Bates Colliery. I worked for a while in the pit bottom area of the coal mine. This was regarded as one of the safer places underground but we still had some adventures. A brief description of "inbye" and "outbye" may be useful at this point. In the simplest terms if you were travelling inbye you would be travelling towards the coal face. If you were travelling outbye you would be travelling away from the coal face. Coal was transported from inbye areas of the mine, outbye to the pit bottom, by means of a deisel locomotive pulling mine cars ( coal containers/tubs which ran on rail track and held tons of coal each). One deisel would pull somewhere in the region of 30 mine cars. When the train arrived outbye each individual mine car went through a tippler. This device turned a mine car upside down and therefore emptied the contents into a hopper which allowed the coal to be fed onto a conveyor belt. The coal was then reloaded into much smaller mine cars (tubs) and these tubs were sent up the pit shaft in a cage. I'll get back to the coal train. When the train approached the pit bottom area the deisel loco would stop, go to the back of the mine cars and start to push them towards the tippler. It was virtually impossible for the driver to calculate the distance between the engine and the mine car furthest away from him. So there was a set of lights at the tippler end to help guide the driver. One light was green the other light was red. A man would operate the lights and if he wanted the train to aproach the tippler he would switch the green light on. When the leading mine car was nearing it's position he would alternate the red and green lights so they flashed on and off very quickly. Then when he wanted the train to stop he would leave the red light on. Well that was the plan, but like all plans they sometimes went astray. There was one driver especially, I wont name him, who occassionally had problems following the proceedure. The controller would switch the green light on for him to start pushing the mine cars towards the tippler. The train would start to approach in the usual way. The lights would then be flashed, red,green, red, green, alternatively to inform the driver to slow and prepare to stop. At a certain point it would dawn on the controller that all was not well, the train was not slowing as it should have and there could only be one outcome, the mine cars were going to crash into the tippler. He would let out an almighty shout to warn his fellow workers of the imminent danger, and leapt for safety at the same time. The other workers quickly jumped, scarpered, or crawled to any place which would protect them, screaming abuse at the driver. (He couldn't hear but it made them feel better). Thank God no one was ever injured, but the first the driver knew there was anything wrong, was when there was a tremendous jolt as the whole train banged in to the tippler and and he was being propelled forward, at which point he instinctively applied the brakes. After a short period of time he was also aware of shouting and flashing cap lamps as the tippler men approached him in a confrontational mood. A string of verbal abuse being directed at him. He was informed in no uncertain terms what they thought of him.I would hesitate to advance the theory that physical contact occurred, fighting undergound was a sackable offence (instant dismissal), so on the odd occasions when fights did take place it was usually when and where there were no witnesses. If anyone knew of such activities they always kept very quite. This problem with the driver usually arose towards the end of the shift, and when the driver was working through the night/early hours of the morning, and, when weariness set in. What had happened was that he saw the green light and started to drive forward, but before the red and green lights began to flash, (a time period of only a few minutes) he dropped off (fell asleep). The consequences could have been disastrous but luckily there was no serious damage. The scenario described above happened a few times (not all were reported), eventually the driver was transferred to other duties.