Colliery Railway
A ‘colliery’ is a coal mine and its associated buildings and equipment. A Colliery Railway is an industrial railway used for transport within a coal mine and to its associated workings.
The early colliery railways were wooden wagon ways built for horse drawn carts. Steam locomotive railways were created specifically for the transport of coal so from an early date, the infrastructure of railways reflected the needs of the coal industry.
Some of the structures that relate to collieries include: coal drops (elevated tracks to allow coal to be dumped from the bottom of rail cars into storage areas), coal tipplers (tracks that rotated to help dump out rail cars), coal jetties (a railway running out into the sea to bring coal to ships), coal cranes (for loading rail cars), coal depots and coal sheds for storage.
Earlier wagon ways may be harder to distinguish, but proximity to a mine or extractive pit can indicate association with the mining industry. Additionally, historical maps or documents will often show locations of collieries and buildings that have been reused and will sometimes maintain a name that reflects their coal industry history.
What to look for:
- Evidence of tracks leading to extraction pits or mining infrastructure
- Historic reference to coal mines/ pits
- Association with mining buildings or equipment
