Please do NOT re-post this entire message ! Dawn Webb wrote, Sun, 4 Mar 2012 16:38:01 +1100 > Coal face - where they were working to get at it. It > may well have continued on in a seam Coal only occurs in seams - geological beds - which vary considerably in thickness, from a few inches to hundreds of feet. The seam is laid down like an eiderdown, and can extend for long distances in both directions. Obviously, depending on the thickness, some seams are not worth excavating. Obviously, you only want to excavate the coal; any rock is expensive to excavate, haul and dispose of. The "room & pillar" method is one where you leave occasional pillars to support the ground while you excavate round them. Please do NOT re-post this entire message ! "Long wall mining" is the modern method, where a chainsaw say a hundred foot long chews out the coal and drops it onto a conveyor belt. Behind this is a row of hydraulic props to hold up the ground above. As the cutter moves forward, so the props are taken down and moved forward. If there is a long delay (such as a long strike) then the ground closes up and the props cannot be removed - and in the extreme, the conveyor and the cutters can be lost, too, buried under hundreds of feet of ground that has already moved, so it's not safe to even try to re-enter. Please do NOT re-post this entire message ! Before such mechanisation, the coal was dug by hand - and in the Victorian era and before, if the seam was thin, then I suspect children did the digging.... They were certainly sometimes employed instead of ponies to haul the wagons. I once had a colleague who had been a mine surveyor in the 1960s - he related how some of the seams were only nine inches thick, and he had to crawl through, dragging his theodolite behind him, and then set it up and do his survey.... > Often mines were not lit, they worked by feel. Or, candles, > whatever. Erm... only before 1815, when "Humphry Davy invented a safety lamp for use in gassy coalmines, allowing deep coal seams to be mined despite the presence of firedamp (methane). This led to some controversy as George Stephenson, working in a colliery near Newcastle, also produced a safety lamp that year. Both men claimed that they were first to come up with this invention. " http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/SCdavy.htm Please do NOT re-post this entire message ! > water was a constant presence and problem. This ceased to be a major problem with the development of steam power around 1770, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Mining. Please do NOT re-post this entire message ! Now come forward to the 1980s, and the miners' strike. A large proportion of the miners felt very strongly that, "my father worked down t'pit; my grandfather worked down t'pit; his father worked down t'pit, and by God I'll do all I can to ensure that my sons, too, will follow me down t'pit." Oh, dear; oh, dear.... I wouldn't wish it on ANYbody - particularly my own son. Where was "ambition" when it was needed....