tarboat's photos

SY 1437 has brought another load of spoil to the Xinghua tip on the Jixi Coal Railway and the locals are picking through the waste for any coal remaining. This site was remarkable for the sheer number of pickers involved.

Tippler at a small coal mine near Xinghua, Jixi, Heilongjiang Province, China. This is typical of the many thousands of small drift mines to be found throughout China. Not a lot different from what I remember in North Staffordshire in the 1970s and 80s.

A bit of terracotta above the Motor World shop in Westgate, Ripon.

Split attention whilst fishing at Kilnsea.

The Hereford and Gloucester Canal was authorised in 1793 and completed to within a mile of Ledbury in 1798. The remainder to Hereford took until 1845 before it was finished. The route included the 2192 yard tunnel at Oxenhall which drained the resources of the company as its construction was hampered by the sheer volume of water entering the construction shafts. The southern half of the canal was converted to railway in the 1881 and the tunnel fell into disuse. Today it remains unused and blocked by roof falls at towards the Ledbury end. Explorers still visit the tunnel and you can see the deep interior here. www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/oxenhall-canal-tunnel-gloucestershire-march-2015.95088

SY 0477 stands in the yard at Xifeng on the Lishu system near Jixi. It had been undergoing attention for faulty injectors and will shortly be taking the afternoon empty hoppers to the Qikeng mine.

Wharfside corrugated iron on the tidal Chelmer at Maldon.

S160 5197 heads past the gallery at the Black Lion as it departs from Consall Station on the Churnet Valley Railway.

High Lane Colliery was established by Joseph Wright after the closure of Norbury Colliery in 1892. I believe that Wright was at one time the Secretary of the Norbury Colliery for Messrs Clayton and Brooke. In 1907 the Great Central Railway granted Wright permission to drive an adit to the New (Accommodation) Seam from the bank of the High Lane Canal Branch. This ran under the cricket club and subsequently under the Buxton branch railway for which the LNWR gave permission for a heading 4ft square under its property. Wright wasted no time in getting to work and these workings started production of coal on January 1st 1908. From Jan 1st to June 30th 1908 the output was 614t 19cwt 0qr @ 6d per ton royalty to the Legh estate at Lyme Hall = £15 17s 6d. He laid down a tramway from the mine entrance along teh towpath to the old abandoned Norbury Colliery canal branch and filled it with spoil from driving the tunnel. The mine closed in 1917 and Joseph Wright retired. The photo shows the view from the towpath bridge over the canal branch. The remains of Wright's mine entrance can be seen just left of centre next to a leaning tree. The timber lintel over the entrance survives and can be clearly seen.

Processing plant at the Hanson quarry at Ingleton which extracts greywacke sandstone for aggregate. A stitch of three images in Photoshop.

The bins just fit in the ginnel between Waterloo Street West and Roe Street in Macclesfield.

This limekiln is high up in the Brecon Beacons National Park in an area that saw extensive limeburning before the enclosure of 1819. It is one of the many intermittent kilns in ruinous condition across this site.

SYs 0973 and 1299 simmer at the servicing point at Xiamiaozi on the Nanpiao Coal Railway.

The Turton Moor Sanitary Pipe Co Ltd reopened the Turton Moor Colliery shafts in 1893 after they had been disused for fifteen years. A tramway was constructed to transport the coal and fireclay to a pipe works constructed on Charters Moss, near the main road. The company went into liquidation in November 1900 and the business was to be auctioned in February 1901. However, a group of shareholders purchased the business which changed to Darwen Sanitary Pipes Ltd. It struggled on until 1911 after which it was closed down and liquidated.

The 6 inch OS map surveyed in 1849/50 shows a series of coal pits on the moors north of Edgworth within Blackburn & Darwen. These are marked as comprising Broad-head Colliery and central to these workings are a series of beehive coke ovens to convert the small coal from the workings. By the late 19th century the pits were long abandoned and today can be identified by their collapsed shafts and associated spoil tips. The colliery remains and coke ovens are a scheduled ancient monument but this does not seem to mean that there is much chance of their preservation. What is left of the coke ovens are the fused shell and inner linings standing out of the moor as they slowly decay and disintegrate. A lonely place, which probably accounts for the survival of these few bits.

A view from Paull towards the storage tanks of the Saltend Chemical Park . BP Chemicals Ltd established Saltend Chemicals Park in 2009. Today a range of organisations operate on the 370 acre site, sharing an established infrastructure and extensive provision of services, feedstocks and utilities

A pass by two trains at Consall Station during the recent stream gala on the Churnet Valley Railway.

Filling buckets with shale at the top loading station of the Claughton Brickworks aerial ropeway.