Former Coal Mill Area

The former coal mill area at Kandos Cement Works sits in the lower part of the kiln building, a steel-framed bay holding the remains of the plant that ground coal for the kiln burners. Most of the working equipment has been stripped or rolled aside. A length of feed pipe still drops from above, and the base frame of the mill itself is bolted to a concrete pad in the centre of the floor. The walls are dark, blackened from decades of coal-dust accumulation. The floor is uneven where successive layers of dust have hardened into a crust. Daylight gets in through an open doorway at one end, picking out the outlines of the surviving steelwork. The air still carries the faint smell of coal in it.

Cement kilns of this era ran on pulverised coal as their primary fuel. Lump coal arrived by rail from the local collieries, was crushed and dried, then ground in a coal mill to the consistency required for burner injection. The coal mill at Kandos worked alongside the kilns for most of the plant's operational life. By the time the works closed in September 2011, the coal mill area had been largely dismantled as part of plant rationalisation; only the structural elements were left in place. The works closed for high fixed costs and the considerable distance from the Sydney market. The coal-mill bay is one of the spaces where the plant's progressive simplification before closure is most legible.