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Post by John on Aug 28, 2014 16:22:34 GMT -5
Found this out a couple of weeks back, the Deep Soft, Deep Hard and Tupton, (Low Main) join together and form a seam 3m 64cm thick at a depth of 665 metres.
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Post by smshogun on Aug 28, 2014 21:16:07 GMT -5
This was the reason they sank Asfordby pit although it could never have a coal prep plant and many said it was sunk in the wrong place on a fault line.
Asfordby was sank as nothing more than an emergency egress for a super complex which was designed to connect with Cotgrave as Cotgrave had both the plant capacity after we upgraded it, and the rail connections to the rail head for connection to the rail network nationally. There was method to the alleged madness as Cotgrave was in Nottinghamshire and Asfordby was in Rutland and the plan was to drive two underground roadways 12 miles long to connect both sites with several underground bunkers of 5000 tonnes capacity. This was to have four 72" conveyors and two would connect to the Cotgrave shafts while the other two would come up a drift so two methods of coaling to the surface would be in place.
Storage bunkers were designed to have the flexibility to connect to any of the conveyors and enough storage capacity to handle a weeks coaling capacity, in addition it was capable of removing any waste from the prep plant and by reversing one conveyor this waste could be packed into the gobbin using high pressure water injection and introducing this crushed waste and dried clay powder into it, this would minimise waste going to Cotgrave's dirthill which was a rolling dirthill.
There was a plan to sink a third mine in the Vale of Belvoir to connect to Asfordby to form this complex, and if you went deeper you got into Blackshale which was averaging 14' thick so you had plenty of working life for this complex. There were other seams available but geological problems meant they may not have been viable if both the other seams were worked simultaneously.
Working patterns were interesting as it was to be a 9/14 system where miners worked for 9 days coaling on three shifts and had 5 days off, due to the volume of coal expected to be produced as it would need the coal prep plant to work the full 14 days on three shifts to process it, and any maintenance works were planned and scheduled for the 5 day non coaling periods to keep equipment in pristine condition for a coal mine. |
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Post by John on Aug 29, 2014 7:23:12 GMT -5
This was the reason they sank Asfordby pit although it could never have a coal prep plant and many said it was sunk in the wrong place on a fault line.
Asfordby was sank as nothing more than an emergency egress for a super complex which was designed to connect with Cotgrave as Cotgrave had both the plant capacity after we upgraded it, and the rail connections to the rail head for connection to the rail network nationally. There was method to the alleged madness as Cotgrave was in Nottinghamshire and Asfordby was in Rutland and the plan was to drive two underground roadways 12 miles long to connect both sites with several underground bunkers of 5000 tonnes capacity. This was to have four 72" conveyors and two would connect to the Cotgrave shafts while the other two would come up a drift so two methods of coaling to the surface would be in place.
Storage bunkers were designed to have the flexibility to connect to any of the conveyors and enough storage capacity to handle a weeks coaling capacity, in addition it was capable of removing any waste from the prep plant and by reversing one conveyor this waste could be packed into the gobbin using high pressure water injection and introducing this crushed waste and dried clay powder into it, this would minimise waste going to Cotgrave's dirthill which was a rolling dirthill.
There was a plan to sink a third mine in the Vale of Belvoir to connect to Asfordby to form this complex, and if you went deeper you got into Blackshale which was averaging 14' thick so you had plenty of working life for this complex. There were other seams available but geological problems meant they may not have been viable if both the other seams were worked simultaneously.
Working patterns were interesting as it was to be a 9/14 system where miners worked for 9 days coaling on three shifts and had 5 days off, due to the volume of coal expected to be produced as it would need the coal prep plant to work the full 14 days on three shifts to process it, and any maintenance works were planned and scheduled for the 5 day non coaling periods to keep equipment in pristine condition for a coal mine.
Clifton was scheduled to have a surface to U/G drift driven to intersect the inbye bunker, to transport coal from the virgin Ashgate seam, it would have been a perfect choice for coal transport from Cotgrave too.
Plans were in the pipeline to drive 41's maingate through into Cotgrave as an emergency egress for both pits, it would have been ideal as a main trunk conveyor road as it was a continuous road from the inbye bunker sight. The road would have linked up with a face at Cotgrave, 51's or 57's comes to mind.
All of Clifton's prep work to drive a drift from the Tupton to Ashgate had been completed when closure notices had been issued..
What a shame, as Clifton was next to the Midland main rail line, had plenty of room for a new washery and screening plant. |
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Post by bulwellbrian on Aug 29, 2014 12:38:43 GMT -5
Money was always a problem for the NCB/BCC. The industry as a whole was never really profitable, most of the capital expenditure had to come from central government. It was always limited. The NCB had to spend what it had in the best way, but politics both internal and national played a part.
There were always planning problems for new collieries in virgin areas. Asfordby only came about because it was already an industrial site, i.e. Holwell Ironworks.
Asfordby was in Leicestershire not Rutland.
There was and still is a lot of coal in the Vale of Belvoir.
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Post by John on Aug 29, 2014 14:42:49 GMT -5
It always seemed there was a bottomless pit of money at Cotgrave the way money was poured into that pit in the 60's Brian, the wastage always seemed appalling compared with other pits..I arrived there in early 68 with the first transfers from Clifton and stuck it out until November of that year...I'd had enough!! Everything had to work "by the book" which always seemed to slow production, new equipment was always arriving, whereas when I was at Clifton, we had to make do with what we had.
At that time, Cotgrave was running five faces, each with two shearers on each face, one the main shearer, the other a sumping shearer to eliminate the T/G stable hole....Not much of a saving in cash really, two men, and an expensive machine that would never recover it's costs.
Would have been a lot cheaper to have had a bi-di shearer that would have eliminated four men from the face plus the cost of a second shearer.
That was just one waste of money I saw.
Changing shifts at the face would have been a more economical situation too, which didn't happen back then at Cotgrave.
I don't blame management, I blame area who gave the orders on how the pit was to be run.
From what I understood, Cotgrave had the highest turn over in labour within the NCB pits. Out of about a dozen electricians who transferred with me, the majority left within a year, I was about No6 out of them.
A fair few of the miners I knew left before me, fitters the same..Not really cost effective, losing all those skills.
Again during my short stay there, both engineering departments were having difficulty manning each shift up and completing planned maintenance schedules due to shortage of skilled labour.
They'd beg men to work weekends for essential maintenance, clocking off was never done, cards signed by the engineer, always job and knock to make sure they could get men to come in on Sat and Sun.
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Post by bulwellbrian on Aug 30, 2014 8:32:40 GMT -5
Once a major project like Cotgrave was approved then it had to work, so more & more money was thrown at it.
An old pit like Clifton had to manage on what it had or what it could scrounge.
I was working at the lab when the Ashgate proposal was mooted and a lot of looking at borehole cores was done, but I don't think it ever became a seriously worked out and costed proposal to be put to Hobart House.
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Post by John on Aug 30, 2014 9:53:26 GMT -5
Once a major project like Cotgrave was approved then it had to work, so more & more money was thrown at it. An old pit like Clifton had to manage on what it had or what it could scrounge. I was working at the lab when the Ashgate proposal was mooted and a lot of looking at borehole cores was done, but I don't think it ever became a seriously worked out and costed proposal to be put to Hobart House.
The roadways for the Ashgate drift were driven in 51's goaf, I covered them on nights a few times, it was like a rabbit warren in there..Tons of money just wasted, and they were working in that area after the closure of Clifton was announced. |
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Post by smshogun on Aug 30, 2014 19:42:49 GMT -5
Brian:
It was at the time of the proposed boundary changes and if they had gone the way they were expected then Asfordby would have been in Rutland and not Leicestershire.
John:
Their plan was only formulated in the late 70's and went on into the early 80's and was part of a plan to have three superpits in the UK, Selby was under construction and the Cotgrave consortium was to set a precedent by nefarious means to say "yes we can mine Rutland as we already have a pit sank there" but politics prevailed and several things went wrong, Asfordby was always classed as a Nottinghamshire mine for this very reason, the coal from this and a third pit would come out at Cotgrave and this was a Notts mine.
If it had gone the way it was expected then it would have meant mining in the Vale of Belvoir and accessing some pretty rich seams, and the main bugbear was coaling through shafts and this was why the drift was proposed, Moorgreen already had an adit and it proved to haul more coal than shafts ever could, and later Pye Hill had an adit driven and this proved successful, hence the reasons for a drift to move coal out of the mine.
Ironically it was the Duke of Rutland who raised the most opposition, ironic as most of his wealth was inherited and most of this inherited wealth came from coal mining, so a powerful NIMBY who was keen for his forefathers to reap the profits for him to inherit, but didn't want coal mining in his back yard. |
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Post by John on Aug 31, 2014 6:08:58 GMT -5
You forgot Bentinck in drifts, in the first week their drift went into production, their output doubled!!
Pity instead of two shafts at Cotgrave, the money wasn't placed into one shaft and a main drift.
Shafts create bottlenecks in production, that was our problem at Clifton, mid to late afternoons shift, both bunkers were full, shafts couldn't handle three faces going flat out. Hence down time of several hours a week.
Even with drifts we had problems at Angus Place, NSW, belts were rated at 600 tons per hour, shearer was rated at 1000 tons per hour, belts got overloaded and the face had to slow production. They now have a third drift, which was started before I left, and a new 2000 tons per hour belt system.
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Post by smshogun on Aug 31, 2014 20:54:03 GMT -5
John, you have to remember that when Cotgrave was sank in the 50's it was common for shafts to be sunk and that it had massive shafts even for its day, it had the best Koepe winders and skips bigger than anyone could imagine, and that it was designed in the late 40's/early 50's with future potential in mind and built in.
Times moved on and mining equipment got bigger than anyone imagined, it performed better than anyone imagined, and with the mechanisation of mines during the 60/70's the production figures of all mines soared to beyond their design capabilities and time caught up with Cotgrave as it did with so many mines imagined to be futureproof at their inception.
We also have to remember Cotgrave was designed to handle coal from 6 faces with equipment of the day, when I headed Special Projects and first went there in the late 80's it had equipment far beyond what was ever planned for and 9 working faces; if we added two more mines output to this then the inward investment screamed drifts and massive underground storage for coal, and a system for minimising waste to dirt hills which is why they were designed two conveyors which could be reversed and the waste run back into the mine and mixed for spraying/injection back into old workings.
There would have been many new technologies introduced had this complex taken off and some were proven to work, others were still hypothetical, but if it had come off then we would have set the standards for low emission mining for a generation. |
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Post by John on Sept 27, 2014 15:59:13 GMT -5
It's hard to grasp, thinking back so far, what we cut in one shift from a mechanized face, a modern face cuts in less than an hour. I worked on a face that cut nearly 50,000 tonnes a week, even that is small by todays standards, 25 years after.. There are faces now cutting 8 million tonnes a year.
There's no wonder we have a world coal glut, I was reading several collieries in Australia have stopped production and staff laid off. Same here stateside, several large companies have put mines in care and maintenance until things improve.
China has cut imports due to their downturn in their economy.
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Post by smshogun on Sept 28, 2014 19:36:01 GMT -5
Went to one of the mining exhibitions and they had a full set of face equipment for South Africa and it was enormous.
Anderson Strathclyde double ended shearer capable of cutting 30' in one pass.
Chocks were 8 leggers and closed they were 14'.
AFC was 10' wide and had 5 drive chains with staggered flights as 10' wide flights couldn't be made strong enough.
Chocks had integrated lighting which wasn't FLP and lifting points on the cleats which could lift 30 tonnes each and they even had ladders on both front legs to get a chain on the cleat lifting point. |
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Post by thoresby on Mar 8, 2016 4:02:39 GMT -5
Regarding the Vale of Belvoir, does anyone know in which directions the proposed roadways would have run at Hose and Saltby if those mines had been built? I have a feeling such underground plans must have been produced and released at the time, but the Coal Authority cannot help as it deals only with mines that actually existed.
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