Mine wheel

The persistent heavy rain meant an escape to the Scottish Mining Museum and an inside blip. It had been the former Lady Victoria Colliery which closed in 1981 after producing coal for 86 years. The museum gives an excellent impression of the conditions that miners and their families had to endure during the last few hundred years and also a tour round some of the Victorian buildings. Although there are no longer any underground workings an underground roadway and coalface has been recreated with some appropriate sounds of machinery to give an idea of the conditions without the constant noise and dust.

I liked the colours of the wheel and the shiny brass and steel on the piston. This is one of the two wheels of the pit head 2400 hp steam winding engine that transported coal and almost 1000 men each day in 3 shifts up and down the mine shaft which at 530m was the deepest in Scotland when it was installed in 1894. We were surprised that we'd been there for over 3 hours and had found one of the guides extremely informative about his work a a former miner.