Here you will see HAA wagons discharing coal at Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station. Motvie power is 58020 Doncaster Works, 56080 Selby Coal and a pair of class 20s 20210+20214. Film shot in 1992
that was me Andy Watkinson driving the class 20 departing the power station during my driver training, in the cab with me were Andy Hudson and instructor Albert Potter....great days
Those were the days. This was my youth. Grey type fives on 4-wheel trucks. The blue choppers were just a bit before my time but I'd take them over a 58 any day. Really interesting video. Thanks!
Great to see this footage. Now all part of history. Soon to be released on my channel is footage of the last train discharging coal at Ratcliffe and of course across the whole UK for power generation.
Good capture of the automatic unloading process - pity you don't also have the door closure afterwards too - oh well, thanks anyway for awesome footage. Love hearing choppers again.
I initially thought the two people who walked away from the train were the driver and second man, and they'd just left the train to roll around the loop itself.
Same here! I thought the first guy was the second man going to change a point or something and when the second guy bailed i thought "Errr... the train is still moving. Guys?!!" Haha
Spent many hours in Fiddlers Ferry unloading these coal trains on various types of loco’s. Unloading at 0.5mph took ages especially if the controller kept putting the creep signals back against you or the plant broke down. If there was a few trains in front of you they would send out relief out to save you working excessive overtime.
I DIDNT REALIZE THE ALCO IS USED IN BRITAIN!! WHAT BRAND ARE THE ELECTRICAL COMPONENTS? I HAVE DONE A GOOD BIT OF ALCO WORK ON THE AT&SF RR AND SHORT LINES! 539s , 244 & 251s!
These had the class 56 has a 16 cyl 4 stroke Ruston rk3ct engines the 58 a V12 , the design is taken from English electric . The claas 20 has a V8 csvt English electric engine. All the engines in here are British design and build apart from maybe the 56 some were built abroard
@@rossbryan6102 No Alcos ever worked in the UK. The class 20s do have a very similar sound to Alco units, though (but it's the turbocharger, not the supercharger, that makes that sound).
Interesting that the UK used position-light signals. I thought that was something only used in the US Northeast on the old Penn. lines. I'm also a bit surprised the UK was still using coal. I'd thought that they ran out of it after the coal miner's strikes an the Thatcher era and all the mines were shut down.
l wilton The UK still has coal fired power stations but they are all set to close soon. The last deep mine closed about 5 years ago.For the past 30 years coal was imported from Europe.
Ever heard of 'import'? The mines didn't run out of coal, it's still there in the ground . Thatcher closed them as it was publicly owned and thought it was cheaper to buy it from abroad , hence the strikes- and rightly so!
Power plants keep several month's worth of coal stockpiled in case of supply interruption, such as a miner's or railroad strike. The stockpile lets them provide electricity while the problems are sorted out or at least let's them plan what to do if the coal doesn't start flowing again.
The good old days of BRITISH RAIL. Pissing your cash away to respray locos in Sector liveries. Whilst the passinger got the Pacer. Halcian days indeed.
You should see our new horse and carts. It's still murder though trying to get work in the morning. The old country lanes by the abbey at Downton are always congested. This doesn't bode well with his Lordship.🙄
Do you know what merry go round is? just so you know there is no gap between the train, in other words it is one continuously train the length from the power plant to the coal supplier and back which goes around and around non stop, same as your bicycle chain one whole piece that again goes around non stop.
No, actually it is not. The merry-go-round is the circular track at either a coal loading station or coal dumping station, the later of which was shown here. Coal suppliers and coal users can be hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, and often there is a single-track line at least part of the way between them. And other trains have to use the line between the two endpoints for other uses. So a complete loop would be impossible.
I wilton please correct me if I am wrong but the title of this video is "Merry Go Round - trains discharge coal at power station" correct, I believe we are talking about the actual train not the tracks, if the video was about tracks only!! then you will not be here watching the video, it is about the actual train, so, if the title is Merry Go Round" then is the train that is going round and round and connects the coal supplier to the power plant, so what you should see is a train completely connected in circular pattern, NO gap and the train goes around slowly non stop loading the coal on one side while unloading the coal on the other side, that I wilton is my understanding of the Marry Go Round system, you are connected at every point and you never stop because you always go in circle, I saw this in South America when I was a kid long time ago and yeah makes sense as far is the Marry Go Round.
I am guessing that English is not your first language, and from that I can understand the confusion. There are two separate clauses in the title: "merry go round" and "trains discharge coal at power station". The simple juxtaposition of those two phrases in the title does not imply that they are equivalent, but merely that they are related. The title is describing the unloading of coal (not either the train nor the tracks), and also mentions "merry go round". While the description does not say it, this is actually a description of the track layout or unloading arrangement, and not the train itself. You can think of the train as a rider on a merry go round. While a real fairground merry go round is a complete circle, in English it is common to use that term to loosely describe something that is approximately circular or repetitive, without it necessarily being an exact complete loop. "I am on the same old merry go round, I do the same thing every day." The actual unloading track (note it is an unloading track, not a loading track, or combined loading and unloading track) may be an oval or even a "U" shape. It might be more accurately described as a "balloon track" or "loop track", but in this usage colloquy is often known as a merry go round. In a sense this is a technical term in railroading that describes this sort of operation. The appurtenant requirements are that it, along with any track to reach it from the main line, is slightly more than two trains long. This allows the train to come completely off the main line before it has to slow down to unloading speed, then proceed through the unloading house at slow speed until completely unloaded, then join back onto the main track without having to reverse. I am sure there may be places in the world where there is dedicated industrial track that loops continuously from some sort of producer to a consumer, but this would be considered more of a conveyor system than a train, even if it used rail hopper cars or something like them. Something like that might well also be described as a merry go round. But what is being described in this video is simply a loop of track with an unloading house in the middle of it, and the trains that are from time to time on that track are not continuous.
Ok I wilton, point well taken and you right English is my second language, but anyway just to be sure we are on the same page, I enlisted the service of a professional in the English language, so here it is from the British dictionary: merry-go-round, denoting freight trains which deliver bulk loads of coal from collieries to power stations on a continuous cycle, loading and unloading automatically while moving. modifier noun: merry-go-round; modifier noun: MGR.
That is an interesting definition, but from talking to my friends that work in US railroads I would object to the use of "continuous cycle" on two points, as I believe it is misleading. Either the people writing that definition are talking about a construct I have never seen or before heard of, or quite possibly the person writing the definition did not fully understand what was described to them. First, while coal must be delivered nearly continuously to a power plant, this is continuous or constant in the sense of "average". Typically a coal train will unload over a period of several hours, with enough coal to run the plant for several days. Then a new train will appear the next day or several days later. So in aggregate the delivery is continuous, but in actuality there are separate deliveries at discrete times. Second, coal for a plant may not always be delivered from the same mine or mining establishment, though it usually will be for several years at a time, as the plant will usually contract for coal deliveries for several years. I grant this could be a smaller quibble, as it could be considered replacing one merry go round with another. There is a UK-specific of now discontinued merry-go-round trains on Wikipedia at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry-go-round_train. Their short description is: "A merry-go-round train, often abbreviated to MGR, is a block train of hopper wagons which both loads and unloads its cargo while moving." This may seem to be the same as the "continuous" in the dictionary definition above, but it really is not. It merely states that the train is moving when it loads and unloads, not that the loading and unloading is a continuous uninterrupted process. I think the following paragraph from the article is pertinent: "Associated with merry-go-round trains are the construction of balloon loops at the origin and destination so that the train doesn't waste time shunting the engine from one end of the train to the other. However, whilst power stations such as Ratcliffe, West Burton and Cottam had balloon loops, few if any colliery/loading points had them and thus true merry-go-round operation never really existed." It is the "balloon loop", which is an approximate circle of track, and the fact the whole train moves slowly around this loop, that results in the resemblance to a merry go round.
Gizmologist1 This video is now history. The hopper wagons used were replaced with larger wagons and most now await the breakers torch as coal is phased out. from UK power stations. The UK closed its last deep coal mine a few years ago.
I know this video is old, however from other videos I have seen from British railroad operations, the link and pin hitches along with the double 'shock absorbers'(not sure what the proper term is) are still in use. Having a man step between two moving cars even at slow speed is insane.
ISTR that GB had decided to move to the Janney type coupler, but opted to keep the buffers (the "shock absorbers") to which you refer. They are handy to keep the trains tight, though (no slack). Can't find a confirmation, however. I've always thought those link couplers were crazy outmoded, like the old link and pin coupling we used until the advent of the safety couplers.
Those are standard Parabola (Hyperboloid, sometimes incorrectly referred to as known as hyperbolic) cooling towers. They are universally used for any natural-draft cooling towers because of their design, which combines great structural strength while minimizing the amount of material required to construct them, vs. other cooling tower designs. The hyperboloid shape helps increase efficiency by accelerating the upward convective air flow, improving cooling effect. Any facility that generates steam (such as to spin a turbine and produce electricity) has to cool the spent steam back down to condensate (liquid water, as opposed to vapor) to be able to pump it back into the system to be used to generate more steam. Hardly exclusive to nuclear plants, you can find this type of tower in facilities and power plants everywhere.
That coal doesn't just disappear. If the amount of work required to get the last of the coal down the chutes was an issue, they'd have improved the system to eliminate that.
