Hi Folks On Friday the 4th December 2009 a good friend of mine from Steadsburn Opencast had a very very lucky escape when his CAT 789 went on FIRE!!!!!! Apparently it might have been a burst hoist pipe which sprayed oil onto the turbo, but the automatic fire extinguishers didnt activate, so my friend had [...]

Hi folks, its been quite a while since ive posted anything, so i thought i would bring you upto date with the latest goings on. Well the payoffs have been and gone, and once again myself and a few others have been selected, luckily not to lose our jobs, but to be transfered over to Stobswood opencast. So [...]

Hi folks, i have recently purchased a new camera with HD video capture. So my plans are to now be able to show you video footage of the machines in their environment rather than just still photos. I have uploaded a quick video clip for you to have a look at, this is just a [...]

Its the second day of the dismantling, and the crane which was brought the day before has been erected and is ready for action… First job on the list was to clear the area around the dragline, allowing the crane to move around. So the old buckets were loaded onto the low loaders, then taken [...]

- Today was the first day back after the summer holidays, and we had a couple of hours clean up this morning after the heavy rain yesterday, which gave us time to break ourselves in gently. – Sadly ive missed 2 weeks of the dismantling of the Dragline, which has really progressed i might add. [...]

- Earlier this week a company called ‘EP Industries’ started the pain staking task of dismantling the 1260 Dragline, ‘Chevington Collier’. As promised im trying to document the whole process as best i can, sadly since being put on a different shift pattern i havent been able to get the shots which i was initially [...]

Hi everyone, Just a quick post to say that ive been very busy lately with weddings and other things, but i have quite a bit of stuff from work to Blog, they have started dismantling the Dragline so i have quite a few shots to show you on the progress so far, my summer holidays [...]

- Today the Tractor & Boxes arrived courtesy of Mr Neil Becher, to start sub-soiling the viewing point over at Maidens Hall. They are probably the only bit of plant that would be able to do it, due to the steepness of the hill. They took the slow journey from Steadsburn, and headed over to [...]

- Today was my second day on the new shift pattern, 7am – 5.30pm, which im still getting used to. We are in the small cut at Steadsburn, as the job is split into two cuts, we are driving CAT 777′s being loaded by an RH120C. Also working in the cut is another RH120C loading [...]

- Well i promised you’s a redundancy update when i new something myself, and today we had a meeting to find out our fate. On a high note they managed to avoid compulsary redundancies, two men of that i know were given their voluntary redundancy, but sadly on a low note myself and a few [...]