A LAUNDRY THAT WASHES COAL

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 53, 4 March 1922, Page 16

A LAUNDRY THAT WASHES COAL

Nearly every colliery in these days is equipped with a laundry. It is not used for washing the shirts of the miners, or even for supplying them ' with clean starched, collars when they take a holiday. .■ ■ ■. i It is placed up near the,mouth of the pit for washing and cleaning the coal, writes a colliery manager in a London paper. ■■■-.. The washery, ,as it'ys called, removes all ■ the dirt and, other rubbish. 1 from the coal, and separates stone and rock from legitimate fuel. •-.■-■■ Coal so treated 1s almost doubled in value) particularly when it is exported. During the war so great was the demand for British coal that the colliery proprietors had not time to wash, it, and many were the complaints of ■ householders that the fuel they had to burn was full of slate and stone. . Now, however, that we are endeavouring to recapture foreign markets, all the smaller coal, such as '-'nuts" and "peas," is being washed. ■' When the full trams, or underground trucks, came up to the surface from the colliers working below there is much in them besides coal that is fit to.be burnt. They pass over the weighbridge, so that each individual worker may be credited with his production, and then pass on at once to the " laundry." . Each tram is run into a huge cylinder and securely fastened. The cylinder turns a complete circle, thus emptying the coal from the tram on to a chute. The iijjper half of this is fitted Wjth bars, like a gridiron, about four inches apart, and between these the smaller coal falls. The big lumps pass on down the chute, along a smaller gully, where boys pick out pieces of , stone with great agility, and' thence into railway trucks. The coal which passes between the bars falls on to a moving platform, by which it is carried into a revolving drum covered with wire of a fairly fine mesh. This shakes out a certain amount of dirt and very fine " duff "or coal dust. ■•< The coal then passes down yet another chute, towards the end of which there is a large, jet of water rushing in. This washes the'coal into a sort of tank, where the water is kept, in constant motion. The stones and dirt, being heavier, fall into a sump arrangement at the bot- . torn, whence they are cleared by an endless chain of small buckets. . A constant to-and-fro movement of the false bottom of the tank gradually carries the cleaned coal out over another series of sieves, which separates it according to size. The other day, out of a hundred and forty trams of - " raw " coal washed, there were no fewer than seven wellladen trams of dirt and stones removed. But there 1 is nothing that more delights the eye of a colliery manager than a truck of " nuts " which sparkle in the sunshine. Washed anthracite—the hardest kind, of coal—can be rubbed across the cleanest and whitest linen and will not leave a mark.