Loading Shed

The collector conveyors terminate at the loading shed entry at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, their steel framework stepping down toward the building's opening in a staircase of declining spans. A hopper tower rises at the junction between structures, flanked by a long enclosed walkway with a run of broken windows along its upper panels. Reddish-brown exhaust pipes protrude from the roofline, and two concrete blocks sit on the cracked pavement below. The conveyors read as a descending line of steel bays carrying the flow into the shed.

The collector conveyors feeding this shed were part of the briquetting assemblage that the Victorian Heritage Register names the only remaining intact set of mid twentieth century briquetting machinery in Victoria, with its conveyor cascades, raw coal bunkers and briquette storage sheds. Coal was conveyed from the west into the site and distributed to either the power station or the briquette factories, with output leaving from the eastern side. The briquetting presses upstream were supplied by Maschinenfabrik Buckau R. Wolf A.G. of Germany under the 1950 contract for two factories rated at 2,100 tons per day. Briquette flow ran continuously through the multi-level factories until the 2014 closure. Brett photographed the loading shed on 15 April 2017, in the closed briquette factory before the demolition program began.