Boiler House Looking Towards Turbine Hall

Looking from the boiler house at Wangi Power Station toward the turbine hall, the photograph takes in the full structural span between the two halls. The connecting bay is a high steel-framed corridor with overhead crane rails running its length. Catwalks on multiple levels cross the bay, allowing access from one hall to the other without descending to the ground floor. The light comes through clerestory windows in the roof. The floor below is concrete, with bolt patterns visible where machinery has been removed. The geometry is the geometry of a working coal-fired power station of the 1950s.

The boiler house and turbine hall were the two main production spaces of the plant. In the boiler house, coal was burned to raise high-pressure steam. In the turbine hall, that steam drove the turbines that turned the generators. The corridor between the two halls carried the steam pipes, the feed-water lines, and the access for maintenance crews moving between systems. Wangi operated this way from 1958 to 1986. After decommissioning, the major plant equipment was removed for sale or scrap. The structural shell was left, including the corridor in this photograph. The geometry shows what a coal-fired generation cycle looked like from the inside.