Workshop Tool Racking

The main workshop at Elrington Colliery was built to keep a mine running. It housed the machine shop, the electrician's shop, and the compressor room, with a 15-tonne overhead crane running the full length of the building above the work floor. The tool racking on the wall is what remains of that daily working order: brackets, shelves, and fixings arranged for the people who needed to find things quickly and get back to the job. BHP Collieries Proprietary Limited, with principal shareholders the Broken Hill Pty. Company Ltd. and Hebburn Limited, developed Elrington specifically to supply coking coal to BHP's Newcastle steelworks. The railway branch to the site opened on 14 January 1924. The first train ran on 13 June 1928. Coal production commenced in 1930, drawn from the Main Greta Seam at 1,190 feet below the surface through two concrete-lined shafts, each 18 feet in diameter. BHP designed the colliery for a planned output of 3,000 tonnes per day, intending it to operate with modern extraction methods ahead of what was common practice in the Hunter Valley at the time. That output was never achieved. The mine operated for 32 years. When BHP closed it in December 1962, citing persistent operating losses, approximately 90 men were affected. Large reserves of coal remained in the seam, unworked. The railway branch was dismantled in 1963. The workshop did not close with the mine. On 17 June 1964, BHP opened Elrington Engineering Pty. Ltd. at the former colliery workshops, employing approximately 50 tradesmen. The engineering works continued operating under private ownership after that, the buildings holding their purpose long after the shafts were sealed. This photograph, made in 2017, records what the workshop still holds: the racking, the fittings, the arrangement of a space that was always about keeping other things in working order.