Religion & Spirituality1 min ago
Plate opener (mining)
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what is a plate opener? I know they used to work in the mines, and tended to be women or children, but does anyone know what exactly one does?
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.This is a bit of a guess. I know children used to work as 'trappers'. To make the ventilation work in a mine, you have to have doors in passages to make the air go the way you want. The trappers job was to open and close the doors to let miners/coal skips through. (Trapper from trapdoor). You could say a plate could be a door, so it could be a different colloquial name for the same job, but as I said I'm guessing.
In mining terms, a 'plate' is a piece of track with a projecting flange to retain the wheels of the coal-trucks. There used to be - maybe still are - mine-workers called plate-layers, plate-carriers, plate-openers etc. All of them were engaged in the creation and maintenance of mine-tracks. My guess is that the 'opener' operated the points where tracks merged, opening and closing them as necessary.
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