Imageo
  • Imageo
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14 years ago
G'day All,
I chanced upon the Dover - Martin Mill Mineral Railway while on holiday in the UK recently and have made an entry. There's a small display with some good photographs at the Visitors' Centre on the cliffs showing the chalk excavation works associated with the Dover docks' construction.

Floundering around on the OS web site to work out the the geographic area and grid reference for the archaic UK grid naming convention 😉 was painful but I chanced across this site http://www.charlesclosesociety.org/OSMap  which made the task a lot easier. I'm probably preaching to the converted here but it's worth a look if you haven't seen it before.
All the best

I'm a Geo

'There's a very fine line between a hobby and mental illness.'
Doveydick
14 years ago
The cliffs above Dover Harbour have quite an interesting history. Apart from the mineral railway, which lowered material to sea level by an incline located between the first two groups of bushes on the right of Imageo's photo (the last in his album), the downward sloping line seen in the same photo was reputed to have been excavated for the proposed Dover to St Margaret's/Martin Mill extension of the 3' 6" guage electric tramway system.
The whole system was taken over by the military in the last war and extended with numerous branches serving fixed gun emplacements and protected areas for the big rail mounted guns, complete with n.g. systems for ammo storage.
So we don't forget this website's about mines, there was an aerial ropeway from Tilmanstone Colliery to the Eastern Arm of Dover Harbour (almost directly below the camera in the photo) which ran in twin tunnels through the cliffs to reach the loading berths. For the record, I believe Tilmanstone had seams at 3000', 6000' and 12000' below surface level, the last was never worked. The shafts have been plugged with some 35,000,000 tons of high quality coal still underground over the whole coalfield.
Peter Burgess
14 years ago
And here's a film of the ropeway in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLH00zaqs_s 

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