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In the popular Haynes series and published in association with the Big Pit Museum Wales, the book reveals what it was really like to work in a coal mine and live in a community it fostered and includes interviews and anecdotes from miners and engineers. It explains in detail all the core engineering processes of underground mining from early bell-pits to modern long wall continuous mining. It explains key elements that made a mine function from shaft thinking, cage winding and mine layout, to manual and powered haulage, coal-cutting technologies and surface coal processing. It also looks at how successive generations of mining engineers have met perennial dangers through innovations in props and supports, ventilations, illumination, drainage systems, gas detection and much more. At its peak in 1920s, the British coalmining industry employed 1.1 million people with more than 1,300 mines across the nation producing nearly 300 million tonnes of coal for domestic and industrial use. Dirty and dangerous, and with complex engineering, extracting a raw material at depths of up to 1,400 metres below the surface, the roadways spread out from the pit bottom for many miles beneath town and country. Here are hundreds of colour and archive photos such as traditional safety lamps, an impressive diagram from 1908 showing a coal-washing plant, a duckbill loader, a continuous miner machine with a combined cutter and conveyer, a lattice steel headframe, pit ponies and early tram sledges pulled by a young woman in ropes and chains crawling on all fours along a basic wooden roadway. Covers history, engineering, technology and safety. 156 very large pages. Colour illus.