Turbine Floor 2

Yellow handrails angle upward along a walkway on the left at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, while a large white control panel lined with gauges and switches occupies the brick wall below. Three cylindrical machines sit centrally on the main floor, threaded through by a dense network of pipes and structural steelwork. Rectangular windows along the far wall push light deep into the floor space, catching dust across the aged equipment. Stam 9 is stencilled onto a steel beam in the upper left, one of several identification markers still legible across the turbine hall. The floor reads as a working machine arrangement, plant and pipework and the operator's panel set against bare brick.

The turbo-generators in this hall were supplied under the 1950 contract, two 30,000-kilowatt back-pressure machines from Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Co. Ltd. of Manchester with feed-heating plant, with a 20 MW low-pressure condensing turbine added in the 1954 revised plan. The operational workforce that ran them was drawn largely from Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and other European countries, and many settled permanently in the Latrobe Valley. Electricity production commenced in December 1958, and the last turbine was taken off on 8 September 2014. Brett photographed the turbine floor on 14 April 2017, in the closed complex before the demolition program began.