Cumbrian coal mine set to generate four trains per day
UP to four coal trains per day will run on the Cumbrian Coast Line from Whitehaven, once the town’s new Woodhouse Colliery opens (expected to be in early 2025, although trial movements could start in late 2024).
This capacity will be sufficient for the first three years of mining at what is claimed to be the world’s first net-zero deep coal mine.
Once the mine reaches full production (around five years after the mine is built), this would rise to six trains per day up to six days a week, although this will require signalling upgrades between Wigton and Maryport to create an extra hourly train path.
Building Woodhouse Colliery will take around two years, with coal production starting around 18 months from the beginning of construction. The mine will produce high-quality metallurgical coal, an EU-classified ‘critical raw material’, to supply the steel industry at home and in Europe.
Trains will only operate within defined daytime hours, and there will be no trains on Sundays.
West Cumbria Mining has selected Freightliner as its preferred partner and intends to use Class 70s (because they are quieter than Class 66s) and HHA wagons.
The mine is expected to have a life of 50 years and employ 500 workers, with 80% of its production exported via Redcar Bulk Terminal (North Yorkshire) and the remainder expected to go to Scunthorpe steelworks, which currently uses imported coal.
The controversial project, proposed in 2014 by Australianowned West Cumbria Mining, received planning permission in March 2019. But with a series of legal battles after the decision was appealed, it has taken almost four years to reach a conclusion.
The long-awaited announcement (on December 7, by Michael Gove, Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities) that the project can go ahead came eight months after the Planning Inspectorate submitted its report.
The mine, located south-west of
Whitehaven, takes its name from the nearby housing estate and is on derelict industrial land. It is close to the former Haigh Colliery, Cumbria’s last deep coal mine, which closed in 1986.
Coal will be taken 2.5km (1.55 miles) by an underground conveyor to a new railway loading facility (RLF) at Pow Beck Valley (near the suburb of Mirehouse), to be built on the site of an disused mine.
The RLF has been designed to resemble a timber-clad farm building, so that its character matches the surrounding area.
WCM’s extraction licences cover 200km2 off the coast at Whitehaven, with an estimated 750 million tonnes of coal. The mine will produce two to three million tonnes per annum.