From where does each heritage railway obtain its coal?

[railfan99]

I asked the above in another thread but didn't receive any substantive answers.

From which colliery (or nation) does each heritage railway in the UK receive its coal in 2023?

What about mainline operators such as Locomotive Services Ltd and West Coast Railways?

Russian coal is no longer (officially) available given sanctions.

All coal mines in the UK have closed, bar perhaps one small one IIRC.

Major coal producing nations include mainland communist China (unlikely source for heritage railways), India and Indonesia (mostly low grade), Australia (at least one mine in the Hunter Valley NSW produces suitable coal for steam locos), United States, Poland, South Africa (huge production problems including electricity shortages and social unrest), Poland, Germany, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Colombia.

The only information on the HRA site was this undated media release mentioning Colombia:

Mine decision ‘short-sighted’ says heritage rail group

The planning decision to stop mining at Ffos-Y-Fran in South Wales will almost certainly increase pollution

www.hra.uk.com

If a heritage railway had purchased coal stocks a few years ago that might last for another year, what will it do when it needs replenishment?

 

[Lucan]

Whose decision was it to shut the mine and what were any reasons given? It was not clear from the article.

 

[John Webb]

As I recall, the Welsh mine needs to expand its workings to tap as yet unused seams of coal to maintain its viability. But the planners seem to have decided 'coal is bad' and refused permission for the expansion, thereby forcing the closure of the mine. I believe discussions are still on-going, however.

Some railways get their coal from Poland, I have heard.

 

[railfan99]

Some railways get their coal from Poland, I have heard.

Do you know which ones? Does it come by rail in hopper or open wagons, or by truck?

 

[DarloRich]

Do you know which ones? Does it come by rail in hopper or open wagons, or by truck?

Surely the coal supplied to heritage railways in the UK will be a tiny fraction of a bulk coal import.

As such I would imagine the coal comes to the UK by ship to a bulk terminal and is then distributed by road where it needs to go. I SUSPECT that the coal comes from Poland or central Asia ( One of the "stans" perhaps?) but how it gets to the uk by ship with the Ukraine situation is beyond me!

EDIT: I bet there is a commodity buyer somewhere with the market cornered!

 

[John Webb]

Do you know which ones? Does it come by rail in hopper or open wagons, or by truck?

Not the foggiest idea! It would be by road truck, but whether all the way from Poland or possibly from a Polish ship at a British port again I don't know. (The small bit of railway preservation I'm involved with doesn't steam anything except the electric kettle for our tea-breaks!)

 

[DarloRich]

but whether all the way from Poland or possibly from a Polish ship at a British port again I don't know.

it cant be economic to truck a small load of coal all the way to the UK for one small customer. How long would a truckload last?

EDIT: The HRA say that the UK heritage rail sector uses in total c.35k tons of coal per annum. A power station uses somewhere between 9k and 14k tons per day.

 

[ExRes]

There's a company in Shrewsbury, Ridge Fuels, who claim to be " the leading supplier of fuel to Britain's heritage railways", they also supply traction engines, heritage properties and blacksmiths

 

[38Cto15E]

I understand that for a heritage railway to run a large locomotive all day at say, a Gala, the cost of coal can be as much as £1500-£2,000.
Include transport/Insurance costs etc and many Galas will not be able to afford to bring in large guest locos.

 

[railfan99]

There's a company in Shrewsbury, Ridge Fuels, who claim to be " the leading supplier of fuel to Britain's heritage railways", they also supply traction engines, heritage properties and blacksmiths

Most appropriate that its premises are at 'LMS New Yard!'

Heritage Fuels - Ridge Fuels

We supply an extensive range of fuels to long established clients in Historical Properties, many of Britain’s Heritage Railways, Traction Engine Society Societies and even Traditional Blacksmiths. Traction Engines We are all stoked up about supplying Traction Engine Societies. Steam Engine Coal...

www.ridgefuels.co.uk

However it doesn't disclose from where the coal originates.

 

[lyndhurst25]

Most appropriate that its premises are at 'LMS New Yard!'

Heritage Fuels - Ridge Fuels

We supply an extensive range of fuels to long established clients in Historical Properties, many of Britain’s Heritage Railways, Traction Engine Society Societies and even Traditional Blacksmiths. Traction Engines We are all stoked up about supplying Traction Engine Societies. Steam Engine Coal...

www.ridgefuels.co.uk

However it doesn't disclose from where the coal originates.

On Castle Foregate, Shrewsbury. Also home to Morris Lubricants, that supply steam oil and other stuff to the heritage market.

 

[paul1609]

Kent and East Sussex Railway trial coal replacement for steam locomotives | Rail Technology Magazine

New trials have begun on an innovative type of fuel usage for steam locomotives from the Kent and East Sussex Railway, as they se

www.railtechnologymagazine.com

 

[John Luxton]

I was at the FRS AGM last Saturday and The Ffestiniog Rly GM mentioned the Ffos-y-Fran situation.

He said he suggested that there might a be a bit of wiggle room in this decision due to the fact that the operator is supposed to reinstate the land.

He speculated that the operator could just go into liquidation and leave the Welsh Government to pick up the reinstatement tab and they might wish to avoid that happening.

 

[zwk500]

Do you know which ones? Does it come by rail in hopper or open wagons, or by truck?

It will almost certainly be shipped in, and then distributed by truck. Immingham and Tyne are big bulk load ports.

I'd be astonished if coal was even permitted through the Channel Tunnel, it would be a massive fire hazard. And I don't know how many rail-connected coal merchants remain who'd be able to distribute the stuff.

 

[Gloster]

Ffos-y-Fran was supposed to close last September, but mining has continued, despite the proximity of houses. The mining company is saying that, due to lockdown, it hasn’t been able to extract enough coal and so hasn’t been able to put enough money into the account set aside for restoring the site. Unfortunately, due to various actions a few years ago, there is no major parent company that could find the money if the mining company couldn’t. Therein lies the fear that if mining is forced to cease, as it should have, the authorities will have to pay.

Source: Private Eye 1596.

 

[ian1944]

Kent and East Sussex Railway trial coal replacement for steam locomotives | Rail Technology Magazine

New trials have begun on an innovative type of fuel usage for steam locomotives from the Kent and East Sussex Railway, as they se

www.railtechnologymagazine.com

The Kent and East Sussex are trialling "ovoids" from an unspecified source to replace their usual import from Colombia.

 

[paul1609]

The Kent and East Sussex are trialling "ovoids" from an unspecified source to replace their usual import from Colombia.

It's CPL formerly Charringtons https://cplindustries.co.uk/cpl-products-launches-new-alternative-fuels-for-the-heritage-sector/

 

[30907]

The Kent and East Sussex are trialling "ovoids" from an unspecified source to replace their usual import from Colombia.

As are other railways.

 

[Trainlog]

Out of curiosity do we know when the next set of trials of Biocoals will take place on UK heritage railways? Been over a year since the Keighley and Worth valley did theirs.

 

[Pigeon]

UK imports of coal now come from the US, Australia, and South America, in that order, in quantities increased to compensate for Russia no longer being at the head of the list. (Plus dribs and drabs which aren't enough to bother about.) About half of it goes to power stations and half to other industry, mainly iron and steel; a wee bit still gets used for heating people's houses, and only a teeny tiny bit (<1%) for the "everything else" which includes steam railways.

All coalfields in the north-western area of Europe are remnants of the same original gigantic deposit, most of which has been eroded away or else buried too deep to get at. The quality of this deposit got steadily mankier the further east you went, so the situation now is that South Wales has some excellent coal, Germany has some burny stuff, and Russia has some absolute crud. You can use Russian coal in power stations because they're big enough that you can make them to burn more or less anything vaguely combustible, but for putting in a locomotive it's horrid, and the steam railways are probably the better off for its absence.

The power station bit of British coal use may be "on life support" but the iron and steel bit hasn't been driven away yet, and the ideological drive to close all the coal mines just so we can bounce up and down going "wheeee look at us we aren't doing mining any more" looks especially daft when we're not just still burning a couple of million tons a year for the foreseeable future but dragging it half way round the world first instead of digging it up on our doorstep. There's nothing ecologically beneficial about making even more invisible mess than before just so the bit of the mess you can see happens in someone else's back yard. If we kept a couple of mines going to supply what we still use, the steam railways would have no need to worry about either supply or quality.

The amount steam railways use is so small that it would be a good match for a small mine in South Wales producing coal solely for steam engines, and operated on a similar basis by people who are into mining (probably railways as well for quite a few). It ought to be a natural expansion of function for the museum at Blaenavon, to be able to exhibit an actual working coal mine and at the same time support railways which are themselves essentially museums. Unfortunately the idea of taking tourists down a working mine in the South Wales coalfield is probably a disaster waiting to happen.

 

[railfan99]

UK imports of coal now come from the US, Australia, and South America, in that order, in quantities increased to compensate for Russia no longer being at the head of the list. (Plus dribs and drabs which aren't enough to bother about.) About half of it goes to power stations and half to other industry, mainly iron and steel; a wee bit still gets used for heating people's houses, and only a teeny tiny bit (<1%) for the "everything else" which includes steam railways.

Thank you: very informative. I or my wife have shares in the three major listed Australian coal miners that produce thermal coal.

At least one highlighted how sales a couple of years ago saw just one per cent going to 'Europe' but that figure had risen last year to nine per cent. There is big demand for thermal coal from Australia with Newcastle NSW the highest volume exporting port of thermal coal in the world. Much output from this Hunter Valley is high quality.

Unfortunately none of the three listed thermal coal minters separately identify the UK but I assume 'Europe' includes 'UK'.

I thought all your coal-fired power stations in the UK had closed, so thank you.

We still haven't exactly found where the coal used on individual heritage railways is from.

 

[zwk500]

I thought all your coal-fired power stations in the UK had closed, so thank you.

At times they have all been switched off, but they get reactivated in times of heavy demand (base load, for obvious reasons). Some plants can dual-fire with biomass as well.

We still haven't exactly found where the coal used on individual heritage railways is from.

And you won't be able to pin a specific railway down to an individual mine. They get their coal from a coal merchant. That merchant will themselves get it from a wholesaler. And the wholesaler will likely have a mix of suppliers for different grades of coal.

 

[D Williams]

For the last year the railway I have knowledge of has been using Ffos y fran steam coal. Previous to that when there were production problems ( the washery shut) they obtained coal from Azerbaijan, this was of questionable quality. Various eco coals were tried but the less said the better. The UK in 2022 imported 4,521,000 tonnes of steam coal ( for power stations), 1,744,000 tones of coking coal ( steel making) and just 92,000 tonnes of anthracite ( presumably this is for household use). These figures and the sources of the coal are available are available on uk government websites. Apparently much of the steam coal was to build up stocks that had been run down before the effects of the Ukraine conflict. The coal fired power stations are due to close in two years and the future of steel making is looking grim. The main reason Ffos y fran remains is to supply Port Talbot steelworks with coking coal but the Welsh Government is hell bent on closing it even to the extent that the steel works closes. There would be a lot of crocodile tears but they've gone "woke" and "green" so any sense has gone out of the window. Anyway these are nasty old jobs that involve people breaking sweat and getting dirty and we can't have that can we?

Future coal supply is the "elephant in the room" in heritage railway circles. Imported coal , the last time I was involved, came in as a part of much greater shipments for other uses ( cement industry?) and sized coal was screened out for heritage use. If UK consumption dies off then the heritage industry(?) will have to bear all of the transport costs. Steam coal also used to come from Poland but for some reason this source isn't mentioned now. Russian coal was good but now unobtainable , to the extent that some heritage railways refused to burn existing stocks of Russian coal when the Ukraine war started. I'd be interested to know if any such coal remains today.

So, the outlook ain't good to the extent that I wouldn't be putting any money or effort into new builds or major overhauls until the picture becomes clearer.

 

[Pigeon]

And you won't be able to pin a specific railway down to an individual mine. They get their coal from a coal merchant. That merchant will themselves get it from a wholesaler. And the wholesaler will likely have a mix of suppliers for different grades of coal.

This is true, but it has become mostly possible for some years now due to the shortage of mines to choose from. They have been keen to use British coal as much as possible in order to get something usefully close to what their fireboxes were designed to handle. There are no deep mines any more, so the choice followed the rise and fall of the handful of opencast scrattings that managed to get a few years of extraction from things like scrappy thin seams that aren't practical for underground mining or reworking spoil tips. The numbers of these in turn diminished until the only one of noticeable significance was Ffos-y-Fran, which moreover was producing yummy Welsh steam coal, so for the last few years probably the majority of steam railways have become dependent on that one operation.

This has led to intermittent panics at points where one lot of scrattings was closing down before an alternative had got going, and then at points when the output of Ffos-y-Fran alone was uncertain. There has been a fair bit of off-and-on about that as they have tried to find ways to keep going and other people have tried to find ways to shut them down. Various railways have had to reduce steam services and/or use Russian coal because that's all they could get (including the Brecon Mountain Railway belching out solid blocks of дым when Ffos-y-Fran is literally over the road).

Currently it's looking like Ffos-y-Fran has just been made to close down for good when people were expecting it to keep going for another year yet, at a time when supplies are generally difficult already, and the railways are having kittens about it. The SVR (my local one) doesn't seem to know what it's going to do when its present stocks run out; local coal merchants still have some stocks of Ffos-y-Fran coal but I have no idea how much. And of course steam railways are in a particularly awkward position because it costs a couple of grand to fill a tender and it's a lot of money and they've recently taken a severe clobbering from plague restrictions to boot.

My guess is there will be a lot of agony and the main source will end up being Colombia; since the start of the month it has been illegal to sell any grade of coal with a greater volatile content than steam coal for domestic use, and this seems to have left the choice to be between various flavours of Bronowski's nuts or raw coal from Colombia. So at least we should still have a supply of something which while it might be harder than you'd want, is still clean-burning and not full of incombustible muck.

 

[railfan99]

Ravensworth mine in NSW's Hunter Valley, Australia is one that I've read produces a thermal (steaming) coal grade suitable for steam locomotives.

It's owned 90 per cent by the Swiss-owned Glencore and 10 per cent by ITOCHU Corporation of Japan. Neither are listed on the Australian Stock Exchange.

Any shipment would typically be a part of say 150,000 tonnes carried in a bulk ship from Newcastle, NSW, Australia (c.200km north of Sydney NSW).

My nation may well have other suitable stocks from other Hunter Valley mines, but this hasn't been publicised.

Colombia is half the distance the east coast of Oz is from the UK, so that means cheaper sea freight.

 

[Fleetmaster]

The state of US politics surely means that for at least as long as it takes to invent a clean alternative to coal for the heritage uses (which of course is bigger than just railways), say twenty years, there will always be a Republican state that is absolutely committed to mining top quality coal for local steel production.

Since coal doesn't have a shelf life, diverting a ship load of that periodically for export to the UK shouldn't be prohibitively expensive. The only barriers would be political, such as for example an import ban on fossil fuels in Britain, or a US Federal interference in the export (which AFAIK would be unconstitutional, but settling that can of course take years), or activist pressure on the shipping line or others involved in the supply chain.

I am confident that the counter argument that this is a tiny amount of coal being exported for a specific and if necessary legally (and literally) ring fenced heritage use, and if the supply is cut before an alternative is viable and in sufficient production the tourist economy would take a massive hit, common sense would prevail.

Then again, common sense would have said not to shut the Welsh mine unless you were sure the operator had the funds to compete the shut down works or you had a contingency fund set aside to do it yourself, but apparently they don't on both counts. Devolution working exactly as it has always done - tiny parliaments seeking global headlines and differentiation against "Westminster" at the expense of basic competence in local governance.

In short, we need American dysfunction to save us from Welsh dysfunction. Or a mad scientist having a Eureka moment inspired by a 1980s science fiction film.

Happy days!

 

[david_g]

We still haven't exactly found where the coal used on individual heritage railways is from.

My railway (the Welshpool & Llanfair) is currently using coal from Ffos-y-fran. Prior to the supply interruption last year we were also using coal from Ffos-y-fran; in the interregnum we tried several substitutes, a couple of unmentionables and eventually settled on Wildfire. Wildfire was tolerable but bearing in mind we have two miles of climbing out of Welshpool where the gradient hits 1 in 29 for a mile, the relatively small boilers are being asked to produce steam at close to their limit, so as a fireman you have to be really on it to get up in anything resembling style. The climb to the summit in the other direction isn't any easier. Furthermore Wildfire produces toffee-like clinker on the bars which has to be cleared before setting off at both ends of the line.

Last weekend I had the pleasure of being out with two trainee firemen (women actually), neither of whom had experienced Welsh steam coal and it was a revelation to them. Despite me telling them not to bale too much in and that it expands as it burns they overdid it and we had some major safety valve action but with a little experience things settled down and we had some very happy looking firemen. I took two trips up the Golfa where, after putting the fire in at Welshpool, as we went up the bank I was using the feed to modulate the pressure between 160lbs (red line) and 155lbs looking pretty relaxed and smug. You wouldn't do that on Wildfire.

What we will do when we've had our final load of finest Welsh I don't know. If the Hunter Valley coal is as good as you say maybe the HRA should be looking at tapping off a proportion of a shipload coming into Europe and stockpiling it for heritage steam use.

 

[John Luxton]

Just a thought on coal is there any chance of obtaining any from Free Mines in the Forest of Dean?

A few years ago I paid a visit to Hopewell Colliery which during the summer months does underground visits - highly recommended too by the way.

On the tour of the workings I asked the guide who was one of the miners if they supplied heritage railways. Apparently they had done but he suggested that they wanted it cheaply and as a consequence they no longer sold to them.

However, if prices have increased generally perhaps obtaining coal from these small mines might be an option.

I am not sure how many are functional and they are small but Free Miners are active and there is a active Free Miners organisation which has a web site https://www.forestfreeminers.org/

 

[railfan99]

This USA media's local UK correspondent doesn't manage to answer for the Swanage Railway and the Bluebell Railway from where exactly each obtains coal, but it's a good eight minute's viewing.

For the record, later this year I hope to do both as they're two I've yet to visit.

 

[D Williams]

Well Ffos y fran has had the rug pulled from under it https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-65399546

I wonder what happens now? I spoke to my local coal merchant today who supplies a lot of the local traction engine clan and he had some interesting stories about the lack of availability of coal of any sort let alone steam coal.