Northern Pits — Coal mine shaft sinking and winding | northernpits.com
How coal came up the shaft: pulley wheel and rope geometry, cage and tub capacity, cage speed and lift time, and why the ventilation shaft and the return stood alongside the winding pair.
The headgear was the first thing a colliery showed the world: a tower of roughly 25-40 m above ground level. Its height was not a matter of pride but of geometry — the deeper the shaft, the taller the tower had to be to keep the pulley wheels above the winding drum.
The rope ran from the winding drum up over the pulley wheel in the headgear and down the shaft to the cage. That geometry — drum, wheel, rope, cage — was the whole of the hoisting system, and every metre of tower existed to serve it.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
The cage carried two or three coal tubs of 0.75-1.0 tonnes each, so 1.5-3.0 tonnes per lift, and it moved at roughly 10-16 m a second. A full lift from a 300 m pit bottom took under a minute.
Multiplied across a day, the numbers explain the crew: at 1,000-2,000 tonnes of coal a day, a 300 m shaft meant hoisting tens of thousands of tubs a month, and the winding engine crew worked shifts of up to eight hours around the clock to keep the cages moving.
None of it worked without air. A working mine needed at least three shafts — one for the incoming cage, one for the outgoing and one for ventilation, the last commonly 3.0-4.5 m across — and a two-shaft colliery was a deliberate rarity because ventilation needs scaled with the coal output. The depths these systems served are set out in Shaft Depths at Northern Collieries.
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