Cool Underground Tunnel and Nanaimo's Old Mine Shafts

[GR74]

It is uncertain exactly when this coal car tailgate was buried in the ground but Saturday, May 28, 2011 was the day that it was resurrected and re-introduced to the world of the living and a brand new era.

The tailgate once belonged to a 1911 Dunsmuir coal car, remnants from a time long ago forgotten. Only a small portion of a corner was barely noticeable to passerby's.

[GR74]

Peter Roosen and I agreed to meet at Dunsmuir's Old Slope (Wellington Colliery) early this morning to recover an artifact that lay buried in the ground for decades. This location is the site of the original Wellington mine that operated from 1872 to 1888, the entire area having been reclaimed by nature long ago.

It only took about an hour's worth of time to uncover the tailgate, which was found to be in excellent condition considering its age and the fate that it had endured. That being said, it was missing one of its side mounting brackets but was otherwise completely and entirely salvageable. The missing bracket was not found.

[GR74]

The artifact will be restored and more than likely put to use on another coal car. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, folks! And yet another nice find!

[gwyneth]

Entering the Wayback Machine, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!

My first examination of the New Douglas [1911] slopes was in 1980: at least that's the earliest of the field notes that I could find. At the time, three entries open, of which one was partially caved and unsafe for entry, a second had a huge block-fall before the first cross-cut, and the third was open for two crosscuts down to the water-line. The then-Inspector of Mines had told me about the slopes, as he had had to visit the site and shut-down an attempted bootleg-mining operation. In 1980. 1980. Yup.

The timbering was by three-piece sets of end-squared and fitted round timbers: posts 30 cm diameter and stringers 38 cm diameter, with rough-sawn 10x20 cm lagging on the roof and on the lower half of the ribs. The roads were driven a bit wider than the timber sets, with the extra space on the right side of road (looking inbye) being used for stowing roof slabs and spalled material from the brushed floor. The coal was about 120 cm thick, inclusive of dirt bands, and the immediate floor was brushed down to give another 90 to 120 cm of working height. The roadway, inside timbers and above the track-ties, was thus 16o to 190 cm high and 250 cm wide, sufficient for a track and a travelling-way on the right side rib, well clear of the track and protected by the rib-lagging.

The workmanship of the timbering was precise and (to my eyes) skilful, with the tops of the posts being slightly peaked, and fitted neatly into mortised shoulders at the ends of the stringers. I did not dig down into the mucky floor to see whether there were foot-boards beneath the posts. One expects them when a floor is weak, but I observed no sign of floor heave so suspect that the floor gave adequate bearing for the posts, and by transfer, any superimposed loads from the immediate roof of the workings.

I took a number of coal samples. It would barely coke, owing to its weathering. Where non-oxidised, I'd judge that it would swell to a fair extent (coke button 4 or 5, perhaps) but make a weak and friable coke. What keeps the Newcastle bed off the coal market is its generally-high sulphur content, which is not amenable to reduction by simple washing methods. Not that that'd have mattered in 1911, of course.

[Nostradama]

Dunsmuir's Old Slope - 2011
The artifact will be restored and more than likely put to use on another coal car. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, folks! And yet another nice find!

Congratulations ! I really know darned little about mining, but I am a history buff, and I'm excited by your find. If it were not for people like you, so much history would be lost. Total congratulations to all the people who work so hard and so often alone or in small groups, making sure items like this are recovered. Most often those people don't get the recognition and thanks they deserve so much. Congratulations and thank you !

[GR74]

Congratulations ! I really know darned little about mining, but I am a history buff, and I'm excited by your find. If it were not for people like you, so much history would be lost. Total congratulations to all the people who work so hard and so often alone or in small groups, making sure items like this are recovered. Most often those people don't get the recognition and thanks they deserve so much. Congratulations and thank you !

Thanks for the compliments, Nostradama. Oddly enough, I am also very limited with my knowledge about mining but have been greatly inspired by the numerous stories that I have heard while in pursuit of my own coal mining experiences.

[GR74]

OK, here's my pictures from today. A nice elderly couple in Parksville had some antiques beside their fireplace that I was able to get some pictures of. Pictured here are a brass coal scuttle, fire dogs and some tools. The lady mentioned that they'd made their way over here from England in 1906 when her father found employment in the coal mines. She figures that they are probably late 1890's, hand-crafted of course. Family heir looms that her kids are fighting over! They were also available in copper.

[GR74]

Along with the coal scuttle were a pair of fire dogs! And some tools consisting of a poker, some pinchers, and a scoop! All over that stuff, I was!

[GR74]

This is a look at Blunden Point from Lantzville Beach (Shangri-La Rd) this morning at around 08:30. I made a brief stop in me olde neighborhood before beginning me work day. Anyway, I stumbled upon some track buried in the sand, possibly from the mining era and probably incorporated into somebody's homemade boat launch once upon a time, the same idea as Departure Bay Beach. Don't ask me how I find this stuff, I rarely go around searching. I think that the stuff comes to me! I practically tripped over this track as I was walking along the surf and staring out to sea! And wouldn't you know it, I just happened to have my camera!

[Nostradama]

And off-topic, for which I apologize. That set of fireplace brasses is extremely valuable from a historical viewpoint, and I hope that when the elderly owners "go", the family infighting over who gets what doesn't end up with the set being broken up. Among "housewives" a woman was judged by the "state of her brasses," and it wasn't uncommon for the brasses to be polished daily. There was a huge empasis on cleanliness, because the only heat in houses was coal-fired fireplaces. That resulted in a constant battle against the dirt left by burning coal, both inside and outside the house. In my mother's family, at least once a year big batches of bread were baked just to be torn apart when fresh out of the oven, and sort of rolled over the wallpaper in the house to take dirt off. Any "decent" woman scrubbed her front doorsteps every day, and usually polished the brass door knob, too. My mother and her eight sisters used to go to what they called a "Turkish bath", like a sauna, once a month and when they were there, sweating, they could run their hands over their skin and end up with their hands sort of grey from coal smoke "sweated out". London probably wasn't dirtier than other cities, but it was known as "the big smoke". Biggest disappointment of my young life was being taken to see Buckingham Palace. Immediate thought "big and dirty". What you see these days isn't what Buckingham Palace used to be--it was sandblasted back to its original colour years ago, after maybe a couple of hundred years of coal smoke. Again, apologies, but maybe I'm a dying breed--I saw what coal smoke had done to Buckingham Palace; I remember what my parents told me about life with coal fires and coal smoke, and they were born in 1904 and 1906.