Boilermakers Workshop

The boilermakers' workshop at Wangi Power Station occupies a separate building alongside the boiler house, fitted out for the heavy fabrication and repair work the plant's boiler operation required. The main floor is concrete, scuffed and stained from decades of welding, grinding, and pipework. A heavy steel-topped fabrication bench runs along one wall, fitted with vices, clamps, and a bench-top guillotine. A row of welding bays at the back of the workshop is set up for arc welding, with gas bottles secured against the wall and shielding screens hanging from rails overhead. An overhead crane runs along a beam at the top of the workshop, the hook parked at one end of its rail.

Power stations of Wangi's size required dedicated boilermakers on staff to handle the ongoing maintenance and repair of the pressure vessels, the steam pipework, the boiler tubes, and the major fabrications across the plant. The workshop in this photograph supported A Station's six Babcock & Wilcox stoker-fired boilers and B Station's three pulverised-coal boilers across the operational life of the plant from 1958 to the closure of B Station on 31 October 1986. After closure, the workshop was wound down. The benches, the welders, and the overhead crane remained. The work that justified the building did not.