the ’Kaap die Goeie Hoop’? Obviously this ship’s captain had never read his history books at school ), anyway in all that tossing about the two AM500 machines came adrift and were rattling about in the hold willy nilly as was there wont, which obviously would have been bad enough, I mean two great big twenty ton metal monsters thrashing about unrestricted in the bottom of your boat, whilst you are trying to navigate through sixty foot high waves, with an horizon barely visible and at sixty degrees to boot, standing on a bridge hanging onto a wooden steering wheel is just about as bad as it gets, or is it? Well maybe not, what if the two AM500 machines were sharing a hold with a good few tons of industrial type fireworks, like Roman Candles the size of six foot gate posts, and spinning wheels three foot diameter, rockets the size of Dowty Duke props? Well that is exactly what happened here, what I can’t imagine is what that captain and his crew must have gone through (apart from underwear) during that experience, but I do know that they survived to tell the tale and eventually managed to return the well battered remnants of two industrial steel and iron indestructible Goliaths in a condition that the insurance company described as being written off completely. I was privileged to see the two defeated gladiatorial machines on their return to Motherwell and whilst the term ‘damaged beyond all belief’ must have been in my mind at the time, I have to say that I am fairly sure that Anderson as a company must have made a shilling or two in being able to reclaim a goodly proportion of the internal components. In all my years of coal mining I’ve seen many instances of unbelievable mechanical destruction, but the damage to these machines went far beyond what even a team of modern day, mad Luddite shearer drivers could have even dreamt of achieving. Two things that really stay with me were the fact that unexploded fireworks were still trapped within the machine remnants and apart from bent booms and distorted shoe posts there were holes punched through one inch thick steel castings that looked like someone had pushed a finger into a block of soft butter, how the ship’s sides managed to remain intact whilst such forces were at work just defeats me, two AM500s destroyed but the ship sailed home helped restore my faith in Irish Ferries, I shall never fly again of course, but the reasons for that could be another tale to be related here at a future date, the story behind Anderson actually chartering a Jumbo Jet purely to fly a complete AM500 across the Atlantic in order to save millions of £s. (No real wonder we were so poorly paid to work for AB’s)