Hetton Colliery

As part of the bicentenary celebration of the winning of Hetton Colliery, together with George Stephenson's steam railway linking the pit with the Wear, NEIMME has organised a free talk at the Common Room this Thursday - on line from 6 pm.

Hetton Colliery, from a drawing by TH Hair 

The Winning of Hetton Colliery on 28 October 2021 from 6 pm until 7 pm on YouTube - register at eventbrite.

Clickat the top of any blog post for modern & historical engineering & other local & online Events.

NEIMME Lectures

The North of England Mining & Mechanical Institute (aka NEIMME or the Mining Institute) has recently handed over its building (Neville Hall on Westgate Road NE1) & resources to The Common Room, which led to a large HLF grant to update the building & provide more public access to science & technology, past, present & future.   The number & scope of public lectures has grown, even during Covid, and lectures are both live in person & live streamed.   Shared resources from other providers are presented through the Common Room web site, incorporating feeds from NEIMME and other partners.   Some examples of NEIMME lectures on YouTube are:

Mine Water Heating - 15 mins

Ashington Workshops Brochure

The brochure below was sent by Neil Morgan:

Ashington Colliery closed in 1988, but the associated workshops kept going with work from the remaining collieries such as Ellington.   The brochure advertises the high quality overhauls on underground locos available for collieries around the country.   Ashington attempted to keep work which BC was putting into the hands of other workshops which had become private companies through subsidy from British Coal Enterprise.

James Joicey, 1st Baron Joicey

James Joicey 1846-1936 
(1925 photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons Licence)

Tanfield Railway is well connected to James Joicey.
He is featured today on Tanfield Railway's Facebook page.
He was born in Tanfield.
He owned East Tanfield Colliery & several more around Stanley.
His companies owned many collieries in County Durham. 
He owned Twizell  &  LH&JC No.14.

NE Miners Talk

NE miners talking in 2014 of their experiences & conditions in a video on Vimeo (2015, 55 mins)
Caution - contains everyday NE dialects, pitmatic, pit humour, tales & technical terms - no subtitles

Rising Sun Colliery

Rising Sun Colliery in Wallsend, possibly shortly after opening in 1908

Photo from the website of Suscram, a group from Cramlington which promotes cycling on the former waggonways of North Tyneside.   It also has an interesting history of Rising Sun Colliery with photos.

Amber Ashington

The Amber Collective based at The Side in Newcastle publish archive photographic collections on line   Within these, there are several covering Ashington, which are linked below:

Part of the Ashington Coal Company Handbook 

Dawdon Colliery

Dawdon was one of the collieries (eg Horden, Vane Tempest) sunk in the early 1900s
using the latest technology to extract coal from under the North Sea
(photo from east-durham.co.uk)