Horden Colliery was a

coal mine Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

situated in

Horden Horden is a village and electoral ward in County Durham, England. It is situated on the North Sea coast, to the east of Peterlee, approximately 12 miles south of Sunderland. Horden was a mining village until the closure of the Horden Collier ...

, near

Peterlee Peterlee is a town in County Durham, England. It lies between Sunderland to the north, Hartlepool to the south, the Durham Coast to the east and Durham to the west. It gained town status in 1948 under the New Towns Act 1946. The act also create ...

County Durham County Durham ( ), officially simply Durham,UK General Acts 1997 c. 23Lieutenancies Act 1997 Schedule 1(3). From legislation.gov.uk, retrieved 6 April 2022. is a ceremonial county in North East England.North East Assembly �About North East E ...

History

It opened in 1900 and was closed on 28 February 1987. Initially owned by Horden Collieries Ltd, it was handed over to the

National Coal Board The National Coal Board (NCB) was the statutory corporation created to run the nationalised coal mining industry in the United Kingdom. Set up under the Coal Industry Nationalisation Act 1946, it took over the United Kingdom's collieries on "v ...

in 1947 when the British coal industry was

nationalised Nationalization (nationalisation in British English) is the process of transforming privately-owned assets into public assets by bringing them under the public ownership of a national government or state. Nationalization usually refers to pri ...

. On 9 May 1930, the colliery set a European record for the most coal mined by a single colliery in a day, with a total of 6,758 tonnes mined. This record stood for over thirty years. The colliery's peak employment numbers were reached in 1935 when 4,342 people were employed in the colliery.

Horden power station

Horden power station was a

coal-fired power station A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide, there are about 8,500 coal-fired power stations totaling over 2,000 gigawatts Nameplate capacity, capacity. They ...

situated in the colliery. The station used a 1,000

kilowatt The watt (symbol: W) is the unit of power or radiant flux in the International System of Units (SI), equal to 1 joule per second or 1 kg⋅m2⋅s−3. It is used to quantify the rate of energy transfer. The watt is named after James Wa ...

(kW) turbo alternator, along with four 400 kW

rotary converter A rotary converter is a type of electrical machine which acts as a mechanical rectifier, inverter or frequency converter. Rotary converters were used to convert alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC), or DC to AC power, before the adven ...

s for DC electrical supply, giving the station a total generating capacity of 2,600 kW. The station provided power for the colliery and the local homes, but has now been demolished, along with the colliery.

Howden waste heat power station

The Howden waste heat power station used gas from the adjacent coke works to generate electricity via steam-driven turbo-alternators. The plant was installed in 1934-35 and comprised: * 4 × gas-fired Babcock and Wilcox boilers producing 16,000 pounds per hour (2.02 kg/s) of steam at 270

psi Psi, PSI or Ψ may refer to: Alphabetic letters * Psi (Greek) (Ψ, ψ), the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet * Psi (Cyrillic) (Ѱ, ѱ), letter of the early Cyrillic alphabet, adopted from Greek Arts and entertainment * "Psi" as an abbreviation ...

at 675 °F (18.6

bar Bar or BAR may refer to: Food and drink * Bar (establishment), selling alcoholic beverages * Candy bar * Chocolate bar Science and technology * Bar (river morphology), a deposit of sediment * Bar (tropical cyclone), a layer of cloud * Bar (u ...

at 357 °C), * 1 × gas-fired Clarke Chapman boiler, output and conditions as above, * 2 × 3 MW

British Thomson-Houston British Thomson-Houston (BTH) was a British engineering and heavy industrial company, based at Rugby, Warwickshire, England, and founded as a subsidiary of the General Electric Company (GE) of Schenectady, New York, United States. They were kno ...

turbo-alternators, generating at 2.75 kV, 3-phase AC, * 2 × Premier

cooling tower A cooling tower is a device that rejects waste heat to the atmosphere through the cooling of a coolant stream, usually a water stream to a lower temperature. Cooling towers may either use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and ...

s, with a total capacity of 0.499 million gallons per hour (0.63 m3/s), The electricity supplied in the late 1950s is shown in the table. The plant had been decommissioned by 1971.

Red Hill

Tony Parker William Anthony Parker Jr. (born 17 May 1982) is a French-American former professional basketball player and majority owner of ASVEL Basket in LNB Pro A. Himself the son of a basketball pro, Parker started his career at Paris Basket Racing in ...

wrote a book about

and the people of Horden Colliery and anonymized it as Red Hill: A Mining Community. U2 wrote a song about the book called

Red Hill Mining Town "Red Hill Mining Town" is a song by the rock band U2. It is the sixth track from their 1987 album, ''The Joshua Tree''. A rough version of this song was worked on during the early ''Joshua Tree'' album writing sessions in 1985. The focus of the s ...

References

Power stations in North East England Buildings and structures in County Durham Demolished power stations in the United Kingdom Coal mines in County Durham {{UK-powerstation-stub

History

Horden power station

Howden waste heat power station

Red Hill

See also

References