General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

In the 1950's, my dad was a haulage contractor and coal merchant. I was a kid, but would go on the trips on the wagons any chance I got. We hauled a lot of coal from opencast sites: Windy Arbour, Roughly Brow, Bryn Hall etc. We delivered it to NCB at Pemberton. The site had ceased mining coal, but the stuff was weighed in and the screens/railhead still functioned.

The coal was the property of NCB, so we were not allowed to take ours directly from the opencast production.

This lead to the rather bizarre scenario: we would haul a load of coal from Bryn to the Blundells site at Pem, tip it into the hopper which fed the screens, then drive around to one of the rail wagons, handball a load of coal on board, and then drive it back to Bryn for our retail sales.

There was just one customer though....

Probably had more clout than the UK government...

Maybe had contracts which predated formation of NCB.

Just one customer had coal delivered directly from the opencast mine.

Any guess:



Uncle Sam

Burtonwood air base, that is.