Carpentry Shop Side of Workshop

The south elevation of the main workshop building at Elrington Colliery stands as one of the more complete remnants of a surface infrastructure that BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited built to support a very ambitious mine. The carpenter's shop lean-to sits low at the left of the frame, its roof pitched away from the main wall. Above the workshop roofline, the steel gantry crane structure projects into the sky, the functional core of a building that once contained the machine shop, electrical workshop, and a 15-tonne overhead electric crane. Elrington Colliery was established to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, drawing from the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface. Two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter, were sunk through the southern slope of the Lochinvar anticline. The railway branch serving the site opened on 14 January 1924; the first train ran on 13 June 1928. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed to produce 3,000 tonnes per day. It never came close to that figure. BHP chose Elrington as a test case for mechanised extraction methods, a deliberate departure from the hand-mining practices common across the Hunter Valley coalfields at the time. The plan collided with the realities of the Great Depression, the conservatism of a workforce wary of new techniques, and a seam that did not yield coal as easily as projected. Output through the 1950s ran at roughly half the planned capacity. In December 1962, with approximately 90 men employed and large reserves of coal still unworked in the seam, BHP closed the mine. Persistent operating losses were cited. The gantry crane and workshop walls stayed standing. On 17 June 1964, BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty Ltd at the former colliery workshops, employing approximately 50 tradesmen. The works continued under private ownership into the 1970s. The photograph, made in 2017, shows what that structure looks like now.