Wild Swan Books
Severn & Wye Railway Volume 4
Ian Pope & Paul Karau
Softback - 174 pages - £29.95
Contents- The Mineral Loop
- Along the Route
- Crump Meadow Colliery
- Foxes Bridge
- Woorgreen Colliery
- Lightmoor Colliery
- Acorn Patch
- New Fancy Colliery
- Brick Pit
- Patent Fuel Works
- Pillowell Colliery
- Park Iron Ore & Coal Sidings
- New Norchard (Pillowell Drift)
- Signalling and Train Working on the Mineral Loop
From the 1840s onwards, housecoal collieries were developing along the ridge to the west of Cinderford. By the 1860s, when they were coming into full production, a large quantity of coal traffic was being lost by the Severn & Wye to the Great Western's Forest of Dean Branch despite the fact that Bullo Dock was much smaller than Lydney Docks. The Severn & Wye tramroad was not well placed to serve such collieries as Lightmoor, Foxes Bridge and Crump Meadow as the nearest it reached was Moseley Green to the south or Churchway to the north.
Powers were therefore sought for a line of railway to serve the centre of the Forest, breaking out of the territory previously served by the S&W and into an area which other concerns may have thought was theirs. Despite the opposition of the Forest of Dean Central Railway and the Great Western, authorisation for the six mile Mineral Loop was gained in the 1869 Parliamentary session. Construction was complete by mid-1872 and it is the story of the Mineral Loop and the collieries it served that forms the subject of this, the fourth book in the series covering the Severn & Wye Railway.
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