Mine railway

A mine railway, sometimes pit railway, is a railway constructed to carry materials and workers in and out of a mine. Materials transported typically include ore, coal, and overburden. It is little remembered, but the mix of heavy and bulky materials which had to be hauled into and out of mines gave rise to the first several generations of railways, at first made of wooden rails, but eventually adding protective iron, steam locomotion by fixed engines and the earliest commercial steam locomotives, all in and around the works around mines.

History

Mine rails

Wagonways were developed in Germany in the 1550s to facilitate the transport of ore tubs to and from mines, using primitive wooden rails. Such an operation was illustrated in 1556 by Georgius Agricola of Germany. This used "Hund" carts with unflanged wheels running on wooden planks and a vertical pin on the truck fitting into the gap between the planks, to keep it going the right way. Such a transport system was used by German miners at Caldbeck, Cumbria, England, perhaps from the 1560s. An alternative explanation derives it from the Magyar hintó – a carriage. There are possible references to their use in central Europe in the 15th century.
A funicular railway was made at Broseley in Shropshire, England at some time before 1605. This carried coal for James Clifford from his mines down to the River Severn to be loaded onto barges and carried to riverside towns. Though the first documentary record of this is later, its construction probably preceded the Wollaton Wagonway, completed in 1604, hitherto regarded as the earliest British installation. This ran from Strelley to Wollaton near Nottingham. Another early wagonway is noted onwards. Huntingdon Beaumont, who was concerned with mining at Strelley, also laid down broad wooden rails near Newcastle upon Tyne, on which a single horse could haul fifty to sixty bushels of coal.
By the 18th century, such wagonways and tramways existed in a number of areas. Ralph Allen, for example, constructed a tramway to transport stone from a local quarry to supply the needs of the builders of the Georgian terraces of Bath. The Battle of Prestonpans, in the Jacobite rising of 1745, was fought astride the 1722 Tranent – Cockenzie Waggonway. This type of transport spread rapidly through the whole Tyneside coalfield, and the greatest number of lines were to be found in the coalfield near Newcastle upon Tyne. They were mostly used to transport coal in chaldron wagons from the coalpits to a staithe on the river bank, whence coal could be shipped to London by collier brigs. The wagonways were engineered so that trains of coal wagons could descend to the staithe by gravity, being braked by a brakesman who would "sprag" the wheels by jamming them. Wagonways on less steep gradients could be retarded by allowing the wheels to bind on curves. As the work became more wearing on the horses, a vehicle known as a dandy wagon was introduced, in which the horse could rest on downhill stretches.

Coal, iron, rail symbiosis

A tendency to concentrate employees started when Benjamin Huntsman, looking for higher quality clock springs, found in 1740 that he could produce high quality steel in unprecedented quantities in using ceramic crucibles in the same fuel shortage/glass industry inspired reverbatory furnaces that were spurring the coal mining, coking, cast-iron cannon foundries, and the much in demand gateway or stimulus products of the glass making industries. These technologies, for several decades, had already begun gradually quickening industrial growth and causing early concentrations of workers so that there were occasional early small factories that came into being.
This trend concentrating effort into bigger central located but larger enterprises turned into a trend spurred by Henry Cort's iron processing patent of 1784 leading in short order to foundries collocating near coal mines and accelerating the practice of supplanting the nations cottage industries. With that concentration of employees and separation from dwellings, horsedrawn trams became commonly available as a commuter resource for the daily commute to work. Mine railways were used from 1804 around Coalbrookdale in such industrial concentrations of mines and iron works, all demanding traction-drawing of bulky or heavy loads. These gave rise to extensive early wooden rail ways and initial animal-powered trains of vehicles, then successively in just two decadesto protective iron strips nailed to protect the rails, to steam drawn trains, and to cast-iron rails. Later, George Stephenson, inventor of the world-famous Rocket and a board member of a mine, convinced his board to use steam for traction. Next, he petitioned Parliament to license a public passenger railway, founding the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Soon after the intense public publicity, in part generated by the contest to find the best locomotive won by Stephenson's Rocket, railways underwent explosive growth worldwide, and the industrial revolution gradually went global.

Rails

There is usually no direct connection from a mine railway to the mine's industrial siding or the public railway network, because of the narrow-gauge track that is normally employed. In the United States,
the standard gauge for mine haulage is, although gauges from to are used.
Original mine railways used wax-impregnated wooden rails attached to wooden sleepers, on which drams were dragged by men, children or animals. This was later replaced by L-shaped iron rails, which were attached to the mine floor, meaning that no sleepers were required and hence leaving easy access for the feet of children or animals to propel more drams.

Wood to cast iron

These early mine railways used wooden rails, which in the early industrial revolution about Coalbrookdale, were soon capped with iron strapping, those were replaced by wrought iron, then with the first steam traction engines, cast-iron rails, and eventually steel rails as each was in succession found to last much longer than the previous cheaper rail type. By the time of the first steam locomotive-drawn trains, most rails laid were of wrought iron which was outlasting cast-iron rails by 8:1. About three decades later, after Andrew Carnegie had made steel competitively cheap, steel rails were supplanting iron for the same longevity reasons.

Motive power

The tram cars used for mine haulage are generally called tubs. The term mine car is commonly used in the United States

Humans

Mine workers have often been used to push mine carts. In the very cramped conditions of hand-hewn mining tunnels, children were also often used before the advent of child labour legislation, either pushing the carts themselves or tending to animals that did.

Pit ponies

The Romans were the first to realise the benefits of using animals in their industrial workings, using specially bred pit ponies to power supplementary work such as mine pumps.
Ponies began to be used underground, often replacing child or female labour, as distances from pit head to coal face became greater. The first known recorded use in Britain was in the County Durham coalfield in 1750; in the United States, mules were the dominant source of animal power in the mine industry, with horses and ponies used to a lesser extent. At the peak in 1913, there were 70,000 ponies underground in Britain. In later years, mechanical haulage was quickly introduced on the main underground roads replacing the pony hauls and ponies tended to be confined to the shorter runs from coal face to main road which were more difficult to mechanise. As of 1984, 55 ponies were still at use with the National Coal Board in Britain, chiefly at the modern pit in Ellington, Northumberland.
Dandy wagons were often attached to trains of full drams, to contain a horse or pony. Mining and later railway engineers designed their tramways so that full trains would use gravity down the slope, while horses would be used to pull the empty drams back to the workings. The Dandy wagon allowed for easy transportation of the required horse each time.
Probably the last colliery horse to work underground in a British coal mine, Robbie, was retired from Pant y Gasseg, near Pontypool, in May 1999.

Cable haulage

In the 19th century after the mid-1840s, when the German invention of wire rope became available from manufactories in both Europe and North America, large stationary steam engines on the surface with cables reaching underground were commonly used for mine haulage. Unsurprisingly, the innovation-minded managers of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company pioneered the technology in America using it to allow the dead-lift of loaded coal consists up the Ashley Planes, and the augmentation of their works in and above the Panther Creek Valley with new gravity switchback sections and return cable inclines, but most notably by installing two cable lift sections and expanding the already famous Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway with a 'back track' dropping car return time from 3–4 hours to about 20 minutes, which the new inclines then fed from new mine shafts and coal breakers farther down into the valley. Sometimes, stationary engines were even located underground, with the boiler on the surface, though that was a minority situation. All of the cable haulage methods were primarily used on the main haulage ways of the mine. Typically, manual labor, mules or pit ponies were used in gathering filled cars from the working areas to main haulage ways. In the first decade of the 20th century, electric locomotives were displacing animal power for this secondary haulage role in mines where sparking triggered explosive methane buildup was a lesser danger. Several cable haulage systems were used:
In slope mines, where there was a continuous downgrade from the entrance to the working face, the rope from the hoisting engine could be used to lower empty cars into the mine and then raise full cars. In shaft mines, secondary hoisting engines could be used to pull cars on grades within the mine. For grades of a few percent, trains of 25 cars each carrying roughly half a ton were typical in the 1880s.
In mines where grades were not uniform or where the grades were not steep enough for gravity to pull a train into the mine, the main hoisting rope could be augmented with a tail rope connected to the opposite end of the train of mine cars. The tail-rope system had its origins on cable-hauled surface inclines prior to the 1830s. This was the dominant system in the 1880s Frequently, one engine was used to work both ropes, with the tail rope reaching into the mine, around a pulley at the far end, and then out again.
Finally, the most advanced systems involved continuous loops of rope operated like a cable car system. Some mines used endless chains before wire-rope became widely available. The endless chain system originated in the mines near Burnley around 1845. An endless rope system was developed in Nottinghamshire around 1864, and another independently developed near Wigan somewhat later. In these systems, individual cars or trains within the mine could be connected to the cable by a grip comparable to the grips used on surface cable car systems. In some mines, the haulage chain or cable went over the top of the cars, and cars were released automatically when the chain or cable was lifted away by an overhead pulley. Where the cable ran under the cars, a handheld grip could be used, where the grip operator would ride on the front car of the train working the grip chained to the front of the car. In some cases, a separate grip car was coupled to the head of the train. At the dawn of the 20th century, endless rope haulage was the dominant haulage technology for the main haulage ways of underground mines.