late survivor of its type. The Caphouse shaft is 11 feet in diameter and although it had been deepened and widened may have been the oldest working mine shaft in the country in the 1980s. In 1892 colliers were paid 4/6d. per day and 13/6d. in 1938. In 1901 the colliery employed 93 workers and this total rose to 206 in 1911, and 240 in 1918. The colliery was sold in 1907. After the sale, the name Denby Grange Collieries referred to Caphouse and the Prince of Wales Colliery (locally known as Wood Pit) situated near New Hall in Flockton. Pithead baths and an administration block were built around 1937 and surface buildings upgraded between 1943 and 1946. The colliery became part of the National Coal Board on nationalisation in 1947. A drift mine opened in 1974. In 1978 the colliery employed 230 men winning 4,000 tons of coal per week from the Beeston Seam. The coal reserves were exhausted by 1985 and the colliery closed. It reopened as the Yorkshire Mining Museum in 1988. Mineral line Sir John Lister Lister-Kaye (1801-1871) linked Hope Pit, Caphouse, and Victoria Pits at Netherton to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway's Barnsley branch and the Calder and Hebble Navigation at Calder Grove by a private mineral line. John Marsden who managed the colliery from 1852 for Sir John Lister Lister-Kaye designed and built the line to avoid tolls charged for using the turnpike. The line began near Hope Pit with a tunnel under the Wakefield - Austerlands turnpike. Two rope-hauled inclines the second partly in a tunnel were needed before the line reached the navigation or the railway. Two locomotives, four-wheeled Solferino and six-wheeled Balaklava were bought to operate the line. The Prince of Wales Pit (subsequently named Denby Grange Colliery) was sunk close to the line near New Hall Wood in 1870. The mineral railway fell out of use apart from the end section when road transport was favoured over rail in the late 1940s. See also Listed buildings in Sitlington References Bibliography External links BBC photographs Coal mines in West Yorkshire 2 ft 3 in gauge railways in England