Main Engine House Door

The main engine house at Elrington Colliery sat at the centre of the surface operation, housing the winding machinery that moved men and coal through two concrete-lined shafts. Each shaft was 18 feet in diameter, sunk 363 metres through rock to reach the Main Greta Seam in the Greta Coal Measures. This photograph, made in 2017, records a wide timber door still hanging on its original rollers, open to the bush that has closed in around the site in the decades since the mine stopped working. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited developed Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to its Newcastle steelworks, with Hebburn Limited as a co-shareholder. Shaft sinking began in January 1925, with H. M. Hindmarsh, previously under-manager at the Balmain Colliery, appointed as the mine's first manager. The railway branch serving the site had opened on 14 January 1924. Coal production commenced in 1930. The mine was designed for 3,000 tonnes per day. It never achieved that figure. For reasons documented in a 1935 AusIMM conference paper by managers McKensey and Hindmarsh, and later in Ross Mainwaring's 2009 history of the site, the colliery consistently ran at roughly half its planned capacity. BHP's own 1935 jubilee publication described Elrington and John Darling collieries as "hardly excelled in modern equipment and methods of working," but the equipment and the seam together never delivered what the steelworks needed at the scale intended. In December 1962, BHP closed the mine. Approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam; the closure was driven by persistent operating losses, not by exhaustion of the resource. The railway branch was dismantled in 1963. The engine house, and this door, remained.