B Station Mill Alley

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 24mm · f/8.0 · 1/8 · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Mill Alley at B Station, Wangi Power Station. A pool of water across the ground floor; coarse grass in the shallows; rusted columns receding the length of the building. Coal mills occupied the left side, pulverising fuel for the boilers. B Station was Australia's first pulverised-coal power station.

Edition

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: B Station Mill Alley
Series: Wangi Power Station
Catalogue: WPS-009
Process: Giclée
Captured: 27 November 2015
Camera: NIKON D7000
Lens: 24.0-70.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/8 s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 24 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Wangi Wangi, New South Wales, Australia
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Wangi Wangi, New South Wales, Australia

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

The B Station mill alley at Wangi Power Station is a narrow bay between the boiler-house structural columns where the coal pulverising mills sat, feeding pulverised coal to the three B Station boilers above. The bay runs along the length of the B Station footprint at a lower level than the firing floor. The mill mountings are visible as concrete pads with anchor bolt patterns; the mills themselves have been removed. The drive motors that turned the mills are gone too. Pipework and ducting run along the upper part of the bay, where the pulverised-coal lines once carried the prepared fuel up to the burners. The walls of the alley are concrete, stained dark with decades of coal dust.

B Station at Wangi was the first Australian power station to burn pulverised coal. The mill alley was where that pulverising happened: raw coal entered the mills at one end, was reduced to a fine powder by the rotating action inside, and was carried out at the other end through the pulverised-coal lines to the burners on the three Babcock & Wilcox boilers. The three 60 megawatt B Station units ran from their commissioning between 1958 and August 1960 to closure on 31 October 1986. The mills and their drive motors came out in the 1995 to 1997 equipment-removal program.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

Once an essential corridor of Wangi Power Station, B Station’s Mill Alley was where raw coal was ground into fine dust to fuel the massive boilers above. To the left, powerful coal mills worked tirelessly, transforming solid fuel into an efficient, combustible form. On the right, the ash plant workshop managed the remnants of combustion, ensuring the station’s operations remained efficient and controlled.

Brett Patman

The series

Wangi Power Station

51 photographs

About a thousand men built Wangi Power Station, on the western shore of Lake Macquarie. They were Hunter Valley locals and post-war Italian migrants, many living in a tent city on the lakeshore through the build. By 1957 they'd put up the main building, 228 metres long and eleven storeys high in triple-brick over a riveted steel frame, with three 76-metre concrete chimneys behind it.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.