Bill's Aviation Log

England - Sep18 - National Coalmining Museum
As you realize by now, coal was a big part of the industrial revolution. So I thought we should visit a coal mining musuem which featured a descent into a real coal mine. We departed York fairly early and arrived at the Coal Mine Museum right when it opened.

The mine was originally known as Caphouse Colliery and was was sunk in the 1770s or 1780s. The boiler house and stone and brick chimney at the museum were built around 1876 along with the steam winding engine house, boiler yard, heapstead and ventilation shaft. The boiler house has two Lancashire boilers and powered the winding engine. The timber headgear at Caphouse and the wood framed screens building at Hope Pit date from between 1905 and 1911. Pithead baths and an administration block were built between 1937 and 1938. The colliery was nationalised in 1947 and a drift mine opened in 1974. The colliery closed in 1985. The Yorkshire Mining Museum opened in 1988 and the museum became the National Coal Mining Museum in 1995. The visitors center was mostly the social and industrial history about the mines and miners. We checked that out then went on the underground tour.

The mine was the real thing. Our tour guide as the real deal: a career miner. He was outstanding. We descended into the mine in the cage elevator. It was no frills, believe me. You go down 140 meters which is 460 feet. We each had the hard hats and miner lamps. At one point the guide had us all turn out our lights. It was pitch black. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. The guide showed us one section that had been set up like it was 1780 or so. A man would chisel out the coal and his wife would load it on to a car. A kid would sit outside the horizontal shaft in the darkness and open and shut a wooden door to the shaft. For 10 hours! Brutal. It was really quite amazing what they did down there to get the coal out. It was a tough way to make a living.

Back inthe sunshine! We walked around the grounds and checked out various buildings. That building behind Lynnette is the steam engine winding house, which was used to haul the elevator carrying people and coal up and down the vertical shaft. We had a nice hot lunch in the museum cafeteria then hit the road, headed for Cambridge.

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England - Sep18 - National Coalmining Museum