This film is part of Free
Mining Review 6th Year No. 3
New colliery opens at Calverton in Nottinghamshire and a visit to Rugby Locomotive Testing Station
Overview
Mining Review took viewers round the regions with the National Coal Board - in this case, to Nottinghamshire, where a special train takes dignitaries to visit the new colliery at Calverton. With a predicted million tons of coal a year for the next 100 years, it's sad to discover this colliery closed in 1999 without reaching half of its anticipated lifespan. In Kent, Valentine Dial informs his co-workers of productivity via a new public address system. a new school is opened at Kelloe, in the Durham coalfields, and in Rugby, main line locomotives are put through their paces.
Both Calverton colliery and the Rugby locomotive testing station had been many years in the making. The lack of an independent testing station had been a source of great frustration to the chief mechanical engineers of the pre-war Big Four railway companies - but a plan to jointly construct a rolling road capable of handling the largest wheel arrangements didn't come to fruition until the early days of nationalisation. Here we see one of Bulleid's original Merchant Navy locomotives tested for general performance and efficiency in March 1952 – the first of three visits for this locomotive.
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