Bucket Conveyor

A bucket conveyor stretches toward the ceiling inside the Bathurst Gasworks, its rusted steel frame still mounted in working position and its open-topped buckets hanging in sequence along the chain. The buckets are still full of coal. The conveyor stopped mid-load and was never emptied, and the dark coal sits in each bucket as it sat at the end of the last shift. The frame around the conveyor is heavy rolled steel, riveted at the joints, with the surface finish softened to a uniform brown under years of dust. Light from above falls across the line of buckets and picks out the curve of the coal in each one.

Bucket conveyors of this scale moved coal between the storage yard and the retort house at a working gasworks. Coal arrived in rail-side bulk, was transferred to the conveyor, and was lifted to the retort feed hopper above the working floor. The Bathurst Gasworks operated as a council facility from 1888 until 1979 and then under AGL on LPG reforming until 1987. The surviving structures and equipment date primarily from the c.1960 rebuild of the plant. This conveyor was last fed coal during one of those eras, almost certainly during the council coal-gas period before 1979. The full buckets are the evidence: the line stopped under load, the chain seized in place, and nothing has been raked out of the loop since.