Turbine Hall Control Room Entrance

Two large circular gauges flank the control room entrance at Morwell Power Station and Briquette Factories, set at the head of a wide concrete ramp. Symmetrical banks of control panels run along each wall beneath overhead steel beams crossed in an X-pattern. A red sign reading 'W-4 TG oil fire spray' marks the left side of the ramp, and yellow safety railings line both edges down to the lower floor. The ramp leads directly to the windowed control room, raised above the floor it oversees. The surfaces are worn but intact, the panels still carrying their switches and dials, the geometry of the space funnelling toward the glazed booth at the top.

The complex was supervised from control rooms set above the plant they managed. The turbine hall this room looked over ran on equipment from the 1950 contract, two 30,000-kilowatt back-pressure turbo-generators supplied by Metropolitan-Vickers Electrical Export Co. Ltd. of Manchester, with feed-heating plant, and a 20 MW low-pressure condensing turbine added under the 1954 revised plan to lift output. The oil fire spray sign on the ramp belonged to the protection scheme guarding that turbo-generator plant. Electricity production at Morwell commenced in December 1958. Brett photographed the turbine hall control room entrance on 14 April 2017, in the closed power station before the demolition program began.