Londonderry Collieries 20t Hopper Pack from Accurascale

History

Built on the site of old blast furnaces, situated at Nose’s Point south of Seaham Harbour, construction of Dawdon colliery commenced on August 26, 1899 to alleviate the expense of mining the old shafts at Seaham Colliery, and the colliery fully opened in 1907.

By 1910, the 3,300 miners at Dawdon Colliery were already producing one million tons of hand-mined coal per year and by 1930 the numbers employed at the colliery had reached their peak, with a workforce totalling 3,798 people. Prior to 1899, Dawdon had been a small village of 83 houses, but under the patronage of the Sixth Marquess of Londonderry, it was extended during the early 20th century, by the building of twenty streets of new housing to accommodate the rapidly growing workforce at the colliery.

In the early 1930s, the increasing tonnage mined by Dawdon Colliery led Londonderry Collieries to issue an order for a new fleet of wooden 20T hoppers, with Charles Roberts & Sons winning the contract, constructing the new wagons during 1935. The design was virtually indistinguishable from the North Eastern Railway P7 types, even down to the fitting of extended wooden stanchions and the end open ‘letterbox’ recesses for assisting in rope haulage operations. As elsewhere, the wooden stanchions were quite quickly sawn down to headstock level, in line with general LNER practice, but examples persisted even into the 1950s.

Under the nationalised National Coal Board, steel bodied wagons rapidly replaced wooden bodied wagons at the collieries, and the surviving former wooden 20T workhorses were either moved centrally to Seaham, to be used for the tipping of spoil and ‘smalls’ (bought up from the staithes by the fleet of Seaham’s Chaldron waggons), or derated to 15 tons for the removal of very large coal pieces.

Unlike the Chaldrons at Seaham, which had a usefulness not served by other wagons, the surviving 20T hoppers were surplus to requirements, and had all but disappeared from the railways of the Londonderry system by the early 1960s.

The Model

The Londonderry Collieries 20t hoppers completes Accurascale’s NER hopper wagon line up for their first run of these wagons. The NER 20t hoppers provide an essential part of their "Powering Britain" series of coal wagons through the ages of the railway. They feature a wealth of detail, separately applied parts, a full diecast chassis for extra weight, various detail differences, brass bearings, sprung buffers, NEM coupling pockets and detail packs.

These wagons are now in production and arrive in stock late Q4 2024.

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