The Last Train from Tower to Aberthaw

Introduction

Coal has been mined in Wales since the 15th century and was often called “Black Gold”. Tower Colliery was the last operational deep coal mine in the South Wales Valleys, located near the town of Hirwaun. It was on the Northern edge of the South Wales coalfield. The coal was close to the surface and drift mining was practised between 1805 and 1941 when a 160 metre deep shaft was sunk. In 1951 a branch railway line was extended from Aberdare to the colliery to enable mined coal and freight to be transported.
The mine was in constant use up to 1984/5 when the Conservative government authorised the closure of the majority of the deep mines in the UK, prompting the National Miners strike. The Tower mine was still economically viable, but despite protests by the miners against its closure, British Coal closed Tower Colliery on 22nd April 1994.
The Tower story didn’t finished there as 239 miners, led by Tyrone O’Sullivan formalised a scheme to buy back Tower and re-open the mine. Each miner paid £8,000 of their redundancy pay-out and the colliery opened again on 3rd January 1995 with the new name “Goitre Tower Anthracite”. The colliery continued to operate until the coal was mined out in January 2008 and it was officially closed on 19th January.

Tower Regeneration

Although deep coal mining was not viable at Tower, there was still an estimated six million tons of anthracite available near the surface. Tower management, led by Tyrone O’Sullivan proposed extraction by open cast mining on the 200 acres site next to the Tower railway line.
The regeneration scheme was a joint venture started in 2012 between Tower Colliery Ltd and Hargreaves Services PLC to extract coal over a period of seven years. After coal extraction the plan was to restore the land for future development by the County Council.
The company expected to remove a million tons of coal each year to be burned at Aberthaw Power Station. The coal price at that time was £50 per ton and the company turnover at that price would be double that of the Tower deep mine. With coal reserves planned to last for at least six years, the predicted last mining date was mid-2018. In 2016 concern over the high nitrogen oxide emissions at the power station brought this date forward to March 2017.

​The Last Train from Tower to Aberthaw

This project tells the story of the last Welsh coal to be delivered from the surface mine at Hirwaun to the power station at Aberthaw in South Wales. On Friday 24th February 2017, the last two Tower coal trains were due to arrive at Aberthaw, sixteen miles West of Cardiff. Each train would carry 1,400 tons of coal in twenty wagons, one arriving at 13.58 and the last at 21.20.

Tower Hargreaves Surface Mine

The coal started its journey in the hillside at Hirwaun where it was mined by giant excavators at the surface mine run by Tower Hargreaves. In the last productive week, the mine delivered 14,000 tons of coal to help power the three steam turbines that supply half the electrical power used in Wales during the winter months. The contract to supply coal to Aberthaw finished at the end of February 2017 and the mining operations were due to complete around the end of March 2017.
This project shows the whole journey from coal excavation to the production of 530 MW of electricity in each of the three generators at Aberthaw. The project has evolved over a five-month period and started with the idea to document what is left of the coal mining industry in Wales in 2016. From Internet research it was obvious that large scale deep underground coal mining is not practised any more in South Wales, but there was evidence of drift mining and some surface mining being carried out in at least two sites around Merthyr. One of these was the surface mine run by Tower Hargreaves.
A reconnaissance visit was made on Saturday 15th October 2016, mainly to ask if it would be permitted to take some pictures at the site. The response was that it would be permitted, but for safety purposes photography was restricted to images taken from inside a Land Rover, on a site tour. The following images give us an idea of the landscape and the machinery used on the site.

 

 

 

 

 

Loading the coal train

The next stage of the journey was to re-visit the site to photograph the coal being loaded onto a train destined for the Power station. I contacted Steve Forward the loading supervisor at the mine and went back to Hirwaun on a very cold and wet day in January 2017.
The following images show the railway loading area, the train arriving and part of the loading process.
The whole process takes around two hours as railway wagons need to be uncoupled. The train is too long to load in one go on the short section of line available.
Before being loaded, the wagons are checked with an overhead camera to ensure they are empty. Coal loading is accomplished using a large tractor unit and scoop that delivers ten tons at a time. This is measured automatically by weight sensors on the tractor unit. Each wagon holds seventy tons of coal.

 

 

 

 

 

Aberthaw Power Station

​At peak output in the winter months, Aberthaw Power Station burns between 5,000 and 6,000 tons of coal per day. The coal is used to drive three massive steam turbines which generate up to 1,600 MW of electricity.
Aberthaw was built in 1971 and specifically designed to burn Welsh coal. In recent years the power station was declared to be in breach of European laws concerning nitrogen oxide emissions. In September 2016 the European Court of Justice concluded that the UK Govt. had incorrectly applied an emissions derogation to the Aberthaw Power Station and duly instigated the introduction of new, lower emission limits. The power station had to stop burning Welsh coal from April 2017 onwards and the contract with Tower finished in February 2017.
I wanted to show how and where the coal is used and contacted the Power Station in mid-February 2017 to obtain permission to take pictures at the site. My initial contact at RWE Generation, the company that runs the power station was Julie Rigby who passed my request to the Materials Handling Section Head, Glyn Cox. A visit was organised on Wednesday 15th February 2017.
I arrived at Aberthaw Power Station visitors reception at 13.30 and was shown a safety video. Glyn met me and provided safety equipment. He then took me round the entire facility.
​It was interesting to see the journey the coal made, including train arrival, the conveyor system, where it is burned and finally the control room. The images here show some of this journey.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Rail Journey

The final week of coal delivery from the Tower Hargreaves mine started on Monday 20th February 2017. The previous week I had scouted out the rail route from Aberdare to Cardiff and checked the train arrival times at the power station. The mine was contracted to deliver two trainloads of coal each day that final week, with the final 1,400 ton load arriving at 21.20 on Friday 24th February 2017.
I wanted to find a good spot to view the trains and also work out the exact times the trains passed each point. Four different viewing spots were visited between Wednesday and Friday of that final week. The images show some loaded trains heading for Aberthaw and some empty trains going to Hirwaun to be loaded with coal. I was lucky that the weather was fine for the images of the two trains on the last day.