Qualter, Hall and Co Ltd is a very famous and world renowned heavy and mining engineering company. When the Selby Coalfield project was started a huge amount of mining engineering expertise was needed to develop the coalfield. The five mines in the complex needed two winders per site to supply equipment and transport the men underground. Mine car handling plants to clear the coal and rock produced during the development phase were also needed at each mine to enable the underground developments to take place before the final connection to Gascoigne Wood Mine was completed. At this point all production came to the surface via the two huge trunk conveyors. Qualter, Hall was chosen to design, supply and install the new, state of the art winders and coal handling plants at each mine.
The first satellite mine to be sunk and equipment installed was Wistow Mine. This was the smallest site at only 29 acres and the shallowest mine in the Selby Coalfield. It was also the first mine to start production in July 1983.
Wistow was the only mine in the complex to use a tower mounted friction-winder (Koepe) on the No1 downcast shaft. All the other mines in the complex installed the friction winder on the No2 upcast shaft .
The winder installed on Wistow No2 upcast was a ground mounted, double parallel drum winding engine with twin cages. Each cage would carry 60 men or 8 tonnes of material. It was the first of the two winders to be installed at Wistow Mine. This shaft was used for the mine car handling plant during early development of the mine.
Below is a pictorial history of the manufacturing and the installation of Wistow Mine No2 winder and mine car handling plant.
During the installation of the No2 headgear the two cages were manufactured and transported from the works at Barnsley onto site for installation.
Each double deck cage weighed 4.5 tonnes and were made of aluminium.
Once the No2 upcast shaft headgear was operational in May 1981 the protective cladding was installed to allow the building of the airlock to progress.
With the cages installed and winder fully operational the winder was commissioned for man riding and use as part of the mine car handling plant.
During this period the surface mine car handling plant and outfeed conveyor system was installed to enable the development mineral to be processed. The double deck system, traversers, LOFCO mine car feeder chains and mine car ramming system enabled very efficient loading of empty, and disposal of full, mine cars to and from the shaft.
The underground coal clearance system to Gascoigne Wood Drift Mine was completed in January 1983 and the use of the surface mine car handling plant ceased and the equipment was removed.
Many thanks to Lisa Butterworth, Marketing Manager and George Wild, Company Secretary at Qualter, Hall and Co Limited for their time and for the use of the amazing photographs.
Plan of coal faces at Stillingfleet Mine with seven worked in the North Selby Mine area.
The first coal faces at Stillingfleet Mine were worked from the east / west lateral roadways. The first face worked in Jan 1988 was H01Bs on the west side of the mine. H01Cs started production in May 1988 at the east side of the mine. The lateral heading to the east of the mine was the connection with the North Selby Mine lateral conveyor roadway called West 2 and was completed in July 1989. The heading was driven by two Dosco Mk 3 roadheaders with heading being driven from both mines simultaneously and was over 3,600m long on completion.
The early face developments were driven using Dosco Mk2a Revised Hydraulics roadheader setting arch supports with Dosco Mk3 roadheaders driving the lateral roadways. As the mine progressed the face heading development roadheaders were replaced with BJD flat chain mat continuous miners (Heliminers) and roof bolting replaced the arch supports to achieve faster drivage rates. Lee Norse LN800 continuous miners were also used in the mid 1990s.
Dosco LH1300 roadheaders were used for the lateral roadways to replace the Dosco Mk3 roadheaders.
The Gascoigne Wood coal clearance connection roadway to the south of the mine was completed in Dec 1987 to load coal into Gascoigne Wood Mine, via a 2000 tonne, 7.5m diameter staple shaft called Bunker 6. A ventilation connection already existed from Mar 1987 and this was kept in use with a .8m diameter borehole.
Plan ofBunker 6 and Ventilation Borehole Connections to Gascoigne Wood Mine
The Bunker 6 Westerland feeder coal clearance connection from Stillingfleet Mine.
The conveyors in the east and south lateral roadways at Stillingfleet Mine had to transport coal from North Selby and Stillingfleet Mines. Roadways in the drive house areas of 5m high by 7m wide, square section stanchion girders were created to house the double, 6.6 K.V. 750kw, steel cord conveyor drives. The South Drive House was situated at the furthest point of the south lateral roadway which loaded onto a lower lateral roadway which delivered via a 2000 tonne staple shaft into the Gascoigne Wood Spine Tunnels.
Stillingfleet Mine developed the east and west lateral headings to the furthest extent and worked faces from 1988. The west side of the mine worked 12 faces, the last being H219s in 1998 and the east of the mine worked 6 faces, the last being H256s in 1995 very near to the North Selby Mine workings. During this period the north lateral headings were developed and a further north east lateral was driven where 2 faces were worked. As the mine progressed northwards a west and east lateral was developed with 9 faces worked from 1995 to 2002.
The South side of the mine had east lateral heading developed and started production in 1995 with H300s and finished with H307s in 2004.
When North Selby and Stillingfleet Mine merged in 1997, reserves became available to be worked from Stillingfleet Mine in the North Selby area. Seven faces were worked in this area, the final face being H853s which finished production in August 2004, one week after H272s.
From production starting in Jan 1988 until closure in August 2004, Stillingfleet Mine worked 49 longwall coal faces, 7 of which were in the original planned area of North Selby Mine. The faces were worked using Anderson Strathclyde AM500, 375 KW D.E.R.D.S shearers with face equipment supplied by Gullick Dobson and Dowty Meco. As the mine progressed, Joy 4LS shearers with Joy face equipment replaced the original equipment on the faces.
During it’s 10 year life Whitemoor Mine worked 18 longwall coal faces. The machines used to carry out the lateral drivages were Dosco LH1300 and Anderson Strathclyde RH22 roadheaders. The face drivages were developed using Joy CM 12 Continuous miners. From March 1993 all underground tunnelling was carried out by contractors with British Coal/ RJB Mining, men working the coal faces. The faces were worked using 300kw BJD Ace DERDS and 390 KW Joy 4LS DERDS shearers. The face supports and A.F.Cs were supplied initially by Dowty Meco and Gullick Dobson. Due to mergers of the mining equipment suppliers Longwall International equipment was used from 1994 onwards.
Whitemoor Mine face plan showing connections to Riccall Mine.
When the NCB started it’s drilling program in 1964 they began with a series of 5 boreholes at Kelfield, Whitemoor, Barlow, Cambleforth and Hemingbrough. When the core samples were analysed they found the Barnsley seam running from the West at Kelfield at over 2.44m thick to the East at Whitemoor at over 2.13m thick.
The Selby Coalfield core sample.
The N.C.B geologist said that in the Selby area the most important find is the Barnsley seam. The seam is widely worked in the Barnsley and Doncaster area and is 3 metres thick but splits into 2 seams called the Warren House and the inferior Low Barnsley seam towards Askern Colliery and beyond. In the Selby area the seam combines to a seam very similar to the one worked in Barnsley. The next phase was to prove the extent and quality of the seam so a drilling program was started in 1972. At the end of 1972 a core sample taken in Cawood showed the seam was over 3 metres thick. Further samples in the 110 square miles of the coalfield proved the seam was up to 3.4 metres thick. The true extent was discovered and 600 million tonnes of Barnsley coal was available in the Selby area. The next problem was how to mine it. The person in charge of the project was Mr Bill Forrest, deputy director of the North Yorkshire are of the N.C.B.
Selby is an attractive, unspoilt area of Yorkshire and very rural. Many farming villages reside in the area with little heavy industry. The two rivers, the Ouse and Wharf flow through the area, which is a very low lying area and prone to flooding. Subsidence was raised as a major worry which could cause cause further flooding problems. Many villages had very old pretty churches and the main one was Selby Abbey, a beautiful, Norman arched church.
Selby Abbey.
The industries found in the proposed coalfield were condensed around the town of Selby and consisted of RHM flour mill, BOCM Silcock animal feeds, a chemical plant, John and E. Sturge producing citric acid, a pickle and bacon factory and Cochrane’s shipbuilders, but the biggest business in the area was a very important business on a massive scale, the farming land.
The NCB quickly realised that opening a mine on this scale in such an area was going to be problematic and that coal mining could become the largest industry and employer in the area quite understandably raised fears among the local communities. For many people a major worry was the influx of hundreds if not thousands of miners and their families. Some local senior officials , who were against the mine even planned to show films and slides to show what mining communities were like, asking the question, “is this for you?” portraying miners as somehow different from the local community. This was a huge issue to be overcome.
Another major worry, especially in the farming communities was subsidence. Selby, as mentioned earlier has 2 rivers running through the area. The area, very much like the Doncaster coalfield has a huge system of drainage dikes due to the high water table in the area which can cause major flooding. Many local people remembered the floods of 1947 where the River Ouse over topped its banking system and flooded large areas, and even flooded the town of Selby. The local farming community had read many stories in farming magazines, about prize agricultural land being reduced to bog and marsh land especially by private mining companies who provided no payments for damage after mining . They quite rightly needed to know what was going to happen when the subsidence inevitably happened and what the payments for lost land were going to be. Farming and living near to the rivers was a particular worry. Subsidence damage to large industrial buildings was also raised and particularly the churches and Selby Abbey.
Many other fears were raised such as the size of the mine headgears, heavy construction traffic, and noise and dirt associated with such a massive project on the local villages. The NCB had a massive task to win over the local people and knew that developing a ten million tonne coal mine project could not be achieved without people being aware it was happening.
The NCB had an ace up their sleeve in the fact that energy prices had become very volatile. The event causing this major issue with energy prices in the country and the whole of the Western world was the Yom Kippur War. It was a similar situation to the Ukraine War when oil supply was cut back and prices rose very quickly. The west was hit with a huge hike in prices for oil imports, so the government looked at the vast reserves of coal in the UK. to replace the cheap imports of oil, used for generation of energy, as a replacement. The North Sea was proving a vast reserve of oil and gas but coal was seen as the fuel of the future of the power generation needs of the country. The Selby Coalfield was worth £250m (£3.3 bn in 2025) a year towards balancing the government books so became a priority.
In 1974 the plan for the Selby Coalfield was made with application for planning permission made clear. One drift mine and five satellite pits, to mine 29,00 hectares of the Barnsley Seam to be delivered to Drax power station via a dedicated rail link. The development of the mine sites was to be a separate issue to be discussed.
In 1973, decisions had been made about the NCBs approach to the local communities about the Selby project. Peter Walker, the Industry secretary and Derek Ezra, who was NCB Chairman, said Selby would be a clean mine and would not have the usual industrial mess associated with mining. Derek Ezra said Selby would be totally different to previous mining areas with different headgears, less pollution, no dirty coal preparation plants, traffic and railway sidings. These were very difficult aims to achieve, but they did show the NCB had set a very high bar for the project to be environmental friendly. These objectives proved to be more difficult than expected.
The NCB set about telling the communities about the environmentally friendly mine from day one. They felt that the people in the area should be made aware of what they were doing to ensure cooperation and information was forthcoming. Local groups were invited to meetings and fact finding sessions. People in the Selby area were provided with copies of the NCB Selby Newsletter, explaining how the Selby project was to work setting out its position and how the new miners and families would be “integrated not segregated” into communities.
The effect in some quarters was that the NCB was raising false hope, that the project was too good to be true and getting local approval for an environmentally friendly pit and then announcing a less palatable truth when the project started.
One of the major issues raised was the height of the headgears. The NCB in the early stages of the project said the winder towers would be unlike any other mines ever developed. They said that the use of winch gear instead of winders would allow the level of the towers to be as low as 40 feet or 12 metres, which would easily be hidden from view. The NCB revisited the calculations and realised that standard engineering of mine winders changed the height of the winder towers to 96 feet to allow for the 16 tonne loads required to be lifted and lowered in the shafts. These towers were still substantially lower than existing collieries and were still barely visible.
Some local people accused the NCB of not telling the entire truth about the project but some saw the mistakes as a part of trying to tell the local people what was happening as the planning process was progressing, including changes made along the way and changes made as the project evolved.
The NCB. looked at various options to mine the vast Selby reserves but once the environmental realisation was accepted the only way to mine the coal was the one drift mine and five satellite pits. This had been tried and tested, all be it on a smaller scale at the Longannet Mine in Scotland.
In 1973 and 1974 the Selby Mine project was very high on the list of the local community’s thoughts. Many different opinions about the project were expressed from comments of “Fighting tooth and nail against the rape of our countryside” to “a coalmine will be a gold mine”. The only way to have a fully rounded review of the Selby project was a public enquiry. The NCB had put in a planning application for the huge project which inevitably meant everyone had to have a say on the outcome of the project. Another option of a Planning Inquiry Commission could have been called by the government, but this was rejected in favour of a Selby Coalfield Public Enquiry.
Bibliography
Ezra, Derek (1976). Coal Technology for Britain’s Future. London: Macmillan.
It was a lovely sunny January day in Selby when we went to visit the Selby Coalfield Memorial. It is sited in Bondgate, a few minutes walk just outside the town centre. The area is lovely to walk with or without a dog. Lovely monument to remember all the men who worked at Selby with every mine represented including the Mines Rescue Service.
A brilliant three dimensional map of the complex shows the extent and true scale of the Selby Coalfield.
As we were in Selby taking some photographs for a post on the Selby Coalfield memorial, I suggested to my wife that we go and have a look at the Wistow Mine site. We arrived at the entrance and I walked a few metres into the old carpark. After a couple of minutes I got the attention of a bloke doing some ground work on the site. I explained to him who I was and what I wanted to do. He gave me a phone number for the owner of the site. I called Richard, who kindly gave me permission to take the photographs I wanted for my blog.
The rear of the boiler house.
Workshop entrance.
Electricians snap cabin doorwith the obligatory fruit stickers.
The last calendar. 2004 closure year.
The transformer and mine reactor caged areas.
Workshops.
Transformer cages.
No1 shaft cap with methane drainage valve.
Pit yard looking towards workshops.
Walking around the site, which now has no power, made me realise how long it was and how things have changed since the Selby Coalfield was producing coal. The site is now used for trailer storage and is under renovation, with members of staff on ground works and 24 hours security.
The dogs are owned by Damien, who kindly escorted us around, so we were safe, but we still gave the five guard dogs at various points a wide birth. What struck me, as it did on a visit to Riccall Mine recently, is how quiet the place is now.
I would like to thank Damien for his assistance and his escort of the site and Richard for his kind permission to access the site.
The Gascoigne Wood Drifts were the second stage of the development of the Selby Superpit. The undergound connection with Wistow Mine was of the upmost importance as all production surfaced at Gascoigne Wood. The drivages were started at almost the same time as the actual shaft sinking at Wistow in early 1978. The two drifts were parallel and set at 70.40m centres and were driven at 1 in 4 to 832m where a sealing ring was installed to stop water ingress.
The geology of the Selby area means that water was always going to be a major problem to be overcome, as it was during the shaft sinking in the Doncaster coalfield in the early part of the century and Kellingley Colliery in the late 1950s/early 1960s. It involved major mining engineering work starting from the initial ground works.
Their were three major water problems encountered during the drivage of the drifts. The Bunter Sandstone, a major aquifer in the Selby area and a major supplier of water, accessed by many borehole-wells. It is situated beneath the glacial deposits. The Lower Magnesian Limestone where up to 340 litres of flow per minute were expected and the Basal Sands where ingress from the Magnesian Limestone strata could cause running quicksand, at artesian pressure to be encountered. This problem had caused huge problems at Bentley Colliery during the shaft sinking process.
The Bunter Sandstone outcrops 800m east of the drifts and was one of the factors for the site being chosen.
The initial access to the drifts was by open cut method. The cuttings were initially de-watered by up to 60 pumps to allow the construction of the circular tunnel lining. A 1.5m, 10m depth, ventilation shaft was constructed at 40.25m in each of the drift portals. A system of de-watering wells were installed at the top 148m of the drift. The drifts was driven by modified single boom S.B.600 Dosco roadheader. This modification allowed the construction of circular, graphite-cast iron tubbing rings each sealed to the last and grouted to seal the tunnel. As the tunnel progressed, the heading was pre drilled and grout cones were injected to seal water ingress 30m in front of the face of the headings. This continued for 14 stages in 13m sections until the 178m area was completed. The next problem to be encountered was the Basal Sands, as predicted, 200m from the surface. This problem was overcome by using technology used in shaft sinking. The ground was frozen from the surface, using the existing technology involving 100 drill holes around each heading and the headings were driven 108m through solid ice. The heading had waterproof seals installed as they progressed to allow the sand layer to thaw. At 832m mark in the drivage sealing rings were installed to ensure a dry drift was achieved.
Selby Superpit 