BFI

This Mining Review item looks at the work done by the private railway lines connecting the collieries at Ashington in Northumberland both to each other and to the main railway network. At the time the film was made, there were five collieries (Ashington, Woodhorn, Linton, Lynemouth and Ellington).

Running round the clock, the railway offers both a passenger and a goods service. Two thousand miners use it on a daily basis, while it also transports coal both from the collieries to the preparation plant at Ashington (the largest colliery in the group) and then on to the main rail network.

The railway was also used for other purposes. During the notorious winter of 1947, two years before this item was filmed in late December 1949, it carried food and other vital supplies to villages that had been stranded by snowdrifts.

National Coal Board records reveal that the original plan was to document the work of the Marsden colliery railway, but this line was not felt to be a credit to the NCB, and so Ashington was proposed as an alternative.

Michael Brooke

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