Main Engine House Basement

Beneath the main engine house at Elrington Colliery, near Abernethy, a low corridor runs under the engine room floor. Rusted machine parts from the operational years remain in place along the passage, undisturbed. The concrete walls and ceiling close in around the space, which serviced the equipment above and the two 18 ft concrete-lined shafts that were the mine's primary infrastructure. Those shafts were sunk to 1,190 ft below the surface to reach the Main Greta Seam, a hard bituminous coal in the Greta Coal Measures on the southern slope of the Lochinvar anticline. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with Hebburn Limited as a principal shareholder, developed the site from 1925. The ground lease was executed on 13 November 1925 from lessor Charles Phillip Latter to BHP Collieries. Shaft-sinking operations were already under way by 31 January 1925, when the Newcastle Morning Herald recorded that all machinery had been installed and two shafts were planned. The mine was established specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks, with a target output of 3,000 tonnes per day. It never reached that figure. Coal production commenced in 1930, and through the 1950s the mine was producing roughly 1,500 tons per day on average, approximately half the planned capacity. The nickname that eventually attached to the colliery was the Peter Pan Colliery, because, like Peter Pan, it never grew up. Elrington Colliery closed in December 1962. About 90 men were affected by the closure. Large reserves of coal remained untouched in the seam. BHP attributed the closure to persistent operating losses. The railway branch serving the mine was dismantled the following year. This photograph, made in 2017, records the engine house basement corridor as it now stands, machine parts rusting in position, the passage intact, the shafts long since sealed above.