Winding Engine

The engine at the top of a shaft that raised and lowered everything in it — coal, ore, waste, materials and men. The headgear carried the sheave wheels, but the winding engine did the work, and its house is usually the largest building left on a colliery site.

Historical usage

Before steam, winding was done by hand windlass, by horse whim, or by waterwheel. A geared variant of the horse whim gin was tried at Walker Colliery around 1750, needing eight horses at a rapid trot to raise five and a half hundredweight at 300 feet a minute; it was not a success and was given up after a few years. Coal was first wound by steam at Hartley Colliery in 1763, using what was probably a Newcomen atmospheric engine, but these attempts failed because a beam engine could not readily be made to turn a drum. Watt's crank of 1780 solved it, and in 1784 he installed the first rotative winding engine at Walker. From then on steam winding spread fast, though water-wheel winding remained common in northern England from about 1760 to 1800 wherever pumped water could be had, and an endless-chain system was used in shallow shafts between 1790 and 1840. Up to about 1850 the standard engine was a single-cylinder vertical with grab-hand reversing gear; horizontal twin-cylinder engines took over afterwards and grew very large — a twin tandem compound of 1912 developed 3,300 horsepower.

How it worked

A drum winder carries the rope on a drum: as one cage rises the other falls, so the engine only has to lift the difference between the two loads plus the coal. The alternative, patented by Friedrich Koepe in 1873, dispenses with the drum altogether and drives the rope by friction over a large wheel, the rope passing over the wheel and down both sides of the shaft with a balance rope beneath. Friction winding is lighter and better suited to great depth, because the machine does not have to carry the weight of a drum big enough to store thousands of feet of rope. The National Coal Board's electrification programme of the 1950s brought Koepe winders into British collieries in numbers; the first, at Bradford Colliery in Manchester, was a 3,720 horsepower machine designed to wind two twelve-ton skips from an ultimate 3,822 feet, its wheel faced with elmwood running on locked-coil rope.

Why it was used

Nothing else could move the quantities involved. A deep colliery had to raise its entire output, all its waste, all its timber and supplies and its whole workforce twice a day through one or two shafts, and the winding engine was the only thing standing between the coal at the bottom and the market at the top. It set the pit's capacity: a colliery could not produce faster than its winder could raise.

Risks & limitations

Winding accidents killed steadily throughout the industry's history — overwinds carrying a cage into the headgear, ropes failing, cages being lowered onto men working in the shaft, detaching gear jamming. Much of British mining safety legislation is about winding: prescribed rope inspections, overwind prevention, limits on winding men and coal together. The engine also fixed a colliery's capacity for as long as it stood, which is why so many pits were re-equipped rather than deepened.

Regional variation

Winder is the usual short form throughout British coalfields, and the building is the winding house or engine house. In Cornwall and Devon the equivalent duty was often done by a whim engine, and a smaller horse-powered winding drum anywhere is a whim or whim gin.

Related terminology

Beam Engine, Cage, Engine House, Headgear / Headframe, Skip, Whim

Images

Mines associated with this term

Included only where MineArchive's own research gives a reasonable evidential basis — not every mine where this might plausibly apply.

• Barony Colliery — East Ayrshire (well documented example)
  Automatically linked by scripts/link_terms.py: exact-phrase match in the record's own recorded text.
• Brightling and Mountfield Gypsum Mines — East Sussex (well documented example)
  Automatically linked by scripts/link_terms.py: exact-phrase match in the record's own recorded text.
• Cefn Coed Colliery — Neath Port Talbot (well documented example)
  Automatically linked by scripts/link_terms.py: exact-phrase match in the record's own recorded text.
• Cynheidre Colliery — Carmarthenshire (well documented example)
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• Lady Victoria Colliery — Midlothian (well documented example)
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• Llanharry Iron Mine — Rhondda Cynon Taf (well documented example)
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• Tarbrax Oil Shale Mine — South Lanarkshire (well documented example)
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Disasters associated with this term

Included only where MineArchive's own research gives a reasonable evidential basis, with the nature of the relationship stated — not every disaster where this term might plausibly apply.

• Botallack Mine shaft accident (relevant method/equipment)
  The break cut the signal wire between the man-engine carriage and the winding engine, leaving the brake unworkable.

Sources

1. (primary) Koepe-winder Installation, Colliery Engineering, September 1954 — Colliery Engineering, via Durham Mining Museum
2. (secondary) The History of Winding - 2 — Durham Mining Museum

Record created: 24 August 2026 · Last researched: 24 August 2026