tony sayer wrote:
All as maybe.. but the Gas now is coming from the other side of the
channel, the coal is here under our feet....
And, according to what I've been told by people who should know, because
of the way the pits were closed, it will not be economically accessible
at any time in the foreseeable future.

The pits round here were closed with what was then a couple of centuries
of accessible reserves, but which is now totally unusable due to tunnel
collapses and the possibility of digging a bit too far and letting water
in with a head of a thousand feet or more from a tunnel they don't know
about.


All of what we have?..

Pretty much, yes. Certainly round here, it was all deep mines, some up
to half a mile down. All the pits (Originally a couple of hundred
pitheads, at closure one superpit, with four pitheads.) are linked
underground, too, so when one pit flooded, so did all the others. I
don't know the figures offhand, but I'd be surprised if you could get
more than halfway down to the coal nowadays.

List of seams at Hanley Deep Pit:-

WINGHAY 4/6 FT THICK AT 129 FT
BILLY COAL 1/6 FT THICK AT 275 FT
ROWHURST + RIDER 12 FT THICK AT 508 FT
BURNWOOD 5/2 FT THICK AT 589 FT
TWIST 4 FT THICK AT 650 FT
GRANVILLE'S 7 FT THICK AT 1120 FT (Birchenwood)
MOSS 3/10 FT THICK AT 1190 FT
MOSS CANNEL 3 FT THICK AT 1225 FT
FIVE FEET 2/3 FT THICK AT 1272 FT
YARD 3/6 FT THICK AT 1409 FT
RAGMAN 3/10 FT THICK AT 1432 FT
ROUGH SEVEN FEET 2/3 FT THICK AT 1448 FT
HAMS 4/6 FT THICK AT 1517 FT
BELLRINGER 2/6 FT THICK AT 1646 FT
TEN FEET 5/6 FT THICK AT 1786 FT
BOWLING ALLEY 4/3 FT THICK AT 1942 FT
HOLLY LANE 3/6 FT THICK AT 2036 FT
HARDMINE 4/6 FT THICK AT 2126 FT
BANBURY 3/6 FT THICK AT 2418 FT
COCKSHEAD 7/4 FT THICK AT 2583 FT

7/4 means 7 feet 4 inches.

Not untypical of local conditions. Add to that the fractured nature of
the rock round the seams, and now *in* the seams due to tunnel collapse,
and you'll see why the pits would be impossible to re-open.

Some of the pits elsewhere that survived the closures are still
producing, and there's a bit of open cast that's getting to be worth
going for.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.