Open Cast Mines & Quarries
A lot of material lies close to the surface, where only a thin layer of soil (called the 'over burden') has to be removed and where this is the case we find the 'open cast mine' and the quarry. These are essentially simple and have always been popular on model railway layouts set in more rural areas, adding some detail however greatly improves the appearance.
There are a wide range of rock types mined and quarried in the UK, clay used for pottery and brick making usually involved an open cast pit and there were (and are) open cast mines for coal and metal ores and sand and gravel are typically recovered from open pits. Those materials are considered separately, this section deals principally with various types of stone. The map below shows the principal areas associated with the recovery of various types of stone.
Fig ___ Stone quarrying and mining areas
Open cast mining usually features a large pit in the ground and large bits of equipment, notably steam, diesel and even electric cranes of various types. Some cranes are the conventional 'digger' type (first used in the 1850s), the examples shown below are both 'face shovels' used to dig away at a vertical face or large pile of material. In larger open cast sites 'drag cranes' were used as these can reach out much further. Drag cranes have a simple open fronted bucket which is dragged across the surface to collect material, the bucket is tipped up to empty it, they were common in sand and gravel pits but the really big examples were used in the UK for quarrying 'ironstone' (the drag line crane was invented in the USA in 1904). A standard crane design can be fitted up as either type of machine by replacing the jib or boom. The cranes were originally designed to run on rails, standard pre-fabricated narrow gauge track was commonly used in quarries as this was easy to move to a new location and for big cranes two tracks were laid side by side. By about 1920 the 'crawler crane' running on caterpillar tracks was in use, early examples were steam powered as shown below top left. The 'back hoe' is a crane with a bucket that scoops material back toward the crane (a cross between the face shovel and the drag line, as seen on the rear of the standard JCB tractor) has only appeared since the Second World War as hydraulic systems have been developed.
Fig ___ Steam and diesel excavators and a drag crane
Narrow gauge rail systems were widely used in quarries, both to support the cranes and also to transport the recovered material. Narrow gauge wagons with tipper bodies, hauled by small petrol engined locomotives (and occasionally steam engines) were very common, the photo below left is low resolution cropped image I found on the Wikimedia Commons (it has been released into the public domain by G-MAN). It shows a typical scene in a sand quarry recreated at the Amberley working museum. The older steam locomotive shown below right runs on similar track, by the 1930s the norm was a small petrol engined loco but some of these small steam locomotives lasted in use until after the Second World War.
Fig ___ Light quarry railway and stock with sketch of a steam loco
The side tipping wagons shown are a very common type called a Jubilee, although this actually refers to the oval chassis and the track they run on. The Jubilee wagons and track were built to 2 foot gauge but the chassis was sometimes modified for use on other gauges (in one case the axles were extended through the chassis, leaving the bearings on the inside, to run on nearly standard gauge line). The basic oval chassis could be adapted in various ways, at one sand pit they used pairs of these chassis to make bogie flat wagons to carry bagged dried sand from the works to the railway siding for loading onto standard gauge wagons. As far as I am aware there are no commercial models available in British N at the time of writing.
Belt conveyors were developed in the mid 19th Century, notably by the work of a Mr G. F. Lyster in Liverpool docks (working on grain conveyors). For short runs, such as on a portable conveyor elevator (used to load wagons) the belt could be all metal, for longer runs canvass or (more often) rubber with a canvas strip embedded into it was used. The longer run conveyors were fairly common by the time of World War One, but they were more difficult to reposition than the light railway track and were mainly used at the receiving end rather than at the quarry. By the 1930s very long conveyor systems were in use at larger mines, transporting material to the central crushing and grading plant, often from more than one source.
Quarries, according to the various Acts governing their operation, are at least eighty foot deep, this could mean a cliff face eighty foot high in the side of a hill or a hole in the ground eighty foot deep. The latter would often require steam pumps to lift out the water and some had cranes suspended from small trolleys running on ropes strung over the hole. An alternative for material such as sand and gravel is to float a large pontoon on the water and suspend a suction hose from this, the only examples of quarries using this kind of working I have found are all post world war two.
One characteristic feature of an open cast mine in the tipper cart or lorry, for a photo of a horse drawn tip cart see also 'Road Vehicles - Hand Carts, Horse Drawn Vehicles and Bicycles'.
The lorries were built on steam, petrol and diesel lorries and in the pre-world war two era, when hydraulics were still problematic, these came in various forms. Some had a vertical screw at the lifting end and the body had a matching attachment that would run up and down the screw, for an illustration see also 'Appendix One - Road Traffic - Steam, Motor and Electric Commercial Vehicles'. An alternative was a curved metal bar with teeth that ran between two toothed rollers as shown below (this is a preserved lorry which can often be seen at shows).
Fig ___ 1930s tipper lorry
Stone Quarries
Stone quarries can be divided into two categories; those producing large lumps of stone for building work or carving and those which ship out broken stone or 'aggregate', in practice however the former generated quite a lot of broken stone which they sold if they could.
Cut stone quarries generally use wedges driven into existing cracks or man made holes to break away the block from the surface. The blocks are often trimmed to approximate shape and size whilst still attached to the rock face, this was originally done with hand saws and similar tools but powered equipment had appeared by the turn of the century. Granite, limestone, marble and sandstone are the important building stones and slate is used for roofing.
Broken stone or aggregate quarrying is usually accomplished with explosives and results in rubble comprised of lumps from about four foot across down to dust. The large lumps need to be broken down further and up to the mid Victorian times this was often done using convict labour armed with picks and sledge hammers. Hand-breaking of stone using hammers continued into the 1930's at smaller quarries but a good man could only break up perhaps half a ton a day. Steam powered jaw crushers appeared in the mid nineteenth century and rapidly replaced convict labour in the quarries. These could be attached to a rotating metal drum with holes in it to sort the stones by size. The drum or 'trommel' could have holes in increasing size along its length to drop the stone into different piles underneath, men with shovels would then shift the graded stone back onto larger piles nearby.
Fig ___ Steam stone crusher
The main body of the unit (A) can be any rectangular section material, solid or tubular, about 6mm wide, 10mm long and 8-10mm high. This sits on a base (B) which is about 6mm high, roughly the same length as the main box but slightly wider. One one side of the main box is the drive wheel (C), this carries the drive belt from the mobile engine. On the other side and mounted at the top is the heavy fly-wheel (D), both these wheels can be represented by small press-studs.
On the same side as the fly-wheel is a smaller wheel (E) which is linked to the centre of the fly-wheel by a belt and operates the 'trommel' (F). To represent the trommel a length of old 'Biro' tube about 15mm long would serve, paint this black with some light grey dry-brushed on. When dry add black dots with a fibre-tipped pen to represent the holes. Any pieces too big to pass through the holes fell out of the far end and were shovelled back into the feed hopper for another run. The two supports for the trommel (G) are solid walls as they serve to keep the rubble divided by size as it falls from the holes. These can be made up from 20 thou card easily enough. A couple of lengths of 2mm rod or similar are glued to the top of the main box to represent the 'works' (H) and a simple hopper (I), made from paper or plastic card is added to the rear.
These machines were usually in the open, perhaps covered by a simple wooden frame with a sloping corrugated iron roof. They were usually arranged to be at a higher level with chutes down which the rubble can be shovelled into quarry wagons or directly into railway wagons.
Mechanically broken rubble, generally no larger than 'half brick' sized (about a 4 inch cube), was screened for size before being loaded into railway wagons. The 'screen' or 'grader' was part of or close by the crushing plant so the oversize bits could be easily re-cycled. The Kibri 'gravel works' mentioned under minerals handling would serve rather well for a larger stone crusher and loading screen.
The early stone crushers of the 'jaws' type were small enough to be moved about as required and a portable steam engine was often used to drive them. One of these machines would therefore set the scene in a small quarry set in any period up to the end of the 1930's. Even in a larger quarry one of these small machines left derelict on the site helps set the scene, they were usually painted all-over black but add some dry-brushed white to represent the rock dust.
In a more modern small scale stone crushing operation the larger material is supplied by dump truck or belt conveyor to a vibrating metal feeder which drops it into the jaw crusher (the primary crusher). This is a rectangular machine about 15 feet cube with large rotating flywheels on the upper sides (both sides). For modelling purposes it can be housed in a building clad in corrugated metal sheeting, perhaps twenty to thirty feet square and about twenty feet tall, the hopper feeding the crusher being on the 'roof'. The material emerging from the primary crusher is fed via conveyor to the secondary crusher, which could be another jaw crusher or a modern impact crusher. The latter is typically a rectangular machine, slightly smaller than the jaw crusher and with flywheels mounted low down on the sides (two on each side on the one I saw), in this machine the stone is divided into two streams, one going to an impeller that throws it outwards against the second stream. The stone thus smashes itself and an impact crusher can grind material down to the level of sand. For modelling purposes this secondary crusher can again be housed in a corrugated metal building, similar to that described for the jaw crusher. The output from the secondary crusher is passed to vibrating screens which separate out the different sizes (which may again be enclosed) and the sorted grades of crushed material are carried on separate conveyors to their respective stockpiles. The screens might be thirty feet long by about eight feet wide and five feet high, set at an angle of about 30 degrees from the horizontal (supported on steal H girder frames. The rock runs down metal rods on the upper surface, falling through into two or three 'bins' or hoppers inside the body of the machine graded by size. The internal hoppers feed onto conveyors to carry the material to the stockpiles. Anything too large for the screens drops off the end and is fed, again by conveyor, back to the secondary crusher. The plant as described would turn out about three hundred tons an hour of crushed rock in various grades.
Fig ___ Small aggregates quarries
Aggregates quarrying recovers various hard volcanic rocks such as granite and basalt (usually called 'granite' regardless of their actual nature), as well as sandstone and limestone. Broken limestone is used in large quantities as a flux for iron and steel making as well as in cement manufacture. If cooked in a kiln it produces lime which is used in agriculture and in various industrial processes, lime burning is discussed in more detail below.
Both granite and limestone are used as railway ballast and in road making, the hard granite goes into the foundations (called 'hardcore'), the limestone is laid on top. For road building a coating of tar might be applied to the limestone, tar will stick to limestone better than to any other rock. Where road-stone (chippings) were carried it was common to state 'Granite' on the wagon side even if the rock were for example basalt.
In smaller works up to the early 1950's the broken stone might be tipped directly from small wheeled tubs running on light plateways along loading banks in or near the quarry.
Up to the 1950's a common arrangement was to transport the crushed rock to the railway in horse drawn carts of tipping motor lorries which were emptied into wagons from a raised loading bank (see Fig ___). Many if not most quarries handling broken stone invested in light plateways, often carrying small tipper wagons. Probably the most common type was the side-tipper as shown top in the sketch below, however there were end-tipping wagons, some of which could swivel to tip sideways, as shown in the lower sketch below.
Fig ___ Tipping wagons used in quarries
The simplest representation of an aggregates quarry is a basic remote loading shed, in modelling terms it really doesn't get much easier than this, but it is a bit lacking in character. The basic building a just a box, you could make this from Slaters scribed plastic card (either 1mm scribed 'planking' or corrugated iron sheeting). The connection to the quarry proper is via the raised plateway that heads off into a cutting, it would be worth modelling a tipper wagon or two to go on the track. The weighbridge as shown would normally be there, but on a light railway you might get away with not having one (with such a short siding the positioning of the weighbridge is slightly problematic).
Fig ___ Ultra-simple aggregates loading point
At larger quarries handling regular large supplies the graded stone would be stored in over-track loading bunkers. The over-track loader might itself be remote from the quarry (or quarries) it served, connected by a lightly constructed plateway or sometimes a small steam hauled light railway. In the 1960's and 70's there was shift away from narrow gauge railways as conveyor belt systems improved.
A larger quarry or modern aggregate depot such as that as Merehead would require a massive amount of space even in N so a remote railway loading point makes an attractive alternative for the modeller. Smaller loading establishments still exist and suitable wagons for a modern scene would be the Graham Farish or Fleetline PGA 50 ton hopper wagons as used by ARC and Foster Yeoman. The 'flood loader', a large over-track loading bunker, was becoming more common by the mid 1970s, these are the more up to date equivalent of the simple loading shed shown above.
Fig ___ Simple modern aggregate loading point
The entrance to the loading bay has milky white (originally clear) plastic strips hanging down across it to prevent dust blowing about, however these wore down over time so you can cut them away to allow model wagons to enter freely. Generally there will be more than a single track, and several such loading points employ a small loco to shunt the wagons under the loader but by using a long approach siding as a works headshunt this can be accommodated on a model.
Fig ___ Simple modern aggregate loading point track plan
The siding run behind the hopper, or at least the left hand end of it, could be set aside for a 'cripple' siding, in which case a stores building should be added toward the left hand end so that local rolling stock repairs could be undertaken.
Personally I dislike the conveyor butting onto the sky so I would add a tower with a second conveyor running up from ground level, or from a raised back at the rear, with a small structure covering a hopper (fed by lorries or narrow gauge tipper wagons). Remember that the conveyor from the hopper up to the tower must end above the run from the tower to the silo, and also remember the 'angle of repose' (the slope the material forms naturally) is important on a belt conveyor, so angle the runs at no more than about 40 degrees from the horizontal.
Fig ___ Aggregate hopper loading point
One small establishment in the North East uses a raised roadway run onto a bridge leading to a simple and quite small hopper, tipper lorries are reversed along the roadway and PGA hoppers are pulled through underneath the hopper. The upper sketch below is loosely based on this prototype in the North East. This gets round the conveyor belt problem and the lorries could be replaced by narrow gauge tipper wagons if required.
The lower sketch is of a rather more substantial loader which incorporates some storage capacity. The sketch is based on a prototype at Wirksworth near Duffield, the crushed rock is supplied from the grader at the main works by a covered conveyor belt.
Both these would serve for layouts set after the mid 1930's, the lorry fed hopper requires a locomotive to move the wagons as the trucks arrive. The larger hopper held enough to quickly load thirty or more wagons, which speeds loading considerably but costs a lot more to build.
Fig ___ Remote Limestone Loading Arrangements
On the Tannant Valley railway the Steetly limestone quarry company used petrol lorries from the early 1930's to deliver crushed limestone to the railway. The lorries were tipper types and a loading bank was provided so they could pour directly into the open railway wagons. Dornaplas offer their Thornycroft lorry in a tipper version (DRN8) for pre-war layouts and their Ford lorry as a tipper (DRN14) for more modern layouts. On the same siding was a large building in which they produced tar coated stone chippings for use on the roads, known in the industry as 'blacktop'. Note this would be associated with a limestone quarry as this is the best stone for tarred chippings.
There are a couple of photographs of such a facility in the late Mike Lloyd's book The Tannant Valley Railway. I do not have my copy to hand bur from memory the siding was a dedicated private siding at some remote location, the loading bank was long enough to hold perhaps ten wagons in the open and a further three or four could fit inside the tin shed covering the tarred chippings plant at the buffers end of the siding. The plant consisted of a rotating metal drum, the chippings were put in and hot tar sprayed or poured in as the drum rotated, giving the stone an even coating.
The building if built to scale would need to be something like eight inches long by four inches wide in N, but it was rather nondescript in character. The original has a corrugated metal walls and roof but 'random stone' walls would be reasonable and easy to model using embossed card. You would need some form of chimney, but one is available as part of a set of 'industrial fittings' from Ratio, and as part of a 'boiler house' from Kestrel.
Up to the 1930's the tar would be from the gas works and would arrive either in large wooden barrels (black and carried in unsheeted open wagons) or in elderly, often rectangular, black tank wagons. If you opt for barrels these can be unloaded at the wharf, if you decide to use tank wagons you need a tar tank (less common I believe). The tanks used were usually a vertical cylindrical tank about ten feet in diameter and thirty feet high which was steam-heated and hence mounted on a brick plinth. The tarred chippings were not carried in Railway Company wagons after 1921, PO stock were used after that date. The wagons used were often three plank and no higher than five planks (quite a few were iron bodied). A Peco 'sand' load insert, painted black, would serve for the load. I believe this traffic started in the early 1920s and had faded away on the railways by the later 1930s.
Fig ___ Simple aggregate loading point and tarred chippings plant
These days the tar coating works is as often as not remote from the quarry and closer to where the material is to be used. As recently as the late 1980's BR was using old HTV twenty one ton hopper wagons to deliver the crushed limestone with the bitumen coming from oil refineries in four wheeled tank wagons. Taylor plastic models offer a conversion kit for the Peco 45 ton long wheelbase tanker to produce a standard bitumen tank wagon. The tarred chipping would then be sent out by road but the basic facilities would remain as a simple shed (probably with a lot of roof ventilation) to contain the rotating drums in which the chippings are tarred, I would assume these would probably be gas fired by the 1980s.
The other end of the aggregate business might be a builders merchant's private siding but was often the local station goods yard. The goods yards were progressively closed in the 1960's but with the construction boom of the 1970's purpose built unloading points were built, in some cases redundant coal drops were utilised.
Since the 1970's unloading points would see regular long trains of PGA stone hoppers of the type released by Graham Farish, these are bottom discharge wagons requiring a raised drop. The stone might simply be poured into the under track bays for loading into lorries by mechanical shovel or a mobile hopper with a conveyor belt might be positioned in a bay to directly load road vehicles. This latter idea means you can save some space as the storage facilities could be relatively small scale.
Where one-off flows occur BR have used bogie and four wheel tippler wagons delivered to a convenient siding and unloaded by a small crane equipped with a grab.
An experiment in 1982 when a standard PGA hopper wagon was rebuilt as a “self-discharge” wagon with a short conveyor belt built into the floor and discharged the load through an opening in the centre of the side above the solebars. This was further developed by Standard Wagon, working with Redalnd, and built two complete “Self Discharge Train” (SDT) in 1988. This was equipped with diesel powered conveyor belts, passed the load to a modified container flat wagon equipped with a swivelling boom conveyor for unloading. I believe trains were typically formed of 20 hoppers and they first entered service in April 1988, running from Mountsorrel to various terminals. The design was particularly useful for short term flows where no unloading facilities were available. More wagons were built in the later 1980s. The stock was rebranded Lafarge in 2002 but was still in use in 2008. The SDT concept appealed to the BR Civil Engineering department for use carrying ballast and spoil. This eventually led to the development of various bogie hopper designs of types YDA and YOA.
These days minerals such as limestone are often shipped by rail to a convenient point where they are stockpiled and delivered by road. In some depots tippler wagons are used for this traffic, the tippler itself often being enclosed in a large building from which the stone is moved by mechanical shovel. The example shown in the sketch below was drawn from a photograph taking in the 1980's of a depot in Scotland handling crushed limestone.
Fig ___ Modern aggregate unloading facilities.
Slate
Slate is probably the first thing which springs to mind when quarries are mentioned. This material was principally produced in North Wales, notably at the quarries in Llanberis and Bethesda although there were also quarries in Scotland, the Lake District and at Delabole in Northern Cornwall. Welsh slate is dark grey, Devon slate is blue, Skiddaw slate from the Lake District is green and purple and Ballachulish slate from Scotland is black.
The graphite in Lake District slate allowed the development of the pencil industry.
Most slate quarries were located in the hills and most Welsh slate was shipped by sea, so there were often narrow gauge lines built, often gravity-operated, running down from the quarry to the docks. The well known Ffestiniog railway was built in the 1830s to carry slate down to the docks at Portmadoc (the port was built in the late 1790s by a Mr W A Madocks on reclaimed land).The line was originally worked using horses, these rode down the incline to the harbour in a 'dandy cart' then hauled the empty wagons back up to the quarry. Steam engines first appeared on the line in 1863, and passenger services started in the same year. In the 1870s a set of exchange sidings were built at Minffordd where the slate was transshipped to the Cambrian Railway. The original name of the company was Festiniog with just one F, by the 1920s tourism was probably its biggest earner although the slate traffic continued until the later 1940s. This line was taken over by a preservation group in 1951, the line still exists (holding several world records) and is now purely a tourist line.
The slate is these days blown off the face of the quarry with explosives (in earlier times they hammered in wedges to break blocks off the face). The resulting blocks are sorted and some are cut into large slabs using rotary saws housed in cutting sheds. Slate slabs are used for electrical insulating panels in large switchboards, billiard table tops and it was once used for sinks and draining boards. It is most commonly associated with thin oblongs used as roofing material, cut to standard sizes by hand, then loaded on-edge into the small narrow gauge wagons for sending down the mountain. The narrow gauge line might reach all the way to the docks or it might arrive at a transfer yard where the narrow gauge wagons were loaded onto standard gauge transporter wagons. (See Fig ___).
Slate quarrying produced a great deal of waste, something like seventy five percent of the material cut from the rock ended up on the surrounding tips. The slate processing was often done in buildings sitting on top of these tips, which makes a full size slate quarry a difficult proposition for a model railway.
A better option is therefore to have a set of exchange sidings where the narrow gauge wagon way meets the railway proper.
When shipped by standard gauge railway the slates were stacked on-edge resting of a bed of bracken or straw in low-sided wagons, typically three plank types.
Fig ___ Slate exchange sidings
Cut Stone
Other than slate the three principal types of building stone and aggregate shipped in the UK were sandstone, granite and limestone.
Sandstone comes in a wide range of colours and textures, including grey millstone grit shipped from Derbyshire to Sheffield for the grinding of steel, the whitish Scottish stone used in Edinburgh and shipped down to London, and the red stone of the Midlands and elsewhere. Millstones for use in grinding corn disappeared in the early part of the twentieth century following the introduction of mills with steel rollers.
Granite can range from white to red, depending upon the location of the quarry, much used for building bridges and lighthouses because of its strength. Most of Aberdeen is built of a pale granite, and the surrounding area has produced considerable quantities of the stone. Other granite quarries were located in North Wales and Westmoreland, the largest sources were however in Devon & Cornwall, where there have been several thousand quarries at one time or another since the nineteenth century. Building blocks were sometimes shipped having been roughly shaped to within a couple of inches of the desired size and shape but the finishing was more commonly done on site at the quarry. Kerb stones, stone setts for roads and inlaying in tram and railway lines were produced from granite, a large quantity being shipped by rail or sea from Scotland to London.
Limestone is a white or whitish rock, used in blocks for building, kerb stones etc. or as rubble in steel and cement manufacture or to make lime (discussed below). Cement is made by roasting limestone (Calcium Carbonate), clay and coke and ends up as a mix of calcium silicate and calcium aluminate, this sets hard when mixed with water and will set under water (unlike mortar)
Limestone was an important building material until the decline in its use after the rebuilding of London following the second world war. Portland Stone is perhaps the most famous building limestone, St Paul's Cathedral is built from it and cement got the name Portland as it resembled this rock. Pulverised limestone dust, carried in sheeted PO wagons, is used in mines to prevent explosions, ICI was a major supplier and wagons used for this traffic by this firm were marked 'For Calbux only' - cal being calcium carbonate or lime, and bux referring to Buxton, a major source of supply of this material. Chalk is a form of limestone, principally used in the manufacture of cement in the older 'wet' kiln process (see Cement).
The nature of the stone being recovered has considerable effect on the nature of the quarry, its installations and the appearance of the finished product. The 'Shire Albums' range of small booklets includes a useful book "Quarries and Quarrying", which contains several pictures of quarry operations, although little on the connection with railways. The standard kit for loading cut stone onto railway wagons was the portable derrick crane, there were many variations on this basic idea, many of which are not difficult to make. The example below is a small hand operated type, using the Ratio OO scale LNER lattice signals kit you can produce a much larger type to the same basic design but steam or diesel powered.
Fig ___ Basic derrick crane
Stone could be shipped either as blocks for building (or cladding buildings), cut into kerb stones or road 'setts' or as rubble for road building (also used for railway ballast and the production of concrete). The wagons used for cut stone were generally private owner, usually of two or three plank sided types. Blocks would be laid on a bed of bracken to cushion them in transit. Stone blocks were often moved from the quarry face to the railway on small horse drawn trolleys, running on iron 'plate ways'. Is worth noting that there have been extensive stone mines operating underground in areas where the stone was only found at some depth most of these being of the 'drift' type. Where the bed of rock sloped down steeply it was necessary to have some mechanical aids to lift the cut stones up the adit, and one picturesque option is the capstan operated by a horse as shown in Fig ___ above.
Fig ___ Wagons for cut stone
Lime
Lime is produced in a kiln or oven in which limestone rock is heated to over nine hundred degrees centigrade, reducing it first to rubble, or if continued to powder. The lime burning kilns tended to be quite large even in 'N', and they came in a variety of designs. One of the more common was the tapering square tower, in N gauge these would be perhaps 30mm wide at the bottom, tapering to about 20mm at the top and about 60mm high. They were usually brick built structures, often leaning up against a cliff face as this meant the stone and coal could be tipped in at the top without having to be hoisted up the outside, there were large (six foot wide and six foot high) arched openings at the bottom where the lime was taken out at the bottom of the furnace. Hoffman type kilns were also used for burning lime (see 'Lineside Industries - Prototype industrial ancillary structures' for more on these structures) and the drawing below shows a Hoffman type kiln located in the quarry itself. A real example of such a kiln in a quarry was located close by the old Settle and Carslile railway route and this continued operating into the 1960's. A very detailed description of this works by Mr. M. R. G. Trueman was published in the Industrial Archeology Review Vol.XIV Number 2 (Spring 1992) which should be available through your local library.
Fig ___ Large quarry with lime kiln
The limestone was carried on a narrow gauge plate way in small open sided trucks. These had ends about two foot high and the rock was piled perhaps three foot high, tapering inward toward the top. After burning in the kiln the lime was dug out by hand and moved in wheelbarrows to the railway loading dock (laid alongside the kiln) where it would be tipped into 'cottage topped' wagons as available from Peco and Graham Farish.
Not all kilns were of the Hoffman type however, some were vertical kilns and some of these were tall structures mounted in the open rather than the more common mine-shaft type. The sketch below is loosely based on the kiln at Rogiet (near Chepstowe in Gwent, formerly Monmouth). The sketch shows how such a kiln could serve as a scenic break set into a corner of the layout, allowing the quarry proper to be off-scene with a narrow gauge line feeding the loading chutes on the upper siding. The second siding runs to the lime kiln but also serves as wagon storage.
Fig ___ Large vertical lime kiln
Companies involved in open cast mines and quarries
Buxton Lime Firms Ltd, later trading as ICI Lime Division
Buxton Lime Firms was set up in 1891 when a number of Derbyshire based companies amalgamated. In 1918 Brunner, Mond & Co. Ltd. acquired a controlling interest in the Buxton Lime Firms Co. Ltd., and in consequence that company became part of the I.C.I. merger in 1926, although the company name was retained as a brand for many years thereafter.
The ICI limestone hoppers, built in the 1930s and running on into the end of the 20th Century, became something of a legend. These carried broken limestone from the Buxton area to the ICI plant in Cheshire. After 1930 ICI adopted a policy of concentrating on larger more efficient works, by 1950 they had major quarries at Tunstead, Hindlow, Small Dale, Cowdale, Buxton Central and Harpur Hill in the Buxton area and also one at Llysfaen, North Wales. In 1950 the Tunstead Quarry, situated a few miles from Buxton, was the largest limestone quarry in Great Britain, and possibly in Europe and collectively the quarries in the group were producing about 2 million tons a year.
Quicklime, made by cooking limestone, was produced at Tunstead, Hindlow, Cowdale and Buxton Central and `Limbux' hydrated lime at Tunstead and Harpur Hill.
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