The inch high wake up to find a lump of coal in the colliery sidings. Okay, coal and collieries tend to go together, but it’s a mystery as to how they got it up the mineshaft.
I found this lump of coal many years ago on the old Somerset & Dorset line near Shillingstone way before the preservationist starting doing their excellent restoration work. So I can pretty safely say that it probably fell off an engine when the line was still open. It’s not quite as big as it was, for occasionally bits get chipped away for putting in the coal bunkers of my miniature engines. Nothing replicates coal better than coal - whatever the scale.
True story: for odd things do happen, I found a tiny lump of coal in my mother’s garden the other week whilst visiting. She doesn’t have a coal fire, and with the garden being rather small, I’d have almost certainly spotted it before whilst doing Bertie hound ‘poo patrol’. So my only thought is that maybe some steam powered aeroplane or bird dropped it, or a coal fired moonshine still exploded nearby.