Shale Oil Works at Newnes

Newnes, in the Wolgan Valley, was the site of a large scale shale oil production facility which operated between 1906 and 1937. The plant exploited deposits of oil shale or torbanite which were exposed in the sides of the Wolgan Valley associated with coal deposits. The deep valley exposes over 300m of Narrabeen group sediments and underneath this are the Illawarra Coal Measures which had a mixture of coal seams and a seam of oil shale about 60m below the start of the Illawarra Coal measures (i.e. c360m below the top of the valley sides). This seam is found in the Wolgan Valley and in the neighbouring Capertee Valley where the Glen Davis shale oil works were found.

Looking into the Wolgan Valley

Although there was some earlier mining and exploration in the Valley, it was not until 1906 when the Commonwealth Oil Corporation began operations that the shale oil began to be commercially exploited. The Commonwealth Oil Corporation bought the New South Wales Shale Oil Company in 1906 who seem to have had some works erected at Newnes and moved its operations from its site at Torbane and erected an elaborate works and a 51 km long tramway from the Main Western Line at Clarence. The company erected a larger plant at Newnes in 1907-09 with the shale being treated at its Hartley Vale plant from 1906 –1909.

From the start the project was plagued by labour issues (one strike lasted seven months) and lack of capital. There was also the question of imports of “foreign oil” which the company wanted “tariff protection” from. There were also technical problems with the retorts when they were finally completed in July 1911.

Solving the technical problems and continuous industrial problems put an end to the Commonwealth Oil Company as it simply ran out of capital. However the receivers under the technical leadership of Mr John Fell modified the retorts and production slowly was resumed in late 1915.

Production continued until 1922 when the the works closed again this time for good.

The coke ovens of which there were 90 were a success supplying metallurgical quality coke to the Great Cobar refining works and the Hoskins steel works at Lithgow .

This is the remains of the Paraffin sheds (quite what they did I haven't discovered as yet). This was clearly a substantial structure with a reinforced concrete floor.

These are retaining walls around the site of the retorts. the retorts were removed and re-erected at the Glen Davis site.

These are remains of the Naptha plant

The site is owned by NPWS and there is a walking trail and interpretation provided. Here we see members of the Institution of Engineers, Heritage Section reading the sign!!

In company with other industrial heritage enthusiasts I inspected the site on the 23rd March 2013 and the site plan shows our track. There is quite a bit to see and lots to understand about the processes on the site. It was a bit difficult to take it all in on one visit especially as it rained just as we got to the site.

Some photos from the Taipei Railway Workshops

We visited the Railway Workshops as part of the pre Congress tour – the congress being the TICCIH Congress which was held in Taiwan in early November 2012.

As I understand it the Workshops were established by the Japanese colonial administration c1900 and were part of a series of now redundant railway infrastructure forming a heavy rail corridor. The workshops are still open but seem mostly to use used for storage.

 

It was difficult to get a decent plan but this plan was seen in the works so may be accurate.

There was a large boiler in residence we were told it was from DT  668 but as we saw that loco in steam two days later maybe it was a spare, Here we see Neil Cossens inspecting the boiler.

Later we entered a workshop that contained numerous furnaces and metal working equipment such as steam hammers which we assume was for metal fabrication. The equipment was a mixture of German, British and Japanese origin.

 

We all expressed the hope that any conservation of the site understood the importance of the contents of the workshop as well as the buildings.

A little more light shed on Sunny Corner

Followers of this blog and friends will know of my on-going involvement with the Sunny Corner mining site. I thought I had pretty much mined all the Australian newspapers for relevant information. Imagine my surprise when I  found an article in Australian Town and Country Journal 23 Mar 1895: 31 on the mines at Sunny Corner.

Then I found it was illustrated!

Then I realised that apart from the Sunny Corner mine there was a rare illustration of the Silver King mine as well.

This is the Sunny Corner Mine

This is the Silver King Mine

The Silver King image gives a really good sense of where the processing plant was located in the landscape.

It is exciting to be surprised by discoveries like this.

Sunny Corner plan

Following on from my earlier post here is a plan of the Sunny Corner site.

Sunny despite the rain

Well after several days solid work (spread out over 6 months) I have finished the search of the Digitised Australian Newspapers for information regarding the Sunny Corner Silver mine. I have clipped the information into a MS Word document which is 111 pages and has 63,959 words! Supporting this is another smaller document on Mitchell’s Creek (the name Sunny Corner had prior to silver being discovered) plus two largish files of Mines Department Records. Downloaded from DIGS.

There was an earlier history of Sunny Corner by Vicki Powys published in 1989 (Powys 1989). It is an excellent historical study. However since Powys research, the on-line revolution has arrived. So much hitherto hidden or difficult to research information has become available on-line.

When I did my first research in late 2008 I had access to Powys book and the Mines Department Records (via DIGS). The digital Australian Newspapers project was only just beginning meaning that I got some accounts of Sunny Corners that were reprinted in the Courier Mail. Last year, when I started this current research, I decided to search the digitised Australian Newspapers systematically and comprehensively as hundreds of papers had been added. Notable among these were the Sydney Morning Herald, the Town and Country Journal and the Bathurst Free Press which covered Sunny Corner.

Newspapers have been available for historians for many years but the difficulty has always been the immense task of systematically searching the newspapers for items of interest to a particular topic. The searchable Australian Newspapers allows a detailed searching of available newspapers so that general topics such as “silver smelting” can be searched as well as “Sunny Corner” or more specifically individuals like “John LaMonte”. This tool has transformed historical research by allowing a more systematic search across a number of publications in seconds.

Supporting such research is also the invaluable Google and the less known Internet Archive which contains numerous on-line copies of old manuals on arcane topics but which tell much about the process of silver smelting and other methods of processing silver-lead and zinc ore prior to the invention of froth floatation.

The Challenge

The challenge now is to turn these words into some form of understanding of Sunny Corner and the mining that occurred there in a reasonable number of words without getting bogged down in the detail.

Tramway at Sunny Corner

Some of you may know that over the last two years I have been doing some work on the former Sunny Corner mining site. Last week I was on site doing some archaeological recording prior to remediation works. While recording the lower edge of the earthworks forming the Open Roasting Pit (where the ore was roasted to make it more suitable for smelting) I came across these remains.

(yes that is the correct slope!)

Care full examination revealed these to be two timbers held apart by metal rod on top of a metal frame with a bit of rail that again keeps the rails apart at a set gauge.

Here is a detail of the metal frame with the rail “in situ”.

Not much is known about how the open roasting pits worked but from the remains it seems that a small tramway network was used to move the ore and presumably firewood around.

Not much has survived since c1889 when the Mine closed. Presumably all the good bits were salvaged for reuse elsewhere while these pieces were thrown over the edge to rust.

Because I had a sub-metre GPS with me, I can tell you that the remains are located at

Northing    6303672.578
Easting    769197.279

GPS_Height    1095.101

I imagine that this form of tramway construction would have allowed the easy realignment of the tramway during the process of roasting the ore.

It is a long trip to Broken Hill

As an outback town Broken Hill is reckoned to be not all that far away and from a South Australian perspective maybe it isn't, but from Sydney it is a long drive and for the organisers of the 2010 Outback and Beyond Conference is has also been a long 18 months or so. So here we all are ICOMITES and TICHS waiting for the Conference proper to start.

To get here I forsook the plane and the train for my car and the back roads of NSW. I decided on the route through Cowra, West Wyalong, Rankin Springs, Hillston and Ivanhoe. Leaving at 6:30 I got to Ivanhoe by 5:30. Ivanhoe was quite desolate so I decided to push on to Menindee some 200k by dirt. I stayed the night at the Menindee Caravan Park.

The landscape from West Wyalong onwards was essentially flat with the odd range of hills. We had been promised plagues of locusts and while swarms were not obvious there were enough locusts to force several window cleaning stops. The locusts are a sign of the good rains we’ve been having this year.

Another sign is the flooded Menindee Lakes refilling from Queensland flood waters from the Darling River.

Menindee has the lakes (a series of lakes with lunettes) and the Darling River. It was for a time the terminus of the standard gauge line from Broken Hill which reached Menindee in 1919. There it stayed until a lifting bridge (for the river boats) was completed and the line through to Dubbo and the rest of the NSW rail system was completed.

This is the bridge in question, shorn of its concrete weight that provided the counter balance to allow the bridge to open but also showing in the foreground the pump inlet – I think for the water pipe to Broken Hill.

After driving around Menindee i headed west towards Broken Hill. About half way Stephens Creek in encountered and after that the first sign of my destination – the Barrier Silver fields could be seen.

The blue line of the distant ranges. Therein lies the richest sliver lead zinc lode and 125 years of Australian mining history and of course heritage.

The mysterious workings of JCIS

For various reasons in late 2009 various projects that JCIS had worked on but had stalled came to life and so we are busy writing reports. We finalised one last week and so this week we have been getting ready for the next one.

The problem is finding all the items that allow a report to be written. There are images and videos on my computer, PDF’s of previous reports. Paper files and reports from the depths of the filing cabinet. Plans and excavation notes along with the artefacts were last seen (by common recollection) in the garage. However they were not obviously there.

Two days later I can report that – the garage is clean and reorganised. A car load of material (and a small brown dog) has gone to the recycling depot and we have come back with nothing new! My office is cleaner and more organised. My model trains have been catalogued and joy of joys the plans and field notes have been discovered on top of a considerable pile of material on Japanese Industrial History.

They were placed there as I recall just before everything went down to the Yass project. Phew!.

What is this?

The following are photos of some machinery located beside a railway track (between two inspection pits) at the former Clyde Wagon Workshops.

One one side is this object which seems to be operated by some sort of air cylinder (it looks quite a bit like the air brakes under a wagon).

On the other side (i.e. opposite) is this item

I thought that they might be some sort of retarders except they are on the wrong side of the track!

This area was used to do heavy repair of four wheel wagons so I am assuming it relates to this work.

All ideas welcome.

The Fall of the Wall meant the end of many things

In the last two days there has been a great deal of interest in the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin and the consequent reunification of Germany months later (typically reported as the reunification of Berlin!). We have been very interested in all this as Jane and I were in Germany in August-September.

I keep thinking of Chemnitz where they have 30,000 empty houses (symbolic of the population migration and decline)and apartments and a large head of Marx.

I think of the Bio Towers of Lauchammer. These are the few remnants of a truly remarkable endeavour the production of coke from brown coal

In 1952 with supplies of quality coking coal from the Ruhr region (in West Germany) the former GDR needed another source of coke for its industry (coke is critical in iron production). The world’s first large-scale lignite (Brown coal) coking plant came into service at Lauchhammer. This technological breakthrough enabled the GDR to replace imported coke with it own supplies.

The process involved briquetting the coal to achieve an even grain size and a reduction of moisture content to about 1%. The briquettes are then coked.

Lauchhammer laid the foundations for the expansion of the East German metallurgy industry. Briquetting plants and power stations started springing up in the industrial haze surrounding the town.

The bio-tower are called tower-type trickling filters they were trickling installation for the biological purification of coking plant wastewater containing harmful substances from the coke works

But of this break-through plant nothing much remains except for the bio-towers. The post-reunification era demolition fever did more than flatten factories: it damaged the identity of Lauchhammer and its people by basically throwing them out of work and devaluing their achievements.

We visited the bio-towers and were greeted by members of the Traditional Brown Coal Association who were keen to show use around. One of their publications Die BraunKohlenengrosskokerei Lauchhammer. Lauchhammer: Traditionsverein Braunkohle (written by an editors cooperative) proudly details the works and the hours and awards its staff were given.

All this is not to say that the GDR was a happy place, clearly it was a most totalitarian and repressive regime and its replacement is a huge step forward for the people of East Germany but and there is always a but, there was a human cost to the people at Lauchhammer that the restoration of the bio-towers can only go some way to heal.

Industrial Nature at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin

Industrial Nature is a concept that originated in Germany – particularly with the deindustrialisation of the Ruhr (Zollverein for example is a good example of such a site). The term refers to three things – the revegetation of industrial sites by native species, the colonisation of industrial sites (working or abandoned) by species adapted to the new environment created by industry and the deliberate plantings on industrialised sites.

The Deutsches Technikmuseum (German Technical Museum) at the former locomotive workshops and goods yard (Anhalter Güterbahnhof) of Berlin-Anhalt Railway Company. The workshops were closed in 1952 but it is not clear when the goods yard was closed. The Museum began using the site in 1987 – naturally it houses a display of railway locomotives and associated items.

There are two roundhouses around two turntables and if you look at Google Maps you can see gaps in one of the roundhouses which are described as follows

“A group of three overgrown tracks in the first engine shed provide a reminder that the site lay abandoned for thirty years. The plants growing here include the Mahaleb cherry (normally a Mediterranean plant), giant knotweed (a native of Siberia) and the medicinal herbs evening primrose and lady’s mantle.”

This is what they were talking about - the abandoned tracks have been colonised.

Below is another example of a ruined building next to the roundhouse simply being left for nature to colonise.

This is a interesting management technique one that could meet both industrial and nature conservation goals without the “prettying up” of sites that often occurs.

The Museum also preserves trains – this is an example of the V-200 class of diesel hydraulic locomotives in service from 1957 to 1984 and cosmetically restored.

Ballast Point- Interpreting Industrial Heritage

In the wonderful world of heritage there often seems to be two options when it comes to managing an industrial site with heritage values – adaptive use as some form of community building like a museum or gallery or demolition. There are limitations to both approaches demolition is forever and with museums and galleries often sites are transformed so that their heritage disappears or the sites gradually fall into disrepair as profits seem never to be directed into maintenance.

Ballast Point in Birchgrove is the site of the former Caltex Depot. Purchased in 1928, by Texaco (later Caltex) who demolished a large house, Menevia, which was on the site to construct a fuel depot, manufacturing and packaging facility. Ballast Point formed Texaco’s and later Caltex’s major distribution point in Sydney and continued in use until the late 1990s.

Ballast Point in 1943

In September 2002, the derelict site was returned to public ownership after compulsory purchase for A$24m by the NSW Government. Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority worked with McGregor + Coxall Landscape Architects to design the park and Landscape Solutions for construction. The site as opened on the 11th July 2009.

Jane, Alistair and I have been there twice. It is really great. it is not a sanitised landscape but one that actively engages with the industrial remains there to provide a rich experience for dogs and people.

Here is Alistair exploring some sort of structure. He has has a great time climbing in and out of things and generally being “Action Dachshund”. For the rest of us the park offers fabulous views of the Harbour, well designed and interesting walks, great toilets and interesting archaeology.

Here it all is you can see the base of a tank, the Bridge and that rotten old Blues Point tower and the foundations of a building underneath where the tank was.

The past is not hidden, it coexists with the present so that a trip to Ballast Point is exciting whether you are an Industrial Archaeologist, landscape designer, 92 year old Mother in Law, excited dog or one of the many kids rolling down a grassy embankment.

Ballast Point is a great example of how industrial heritage can live on.

Photos of the Edwin Davey Weighbridge

Here are some photos of the remains of the rail weighbridge used by the Edwin Davey Flour Mill.

This is the Flour Mill building sitting on the sandstone escarpment. The siding was located in the middle ground where the fence is. The weighbridge and loading facilities were located roughly where the graffiti can be seen.

The overhanging part of the building is where the grain was elevated to.

This is a view from the top of the escarpment looking down on the rail weighbridge. You can see the weighbridge itself and remains of the balance and evidence of underground loading facilities.

This is a close up shot of the weighbridge and balance. The weighbridge was made by the Australasian Scale Co, Sydney which were associated in some way with Avery’s the British scale manufacturer. You can see artefacts associated with graffiti art discarded on the ground.

The Edwin Davey Flour Mill and its rail connection

I have been doing a heritage assessment on the rail weighbridge that served the Edwin Davey Flour mill in Pyrmont. The Mill which was established c1890 and taken over by Edwin Davey in 1900 was connected to the Darling Harbour Goods line when it was constructed c1922.

The siding was cut into the sandstone escarpment on which the mill stood creating space for several wagons and a rail weighbridge. Wagons presumably were weighed and then discharged into underground bind that conveyed the wheat to bucket lifts that took the wheat up the escarpment to the storage silos in the mill. There is no evidence that the Mill discharged flour into rail trucks.

This is an undated photo of the siding and the mill. From the ‘newish” look of the exposed sandstone cutting it must have been taken when the siding was newly opened. If you look closely you can see that the wagons on the street outside are horse drawn.

What is interesting about the place is that later a connection was made to the Sydney City Council’s depot which seems to have been established in an old quarry (probably “Hellhole”).

I haven't been able to establish a date for the siding. If you look at the website for the City of Sydney archives (http://www2.photosau.com/cityofsydney/scripts/home.asp) you can search on Wattle Street and see pretty much all their photos. The earliest ones date to 1931 and show the siding with wagons “in situ” (e.g. SRC 13736). It looks like that the Council had established an asphalting plant on the site which was located at the rear of the site next to the quarry face and which was loaded from Jones Street.

The railway wagons seem to have discharged from their elevated track onto the area at the base of the asphalt plant. Later there was some sort of cement making plant as well. It seems obvious that the wagons (only 4 wheelers have been seen) brought in material for Council use.

This plan taken from the current Parish Plan shows the layout of the Council’s siding and the rather complex shunting required from the Flour Mill siding. There wouldn't be much room for traffic so presumably the trains were short or stood on the main line while portions were shunted.

The Council siding seems to have lasted until at least 1970 – it is not there in 1973 I think. The siding to Edwin Dave lasted until 1995 – I even saw a 48 class hauling some wagons from the siding when I first moved up here.

My thoughts about this area also drift to what an interesting little model railway this would make.

Any further information on the topic would be most welcome.

Industrial Heritage and Art: Yamamoto Sakubei in Tagawa

This is Yamamoto Sakubei one of the most stunning artists in the area of industrial heritage I have ever seen. I am not sure of his story but his art – in the form of pre-Manga drawings - documents life in the coal mines of Tagawa in the Chikuho region of Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu. I know very little about him except that he was an ex-coal miner. I was sent a book of over 500 of his drawings and saw more at the Tagawa City Coal Mining historical Museum.

Here we see a typical drawing of a woman mining a coal seam. There is text describing the drawing (I wish I could read Japanese) and the drawing is quite detailed.

On the right another miner is shown taking the coal to a skip. Women and men worked together in Japanese coal mines until the 1930’s. The work was really tough as there was little mechanisation in the mines until after the Second World War. Yamamoto Sakubei seems to document the gradual mechanisation of the mines.

This image shows the equipment of the Japanese miners although it should also be noted underground because of the heat very little clothing was worn.

The collection of drawings is not only an important documentation of the work involved in mining but is also quite poignant in its depiction of what was a hard and dangerous life.

At Work in Chikuho (14th February 2009)

This page hopefully gives some idea of the inspection work and the team doing the work. On the right we are inspecting a canal used for coal barges.

Dinu.Bumbaru turns his back on a steam engine (below). We visited many sites and Museums and worked to a fairly tight schedule. There was a lot to see.

The team from Kagoshima Prefecture are being briefed about coal mining locations at one of the coal mining museums (above).

Barry and Koko discuss matters while the others listen or try and find where we are on a map. Mike checks out an archaeological point (switch) lever.

At the end of the day we all began to fade.

The Nagasaki Hammerhead Crane (again)

I am posting another picture of the crane because the one earlier taken from Glover Garden (グラバー園) house was during a rainstorm and required quite a bit of Photoshoping to get clear.

This photo is clearer but suffers from being taken from inside the shipyard so it was difficult to get far enough away to get a good shot. The rain didn't help either.

The Mitsubishi Shipyard didn't seem to worry all that much about us wandering around.

There is also an excellent Museum on site which was well worth visiting.

Ships and Cranes

The Mitsubshi shipyards were an important industry in the Nagasaki area. They were established as the Nagasaki Ironworks in 1857 with help from Dutch naval engineers as a government facility. However after the Mejii restoration the shipyards were run by Mitsubshi-sha headed by Yanosuke Iwasaki.


There is an excellent museum on the site in the former wood-pattern shop. This contains a number of pieces of important machinery and documents relating to ship construction.

Of course the discovery of a 1909 Hammerhead Crane by William Arrol still working in the Mitsubishi shipyards was a plus as was the fact that we could go in and photograph it.

Knacked in Nagasaki

Its been a wet day in Nagasaki today. After viewing the commuter rush we headed out to view the "battleship island" , Hashima Island, (sometimes also called Gunkanjima Island) our trip was cancelled due to bad weather but we went to a rather ordinary museum on the subject instead. We could see the island from the coast.




Apart from these photos we learned nothing new and wasted the morning being led astray when there was so much more to be seen. We drove back into town where after a brief stop at a telegraph station we went to the Kosuge Ship repair dock. This dates from 1868 and was the first patent slip in Japan. The slip and the engines were modernised in 1937 but the original engine and 1901 boiler are still there. This is a realy great site with lots of interest. Of course I had to find mud to step in and dust to lean against much to the amusemt of our party.