An old quarry which yielded up some interesting details … visited with Pincheck and Foz.
Craigfoot was one of only two active quarries in the Ochil Hills working andesite, a particularly hard and imporous volcanic rock. It originally worked a quartz-dolerite fault within the andesite, which is the coloured streak running down through the blue-black igneous rock – often referred to as “whinstone”, and long used as kerbing, hardcore and road metalling. From the Alloa side of the Ochils, it looks like a great dark bite taken out of the hillside.
Craigfoot Quarry was opened in 1930 by R.W. Menzies (although smaller scale quarrying had taken place here since 1880). Presumably the quarry had a relatively uneventful life, as a rather ordinary source of roadstone – but in January 1949 it experienced a large explosion, when a magazine containing 150 lb of high explosive detonated killing quarryman Alexander Honeyman and blowing out doors and windows in the Shillinghill area of Tillicoultry. The Menzies family still own Craigfoot's former operator, Tillicoultry Quarries Ltd, today although now they only operate hard rock quarries located at Wellwood, Dunfermline; and Northfield, Denny. Craigfoot shut around four years ago, despite having planning permission to extract more stone.
Happily, there's still a lot of equipment left, including the Allis Chalmers primary crusher – there's an art to reaching it, as the steel stairs leading up to it have been removed. Inside the massive steel castings were hardened teeth that ate up the andesite, rendering it down into smaller chunks. It was powered by a big diesel engine driving a Siemens electric motor (the slip rings in the motor cope with the crusher jamming better than a clutch on a diesel engine). From there, a conveyor lead it into a bing, from where it was loaded into a secondary crusher, then a hopper at the foot of the big conveyor that climbs up towards an Allis vibrating screen at the head of the hopper house, which sorted the aggregate into six sizes. The process was overseen by a CNC-type logic controller, and piloted from a small control panel in a wee portacabin.
Another interesting survivor is a Ruston-Bucyrus 22-RB crane, still in fairly good condition, with the hook hanging limply from its lifting cable, and the other end of the wire rope wound around its drum. Modern cranes are hydraulic, but this is a good old-fashioned mechanical one, built like a tank. It reminds me that I'll have to revisit the crane graveyard of the north, which has some monster NCK Eiger cranes rusting quietly in the long grass and weeds …
Craigfoot was one of only two active quarries in the Ochil Hills working andesite, a particularly hard and imporous volcanic rock. It originally worked a quartz-dolerite fault within the andesite, which is the coloured streak running down through the blue-black igneous rock – often referred to as “whinstone”, and long used as kerbing, hardcore and road metalling. From the Alloa side of the Ochils, it looks like a great dark bite taken out of the hillside.
Craigfoot Quarry was opened in 1930 by R.W. Menzies (although smaller scale quarrying had taken place here since 1880). Presumably the quarry had a relatively uneventful life, as a rather ordinary source of roadstone – but in January 1949 it experienced a large explosion, when a magazine containing 150 lb of high explosive detonated killing quarryman Alexander Honeyman and blowing out doors and windows in the Shillinghill area of Tillicoultry. The Menzies family still own Craigfoot's former operator, Tillicoultry Quarries Ltd, today although now they only operate hard rock quarries located at Wellwood, Dunfermline; and Northfield, Denny. Craigfoot shut around four years ago, despite having planning permission to extract more stone.
Happily, there's still a lot of equipment left, including the Allis Chalmers primary crusher – there's an art to reaching it, as the steel stairs leading up to it have been removed. Inside the massive steel castings were hardened teeth that ate up the andesite, rendering it down into smaller chunks. It was powered by a big diesel engine driving a Siemens electric motor (the slip rings in the motor cope with the crusher jamming better than a clutch on a diesel engine). From there, a conveyor lead it into a bing, from where it was loaded into a secondary crusher, then a hopper at the foot of the big conveyor that climbs up towards an Allis vibrating screen at the head of the hopper house, which sorted the aggregate into six sizes. The process was overseen by a CNC-type logic controller, and piloted from a small control panel in a wee portacabin.
Another interesting survivor is a Ruston-Bucyrus 22-RB crane, still in fairly good condition, with the hook hanging limply from its lifting cable, and the other end of the wire rope wound around its drum. Modern cranes are hydraulic, but this is a good old-fashioned mechanical one, built like a tank. It reminds me that I'll have to revisit the crane graveyard of the north, which has some monster NCK Eiger cranes rusting quietly in the long grass and weeds …
