Mark Smith is asking about the Selby Complex of five mines -- Ricall, Wistow, 

Stillingfleet, North Selby and Whitemoor and also the surface facilities at Gascoigne Wood. 

 

Gascoigne Wood was never a production unit.  The five mines were laid out along a 

"spine" of two long (ten mile/15 km) twin conveyor tunnels which brought the coal from 

the five mines to the surface at Gascoigne Wood, which was initially intended merely 

as a train loading station.  No thought was given in the initial plans to the possibility of 

washing the coal.

 

The consultants to British Coal handling the surface buildings and facilities at all sites 

was W.S. Atkins and Partners, whom I worked for up to 1979. I was not on the Selby 

Project myself, but heard plenty about it from my colleagues (one major design meeting 

spent over two hours discussing the heating system for the buildings - the consultant 

architects recommended hot air heating through grilles in the floor, but the British Coal 

team wouldn't hear of it - they wanted hot water systems with radiators, because you 

can sit on a radiator at the end of a shift and warm your backside, which you can't do 

with a grille in the floor).  After discussing this one point at great length, the meeting 

was running out of time before the Atkins people had to catch a train back to London, 

so the discussion relating to the choice of some coal handling equipment due to cost 

about £30 million took place, and a decision was made, in the last five minutes.

 

Reports on progress at Selby appeared  in three articles all published in the June 1983 

issue of Mining Magazine. The titles of these articles are:

Progress at Selby 1 - Overall Project Concept and the Wistow Mine (pp 416-421)

(at the time, Wistow was the nearest to coming into production)

Progress at Selby 2 - Conveyor systems in the North and South Drifts (pp 425-431)

(The North Drift had a Cable Belt conveyor, the South Drift Anderson Strathclyde)

Progress at Selby 3 - Gascoigne Wood facilities (pp 433- 437) 

( Illustrations include a photo of the model of the finished layout, a very detailed line 

drawing and  a photo of the site under construction. the coal was to be stockpiled and 

subsequently reclaimed, or sent directly to a merry-go-round train.  The brief section 

on mineral processing says that there were to be two in-line magnetic separators to 

extract metallic objects, plus a sampling system to analyse for moisture, ash content 

and size. And that was it!

 

I am sure there were later mentions of Selby in Mining Magazine - dates of when 

production started at each of the mines, for example, but my disc with all texts from 

1981 to 1998 is playing up today, so I can't readily find them today.

 

Tony Brewis