DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS OF THE RESPECTIVE COALFIELDS. JJS 
In 1898 mining operations ^ were commenced in a second 
well, situated 1,500 feet from the first, where the seam was found 
to have a thickness of 20 feet. A winding shaft was subsequently 
put down and a working colliery established and connected by a 
brancli line, 10 miles in length, to the main line of the Jodhpur-Bikanir 
Railway. 
According to information supplied in 1905 by Mr. G. Dixon, 
for some time the manager of the colliery for Messrs. Bird & 
Co., the lessees, the seam has been followed for some 1,500 
feet to the west of the winding shaft, the thickness of coal being 
about 30 feet throughout. On the south a fault has been met 
with at a point 600 feet from the winding shaft. On the north 
inferior coal was encountered and no work is proceeding in this 
direction. A pit situated some 1,900 feet north of the winding 
shaft proved only 3 feet of coal. A prospecting pit is now 
being put down at a point about 1 mile west of the present 
worldng shafts. The method of working consists in dividing the 
seam into pillars 100 feet square, only the bottom section, 8 feet 
thick, being mined at present. Owing to the soft nature of the coal 
and overlying strata expensive timbering operations are necessitated. 
As the seam is fiat and the coal horizon lies nearly 100 feet 
above the water-level of the country, the mines are completely dry. 
In 1901 a boring ^ was put down under the direction of the 
Geological Survey of India, with the object of proving whether other 
coal seams existed. The original intention was to bore to a depth 
of 1,000 feet, but the contractors were unable to reach much more 
than half of that depth, and the negative result attained was, there- 
fore, indecisive. The coal is a resinous, woody hgnite of a brown- 
black colour. On exposure to the air it rapidly oxidizes and sphts 
up, heat being produced during the process. Owing to this cause 
what might, but for prompt measures, have proved a disastrous 
fire occurred in the underground workings of the colliery in 189& 
By reason of the hghtness of the fuel difficulty was at first 
experienced in burning it in locomotives with grates designed for 
burning the heavy Bengal coal. On the introduction of a more 
suitably designed grate this difficulty was overcome. Experiments 
have been made with the object of reducing the large percentage of 
* R. W. Clarke : Tram. Fed. Inst. Min. Mcch. Eng., Newcastle, XXII, (1901-02) 
2 General Report, Oeol. Surv. Ind., p. 14, (1901-02). 
I 
