Today we sit here in our technological world that has progressed to levels of prosperity and technological advancement unimaginable 40 years ago.

Sadly, steam locomotives are definitely left in our past.

The GWR in its heyday was so paranoid about its coal supply that one of the reasons for choosing the Swindon works site to build, repair and change its locomotives halfway through their journey, was its closeness to a canal that could bring readily available supplies of coal from the Somerset coalfield.

Towards the end of the 19th century the GWR acquired its own coalmines in Wales and it is said that at one point it had more than 2,400 miners on its payroll. The GWR needed coal for its own gasworks, heating and for the fires in its offices and stations. Coal was king in the GWR world and its locomotives needed vast amounts of energy, its mountainous stockpiles of coal at strategic depots kept the ravenous fires of the GWR locomotives working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Coal had fuelled the Industrial Revolution, and was required in vast quantities at the turn of the 19th century to keep iron foundries and industry expanding.

Transporting coal had always been difficult but carrying it by canal and sea made it a viable proposition, hence the Somerset Coal Canal – a great feat of engineering.

Its remains point up the scale of civil engineering projects at that time. Transporting coal by horse- drawn cart using rails called tramways began to grow, then engineers built a steam locomotive to pull the trains of wagons along.

From then on steam locomotives became the technological Midas touch of the 19th and 20th centuries. The first central electrical generating power stations began to appear in the 1880s and it was not long before the GWR was generating its own electricity fired by coal.

Coal still provides about half of the world’s energy and that is set to increase in this country with clean burn power stations.

Railways have been given a new lease of life with the amount of coal traffic they transport throughout the British Isles.

We have come along way since the Neolithic tribes first used outcrop coal where it was exposed in rock faces or near the surface. Traces of it have been found in what are believed to be funeral pyres.

By the beginning of the first millennia the Romans were mining coal in all the major coalfields in the British Isles. Coal remained a locally mined and locally used fuel, because of the difficulty and cost of transporting it. But coal gave birth to the railways and the railways revolutionised the world And, although the GWR has gone, coal is still here.

Bearing in mind that the generation of electricity is by coal the question is how much coal have you burned today?