Ex-Work Colleague Looks Back (Part One)

Following my posting of some old BCL Plant photos from 2004 on our Digger Man Blog Facebook group, I was contacted by a guy I worked with on the job Jason Roberts from South Wales.

Jason has sent in a first batch of 3 photos from his time when he was working for Walters before he had started operating machines on the rail work side of things. At the time Jason was working on a river diversion project so that the Parc Slip Open Cast Mine in Cefn Cribwr near Bridgend, could reopen.  

Jason said “At the time I was mainly working on the opencast operations, primarily digging water courses and lagoons operating a Caterpillar 325 or sometimes a 330. I worked around a lot of the bigger machines though and took quite a lot of photos during my time there, most are on an old mobile phone but for starters here are a trio, not the best quality, but phone cameras were not so good back in those days!”.

At the time Celtic Energy were running Hitachi EX1800’s consisting of two face shovels and a backhoe version. These machines were generally loading 100 tonne class Terex 33-11 rigid dumptrucks.

Concluding Jason said, “The trucks were cross hired in from Miller Mining. There were also two D9R’s or possibly N’s can’t quite remember for sure, and a Komatsu D155 dozer and a Cat 16G motor grader. In these photos they are seen digging up the old workshop area. We had been there for a month or two previously on the smaller machines, stripping topsoil on all the fields and removing hedgerows, it was a brilliant job for me and my mate”.

We thank Jason for sharing these and look forward to receiving more in due course.