Monday, 31 March 2025

 

Some thoughts on Northern in Tyke Country


A week away in Beverley in a holiday let right next to the town’s rather grand station, so what do we do but travel with Northern three times to Scarborough, Hull and York on separate weekdays.

 

A Northern Class 170 at Beverley

 

All the trains (6) were on time, clean, well patronised and had very robust on-train ticket checking. I did notice though the Northern and indeed wider operating rail company’s problems of Sunday cancellations due to lack of train crew.

A downside with Northern was our pre-booked, via their own website, tickets to Scarborough. I inadvertently selected the wrong Monday, should have been 24th March but I booked for 31st March. I realised my error straight away and tried to change the tickets to the correct day – wait for it!

The original tickets were £22 ish ,I recall, and the new ones were £27 ish. No problem thought I, I’d pay the extra and a small admin fee. Oh how wrong that thought was. The admin fee was quoted as £40!!! I was stunned and had to just buy new tickets and let the wrongly dated ones go. Yes, I know it was my error but £40 to change them to the right day that I wanted to travel on when the tickets were in the £20’s strikes me as appalling. Northern, a public company these days, should be ashamed of such a stunt.

 

A Northern Class 155 at Beverley
 

Other thoughts - Scarborough Station was a right old mess as it’s clearly undergoing major works. The trouble is there’s nowhere for the diesel fumes to go as the temporary roof is only a short distance above the trains. You had to walk down the platform to the uncovered part to escape the fumes.

 

A TransPennine express Class 185 at under refubishment Scarborough Station
 

OK, I’ve had a grumble but the Class 170’s were a great ride (I’d previously sampled the East Midlands Trains version of them on the Robin Hood Line down in Nottinghamshire) and even the refurbished and elderly Leyland-built Class 155’s to York were passable. So that was our experience over in Yorkshire of Northern. A bit of a curate’s egg.

Friday, 14 March 2025

 

The death of UK coal mining


Being born and raised (until the age of 6) in a mining community makes me someone with a clear link back to an industry that has now completely gone.

 


By the time I was born (1958) it seems coal mining was already in decline. Both of my grandads were originally miners but both finished their working years doing other work – one had a fruit and veg horse & cart round in Kirkby-In-Ashfield the other worked in Boots the Chemist factory in Nottingham. Of my dad’s generation, amongst my family, 2 of the men were miners but 3 were not. Of my generation (all born 1950’s) none of the 3 males became miners.

Frankly, mining was a dangerous job which many fathers clearly did not want their sons to follow on to, if there were other employment opportunities available. However, for generations alternative employments for men were few as mining communities had been developed to provide miners for local pits. The railways were the obvious alternative as wherever there was a pit there was a railway working to it. My uncle Ken Calladine took the railway route to employment.

I recently came across a YouTube video from June 1968, which I link below:-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00PpizDxVG4 *

The video is of a Nottinghamshire NUM Miners’ Gala/Demonstration through Mansfield. What particularly took my eye was the white ‘coffin’ regarding the demise of Kirkby (Summit) Colliery (closed 1968) as that was where my grandad Walter Calladine had worked many years ago. He died of pneumoconiosis, I might add.

So only 10 years after I was born the decline in coal mining was clearly deepening. Add another 40 years on and UK coal mining was all but gone with mining communities suffering great hardship due to the lack of alterative employments; some still struggle to this day! Friday 10th July 2015 saw the last Nottinghamshire coalfield mine close – Thoresby.

Many of us, if we think about coal mining at all these days, will look back to the miners' strike of 1984/85 and probably see it as the defining moment in the run down of the UK coal industry. In many ways it was, however, more mines were actually closed during Harold Wilson’s governments than at the hands of ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’.

The video is a wonderful piece of social history as much as it’s a record of proud but declining mining communities. Just imagine if we were expecting our present generation of young men to go down a pit; there’d probably be demonstrations against such dangerous work and the wording on that ‘coffin’ may change to:-


***** Colliery - Don’t send our sons to be murdered down a pit’


 * Acknowledging the MuBu Miner YouTube channel/original recording by Ken Smith

Archive footage of the 1968 Nottinghamshire NUM Gala and Demonstration passing through Westgate, Mansfield in June 1968. The theme of pit-closures is evident from the various floats, 1968 was the worst ever year for pit closures in Britain. Branch Banners, Coal Queens, Colliery Brass Bands and Carnival Bands all feature in the footage. Original footage by Ken Smith of Underwood

 

Archive footage of the 1968 Nottinghamshire NUM Gala and Demonstration passing through Westgate, Mansfield in June 1968. The theme of pit-closures is evident from the various floats, 1968 was the worst ever year for pit closures in Britain. Branch Banners, Coal Queens, Colliery Brass Bands and Carnival Bands all feature in the footage. Original footage by Ken Smith of Underwood

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