The Rise and Fall of King Coal

By Nick Pigott

Published by Gresley Books www.mortons.co.uk

220mm x 325mm size, 256 pages, B&W/colour, hardback. £29.99

COAL might now be something of a dirty word, but it wasn’t always so, as the illustrious author and former editor of our sister title The Railway Magazine reminds us. Generations gone by referred to the hugely compressed nuggets of organic matter extracted deep from the ground as ‘buried sunshine’. Delegates to last autumn’s COP26 certainly weren’t calling it that, and as a major contributor to global warming, coal burning, in the UK at least, has all but ceased. As you would expect from the keyboard of an editor, this book is both thorough and bang up to date in telling the whole story of the UK coal industry, from coal’s formation 300 million years ago to the decisions made at COP26.

Obviously with such a massive topic this single, well illustrated book doesn’t cover individual collieries and coal flows in detail. But it does succeed in examining the key few centuries of recent coal extraction in a very readable way.

We should point out here that this is not a railway book as such. And although surface and underground railways each merit individual chapters, and were for decades instrumental in the distribution of coal, they are almost incidental in this volume. However, there are images of diesel-era coal train workings, including a full-page classic shot of a Class 56 leaving Didcot power station (now demolished) with a rake of MGR hoppers (some of which have made it into preservation – see Wagons p30). Modellers, in particular, will find useful details of features that, once so common, have already disappeared.