Poignant photo (taken from Facebook) from Ferrybridge signalbox marking the final shift at Kellingly Collery, the last deep coal mine in Britain.  The end of an era.

The histories of the British coal and railway industries have been intertwined from the very beginning. The first railways were built to carry coal. If you look at a historial rail atlas, all of Britain’s major coalfields were covered in a maze of lines, most of them now long closed.  Even after privatisation, coal was still one of the major freight traffics on the network.

The railways still carry a fair bit of coal, mostly foreign imports plus a handful of opencast mines in Scotland and Wales. But as CO2-emitting coal-burning power stations are being phased out it’s already in steep decline. Relatively new bogie coal wagons are  starting to go for scrap because there’s no longer enough work for them.

The closure of the last deep pit marks the beginning of the end.