A former worker named Cliff sent through a collection of photographs he took inside Wangi Power Station in the late 1970s and early 1980s, while the station was still running. He wrote in after I shared the first Wangi gallery.
His photographs look at the place the same way I used to look at industrial buildings before I picked up a camera. The same kind of seeing that became Lost Collective. That's why I'm sharing them. They're not mine, but the seeing is the same: a working interior, people doing their jobs, no staging.
What follows is Cliff's archive of the operational years, alongside Sam Hood's 1955 construction frames from the State Library of NSW and the engineering record at the University of Newcastle. The article holds more of Wangi's lifespan than would fit on a product page.
Construction
Wangi Power Station was a railways job before it was an electricity one. New South Wales Railways needed generating capacity of its own, and in April 1941 its Chief Electrical Engineer, W.H. Myers, put a formal proposal for a station built at the coalfields to the Electricity Advisory Committee. The government approved it in 1946. Railways built the station and then handed it over: on 1 January 1953 ownership passed to the new Electricity Commission of New South Wales, with Railways staying on as the constructing authority.
At its peak the build carried around 1,000 men. They lived in single and married quarters and in a large tent city pitched alongside, families included. Many were Hunter Valley locals; a good number were post-war Italian migrants, drawn from the same labour pool that was building the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The migrant workforce and the industrial relations of the build are both recorded as Historic Themes on the station's State Heritage Register listing.
The project was costed at 28 million pounds. It was also put up by a method that was new at the time: the first generating units went into service while the rest of the station was still going up around them, the building filled with boilers and turbo-alternators as demand for electricity grew, rather than finished empty and fitted out afterwards.
A power station starts as a plan and a cleared stretch of foreshore.
The scale comes later, in steel and brick.
Civil works began in 1948. The plan sets the station on the western shore of Lake Macquarie at Wangi Wangi, on ground running roughly 1.2 kilometres along the foreshore.
The lake gave it cooling water; the coalfields sat close behind. The location committed a long stretch of foreshore to a single purpose.
The first chimney was started by Arcos Constructions on 7 April 1951. The first structural steel went up in August 1952.
Construction did not run smoothly. In September 1953 around 500 workers walked off over the dismissal of 10 carpenters, and the strike made the front pages of the Newcastle papers across a week. About 40 Italian migrants brought out for the project joined it, refusing to work while their Australian workmates were idle.
The steel came from Sir William Arrol and Co. of Glasgow, the firm that built the Forth Bridge: 8,359 tonnes of it, raised as a riveted frame.
Finished, the main building ran 228 metres long, 53.3 metres wide and 41 metres high. Eleven storeys at full height. The triple-brick cladding over the frame took about 3 million bricks.
Coal
Wangi Power Station was built where the coal was. The post-war plan in New South Wales was to put power stations on the coalfields rather than haul coal to the cities, and Wangi was one of a series built to that plan to cover the state's electricity shortfall.
Two collieries fed it. Awaba State Mine opened in 1947 and was linked to the station by a 10.4-kilometre branch line; Newstan Colliery, brought under the Joint Coal Board in 1951, joined the supply from 1957. Rail carried the coal for 26 years, and across its working life the station burned about 20 million tonnes of it.
The station ran on a constant supply of coal.
Everything in the handling yard was built to keep it moving.
The drawing lays out the coal-handling works across the site. Coal came in by rail at one end and was carried toward the boiler house at the other.
Between the two, the plant unloaded it, stored it, and lifted it toward the boilers. The handling never stopped while the station was running.
The main conveyor climbed to the boiler house inside an enclosed steel housing. It carried coal up from the handling plant below in a covered line.
Rail delivery ended with the last steam-hauled coal train, behind locomotive 6042, on 23 February 1973. Road haulage took over later that year. What changed was how the coal arrived, not how it moved once inside.
The stockpile held the buffer between delivery and demand, bulldozers working the heap toward the intake. In 1964, its peak year, the station burned about 1.2 million tonnes of coal and generated 2,439 gigawatt-hours.
The coal stopped moving when A Station retired in March 1985. B Station followed in October 1986, and the generating equipment was taken out between 1995 and 1997.
The boilers
The station's boilers came in two generations, built about a year apart and then left running side by side. A Station used the older, proven way of burning coal. B Station used the new one, and in doing so became the first power station in Australia to burn pulverised coal.
The boilers were also a test bed. Wangi ran the first full-scale trial in Australia of plasma-arc ignition for pulverised-fuel boilers, developed at the University of New South Wales. Its 1975 to 1976 trial of Ducon Micropul fabric filters led to the filters later installed at Eraring, and the shaker-type fabric filter fitted to A Station in 1976 went on to become standard across New South Wales power stations.
Two ways to burn coal.
Ground to powder, or fed raw across a moving grate, both raising steam for the turbines.
The drawing cuts through one of the 3 B Station boilers. Coal came down from the bunkers above, ground to a powder and blown in through the burners as pulverised fuel.
Each boiler raised about 550,000 pounds of steam an hour at 950 PSI and 950°F, feeding a single 60 MW machine. An economiser pulled the last heat from the flue gas before it left through the stack.
A Station worked on an older principle. Six boilers ran the length of the hall, feeding the 50 MW turbines in pairs, a coal bunker above each one.
These were chain-grate boilers, raising about 180,000 pounds of steam an hour at 650 PSI and 840°F. Raw coal burned on a slowly moving grate, rather than being ground to powder first.
This is the firing front of Boiler No. 2A. Crews lit a boiler like this by tossing in an oil-soaked rag and hoping it caught. The gravimetric feeders, the rotating wheels above the chutes, dropped raw coal to the stokers below.
Spreader stokers flung the coal across the grate to burn. An access hatch still stands open on a bank of ash, the grease lines and the tools for clearing a jammed grate left where they sat.
The turbines
Six machines turned the whole station. All were supplied by C.A. Parsons and Co., three-cylinder tandem compound steam turbines, three of 50 MW in A Station and three of 60 MW in B Station, for a combined 330 MW. Each B Station unit was the largest single generating machine in Australia when it entered service, and the first in the country to run a hydrogen-cooled alternator.
They came on slowly, one at a time, between 1957 and 1960, with No. 6 the last on 24 August 1960. The first B Station unit got ahead of its own boiler. From June 1958 it ran on steam piped temporarily from the A Station boilers, and went on doing so for about 10 months until its own boiler was commissioned in April 1959.
The hall was built around the machines.
Everything below the floor and above it served the six that turned.
The drawing runs the length of the turbine hall. Below the floor sit the condensers, the extraction pumps and the low-pressure heaters; above them, the deaerators and the reserve feed-water tanks.
Spent steam condensed back to water below the floor, was reheated through the feed-water heaters and returned to the boilers to begin again. A 60-ton electric overhead crane ran the length of the hall, heavy enough to lift a turbine casing during an overhaul.
Looking the length of the turbine hall towards the A Station end. Six Parsons machines stand in a row under the steel roof, their casings lagged against the heat.
On the left, an operator in uniform works a turbine control panel while the workers move along the floor in overalls. One of the men in the frame is Jack Chilton.
The high-pressure end of No. 6 turbine. Steam entered here at full pressure and passed through 3 cylinders, high, intermediate and low, giving up its energy stage by stage.
Each set drove its alternator directly at 3,000 RPM, locked to the 50 Hz grid. The lagged pipes overhead carried steam between the cylinders and down to the condenser below.
The day No. 2 came apart
A Station had been fully on line for barely a month. The last of its three C.A. Parsons 50 MW units was synchronised on 6 November 1957. On the night of 8 to 9 December, No. 2 overspeeded and burst. It was producing about 50,000 kilowatts at the moment it let go, with the station carrying 110 to 115 megawatts, which means all three A Station units were running.
A heavy bearing housing was thrown about 25 feet into the air. The failure ran on the front page of the Canberra Times on 10 December. Electricity Commission engineers inspected the wreck the next day, and an inquiry opened the day after.
One turbine let go.
The wreckage ran the length of the turbine hall.
No. 2 overspeeded, running well past its 3,000 RPM working speed until it burst. The faster a turbine turns, the harder it pulls against itself, and past a point the steel cannot hold.
Debris from the shattered casing lies the length of the floor. A section of concrete is gone from the upper walkway, where the shaft punched out through the windows and came to rest in the switchyard outside.
The main shaft, torn clean through. The fracture is twisted rather than flat, the mark of a break taken under rotation.
The metal is deformed around the break, stretched before it parted. That is the signature of a sudden overload rather than a slow crack.
A wider view of the wrecked machine. The casing has split open, parts have come off their mounts, and the lagging that wrapped the cylinders is strewn across the deck.
What had been a balanced machine turning at speed became a field of displaced parts. The failure carried into everything bolted around it.
An end bearing, scored and run to ruin. With the shaft no longer held true, the spinning mass dragged metal across metal.
The deep gouges and melted metal are the mark of that heat. The unit was expected to be out of service for about 6 months.
A blackout that lit the state
Wangi Power Station was built into a shortage. New South Wales in the late 1950s did not have enough generating capacity, and ran on power restrictions and blackouts. Wangi was one of the stations built to relieve that, and the heritage listing credits it with a pre-eminent part in doing so.
It earned the credit early. On 11 September 1958, two months before the station was officially opened, part of the New South Wales grid shut down, and Wangi played a part in restoring it. The total blackout of 1964 was the larger test.
A station earns its keep on the days the grid fails.
Wangi had two of those days.
On the night of 10 June 1964 the NSW grid went dark. A total state shutdown, the only one of its kind. Across the network, the boilers in coal-fired stations cooled. Restarting a cold boiler is a slow proposition. Restarting a coal-fired grid is slower.
The stoker-fired boilers of A Station at Wangi Power Station had stayed alight through the shutdown. The chain grates and the rotograte feeders had kept moving; the fires were ready. The station played a major role in bringing the state back. The Heritage Council called this out in the listing language: Wangi Power Station "played a major role in restoring power to NSW after the total state power shutdown of 10 June 1964." That sentence is one of the reasons the building stands on the State Heritage Register today.
1964 was also the station's peak operating year: 2,439.713 gigawatt-hours generated, 1.2 million tonnes of coal consumed, around 400 employees on site.
Cooling water
A coal-fired station raises steam to drive its turbines, then has to turn that steam back into water to use again. Condensing it takes a large and steady flow of cool water, more than the station drew for any other purpose.
Two tunnels carried that flow. The first was a 577-metre bore of horseshoe section, running at up to 454,600 litres a minute; the second, commissioned in 1960, was larger again, rated at 1,360,800 litres a minute.
The lake was half the machinery.
The turbines could not have turned without it.
The station depended on cooling water from Lake Macquarie. Water was drawn in at Myuna Bay through filtered intake screens, run through the condensers to cool spent turbine steam, and discharged at Wangi Bay via an outlet canal. Two tunnels carried the flow at peak: combined cooling-water use ran to 19.3 cubic metres per second. The intake structures and pumps were dismantled with the rest of the generating plant between 1995 and 1997. The outlet canal survives.
The wider site
A working power station is also a workplace, and Wangi Power Station ran with around 400 people on site at its 1964 operating peak. It trained its own as well: the heritage listing describes the station as one of the most advanced training centres for power station operations in the southern hemisphere.
The complex was larger than the building at its centre. Its boundary ran a perimeter of about 10 kilometres, and Myuna Colliery, which fed it, took up around 15.5 hectares of that ground immediately to the west.
The boilers and turbine hall were the half you came to see.
The rest of the site kept them fed, watered and staffed, and tied to the grid.
Beyond the boilers and turbine hall, the site carried the rest of what a working power station needed: administrative offices, workshops, switchyard, three 2.27-million-litre water-storage tanks on the hill behind the station, on-site housing, and an apprentice workshop. The triple-brick cladding over a riveted steel frame ran 228 metres along the western shore of Lake Macquarie.
The architecture
Power stations are built to work, and most of them look it. Wangi Power Station is one of the few in Australia where the look was treated as part of the job. The heritage listing records that the building's appearance and its landscape setting were design parameters in their own right, not by-products of the engineering, and calls the result a show piece of New South Wales power generation for the quality of its brickwork and its design.
This one was built to be seen.
A working power station given the care of a public building.
The heritage listing for Wangi Power Station calls the building "industrial architecture influenced by the Expressionist school," with chimneys carrying space-age flourishes that nothing else in NSW power generation quite repeats. It was the last power station constructed in Australia to follow the English model of industrial architecture: intricate brick massing instead of the skeletal steel structures of the stations that came after it, like Liddell and Bayswater. Architectural appearance was treated as an integral design parameter alongside the engineering, which is rare for the era.
The project architect was Colin Smith of C.H. Smith & Johnson, Architects. Smith was Elcom's project architect of record; the SHR is explicit that he "took it through" rather than designing it. The original NSW Railways Department architect responsible for the design has not been identified. It is one of several research threads that the building still carries. W.H. Myers, Railways Chief Electrical Engineer until 1946, was involved in the initial specification and design before he retired.
An archival shadow
A building can outlast its records, or its records can outlast it. Wangi Power Station is being studied and recorded more closely now than at almost any point since it was built, even as the building itself is left to decay.
Part of Wangi outlived the rest.
The paper has held up better than the brick.
The other half of the station is on paper. Approximately 5,000 architectural and engineering drawings of Wangi Power Station live in the University of Newcastle's Cultural Collections at Auchmuty Library, as part of an 11,000-item Coal & Allied Mining and Power Collection. They appear to be the only known surviving copies of the construction plans.
The collection was about to be destroyed in 2000. Coal & Allied donated it to Lake Macquarie City Library that year, which stored it adjacent to the Lake Macquarie Historical Society in Toronto until 2009, when it transferred to the University of Newcastle. Since 2020, Professor Michael Chapman and Gionni Di Gravio's Hunter Living Histories project has been combining the paper record with point-cloud and drone scans of the building, producing a 3D documentation model of the site as it stands now. The 1953 General Site Plan, the 1950 Mezzanine Plan, and the 1949 Site and Environs drawing are all publicly accessible through the Living Histories portal.
Bill Bottomley's Remembering Wangi Power Station: Oral Histories, completed in October 2016 for the Wangi Wangi Centenary, sits beside the drawings. Worker interviews with Jim and Merle Rawson, who worked Elcom Communications and Time-keeping, among others, fill in the human record that the construction plans don't carry.
The unbuilt second life
Wangi Power Station generated electricity for 28 years. By 2021 it had spent almost as long waiting to become something else. Since it left public ownership in 1998 the building has carried one redevelopment plan after another, and none of them has been built.
The company that bought it did not outlast the plan. I J McDonald and Sons was deregistered in December 2018, four years after the managing director who drove the redevelopment had died, with the building still standing and still empty.
Building it was the easy part.
Deciding what it becomes next has taken longer than it took to build.
Pacific Power sold the main power station site to I.J. McDonald & Sons Pty Ltd in 1998 through Public Tender. The proposal was a $300 million redevelopment of the building shell: 100 apartment units, a 3.5-star motel, a shopping arcade, cinemas, and offices, all inside the 12,000-square-metre footprint. Lake Macquarie City Council approved a supporting rezoning in 2009. The project never proceeded.
Ian McDonald died in 2014. The family retained the title. In November 2021, Colliers ran an Expression of Interest campaign at a $30 million-plus guide for the 22.3 hectare site, framing the redevelopment opportunity in comparison to Battersea Power Station in London and the Casula Powerhouse in south-western Sydney. The EOI closed on 9 December 2021 without a confirmed sale. No transaction has been confirmed since.
The building waits.
Legacy
Across 28 years of service Wangi Power Station produced 36,181 gigawatt-hours of electricity, and for the first years of its operation it was the largest power station in New South Wales.
That is much of why it is still standing. Wangi Power Station was added to the State Heritage Register in 1999, listed for its place in the evolution of coalfields power generation in the state, for the power it helped restore after the shortages and the blackout, and for being a rare power station built to be looked at as well as run.
Most dead power stations are pulled down and forgotten.
This one is heritage-listed, still standing, and better recorded than most buildings still in use.
A Station was retired on 7 March 1985. B Station closed on 31 October 1986. Formal decommissioning followed in 1989. The generating equipment was removed between 1995 and 1997. Today, Wangi Power Station stands silent. The machinery is gone. What remains is the building shell on the lakeshore: the brick, the steel, the chimneys, and three million bricks' worth of architectural intent.
If you have memories or photographs of Wangi Power Station, get in touch. Cliff's archive is here because he sent it. The same is true of everything else in the collection that didn't come out of my camera.
