From the Beeb:

Major disruption has been caused to the Tyne and Wear Metro system after an old mine shaft collapsed near a station. The hole appeared close to the track at Northumberland Park station, in North Tyneside, on Wednesday evening.

Trains have been suspended in both directions between Benton and Shiremoor as engineers work to secure the site. The suspension is expected to be in place until Friday and replacement bus services are in operation between Four Lane Ends and Shiremoor.

A Nexus spokesman said: "Structural engineers were on site as soon as we became aware of the problem.

"It looks as though this situation will almost certainly last into Friday."

Anyone know what this might be?

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Almost gauranteed to be a coliery shaft.
Few people realise today that the city now covers areas once heavily mined, there wereven collieries on the banks of the Tyne at Scotswood at one time.
Depends exactly were it is, Shiremoor has large open areas etc.

Jagman's right, it will be a coal mine, workings cover much of Tyneside.
A couple of years ago there was some consternation when a lake in a field next to Newcastle airport suddenly drained into old mine workings, gave the airport something to think about I'm sure.

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I heard that a while ago in part of Newcastle Airport car park a 'depression' appeared.
Any one know if this was true or is this the same thing as the lake disappearing?

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Dont know anything about the carpark.
The lake made headlines in the local papers though, complete with an eyewitness who saw it go and reckoned it only took a couple of minutes 'like someone pulling the plug out of a bath.'

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Must of been something - see a lake dissapear.
A bit worrying though if you were fairly close.
Just backs up the reasons why I don't like to walk over/through shaft depressions

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this happens about 2-3 times a year in the black country.lost a couple of houses in moxley a year ago if i remember rightly

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This from a British Geological Survey 1990 concerning the area Camborne-Illogan-Redruth.

A legacy of the mining industry is a large area of dereliction and hidden hazards. Attempts made to landscape and plant worked and spoil-covered areas of the mineralised belt (Shipman, 1984) have had only limited success because of toxins by arsenic and base metal sulphides in the soil. About 3,500 shafts were mapped during the survey. This is an incomplete record and indicates the dimension of the problem that shafts may present. Open mine shafts in the more frequented areas of the sheet have been capped in recent years. Others have been blocked near the surface, but decay of retaining materials will inevitably lead to further collapse. Ground instability is also locally compounded by past mining operations in lodes and stockworks close to the surface. Records for many of the larger and more recent mines are none for earlier shallow and potentially unstable mining operations.

The other week a hole about 20 feet across and 75 feet deep suddenly appeared in the main road about 200 yards from my house. I haven’t seen the official report but there is an adit running along that area and the collapse occurred after torrential rain.

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I’ve got a couple of photos of a shaft that we backfilled about 500m away form this collapse that I’ll upload tomorrow, may be of interest.

On the same subject the land not more than 20m away had a couple of shafts in it that were grouted a couple of years ago.

Since the collapse (that was nothing to write home about, a bit of a depression in the ballast) the site of the original grouting was redone on a much grander scale! :oops:

As promised above, some photos I took with my phone when working on the site next door.

http://www.aditnow.co.uk/album/Earsdon-Coal-Mine-Archive-Album/ 

I hope this is not too off topic.