STOP PRESS! THE 2021 COPPER PIT COLLIERIES EDITION IS NOW COMPLETELY SOLD OUT.

THE FINAL DELIVERY WAS FOR 43 x 0 GAUGE, 110 x 00 GAUGE AND 125 x N GAUGE.

The club’s 2021 private owner wagon commission continues our popular Swansea colliery theme with, this time, a seven plank coal wagon in the black and white-lettered livery of Copper Pit Collieries Ltd. Once again, our trademark ‘three gauge’ production will be a limited edition and, once sold-out, it will not be reproduced for a considerable time. No ready-to-run example of this wagon has been produced before, although decals for applying to kits are available commercially. Our wagon will have a different running number from available decals however, allowing two wagons to run together more realistically.

The artwork for the commission [see below for the O gauge version] has been received and signed off and production should commence in the early New Year. The actual release date will be advised in due course.

Shown opposite is an O Gauge kit utilising commercial decals. The model was built by Dave Roberts.

The wagons will be produced as follows: O Gauge 44, OO Gauge 120 & N Gauge 120. All will be in ‘ex-works’ condition although there is a possibility that a very small number may be weathered. Prices: O Gauge £45 and both OO & N Gauges £15. Postage costs, when required, will be advised in due course.

Copper Pit Colliery was one of a great many local coal mines which have long-since disappeared from the map of Swansea. Operating on-and-off between 1870 - 80 and 1930, it was situated close to where the Duke of Beaufort’s Arms PH is in Morriston, more-or-less on the site of the Duke Roundabout. Little remains today, much of it being covered by a dual carriageway, although the engine house survives as a scrap metal works near the junction of Beaufort Road and the roundabout. Sadly, no photographs of the colliery appear to exist. Copper Pit was owned by a number of concerns during its somewhat erratic life, including the well-known Glasbrook Bros, the owners of a number of coal mining, brick manufacturing and timber suppliers in and around the Swansea and Gower area.

The colliery had sidings connected to the GWR’s Morriston branch and that Company built a workman's halt - Copperpit Platform - near the colliery to service it. The Platform was taken out of use in 1956. Few photographs of the Platform exist and I am grateful to Steve Powell for allowing me to reproduce the two images below. Seen clearly in the background is the spire of that ‘Cathedral of Non-Conformism’, Morriston Tabernacle.

A number of the buildings in the above photo still stand today, notably the house just to the right of centre [with the three upper-floor windows]. These serve well to help identify the site of the platform, the general area of the colliery and also show the impact of more-recent development. Compare the photo below with the original, above. The Beaufort Arms PH is on the extreme left of both photographs.

This map, taken from an early-50s Swansea street map, shows the location of the Platform long before the many changes and developments which occurred altered the area completely. The Swansea Canal, shown clearly in the image above, can be traced on the map, which gives a good understanding of the colliery’s location within the hinterland of Morriston. Compare it with the map shown, below, dating from the late 19th. century.

Incidentally, and quite by coincidence, the map also shows two of the club’s earlier locations: the bottom-end of Slate Street and, briefly, on Morfydd Street, near the church. The station shown on the extreme right of the map is Morriston East, on the by-then closed LMS/MR line.

This low resolution image is Crown Copyright: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales. It dates from the early years of the 20th. century.

It shows the colliery disused although within a few years it was in operation again. Although difficult to see in this image, the GWR’s Morriston Branch runs to the left of the canal, up through the centre of the plan.

Copper Pit Collieries had quite a large fleet of wagons from several manufacturers during its existence. Our wagon is believed to have been from a batch produced by R.Y. Pickering of Wishaw and delivered, we think in 1913. It would have been a regular sight trundling along the lines shown on the maps but would also have travelled far-afield in its day as the colliery had contracts for its steam coal in London [winning a large contract for supplying coal to some Thames-side pumping stations] and elsewhere. Eventually the colliery went the same way as a number of other Swansea pits: adverse geological conditions and the state of the economy made continued production unprofitable and it is now a little known memory, leaving almost no mark on what was once a busy Victorian industrial landscape.