Workshop

A workshop at White Bay Power Station has long workbenches along three walls, fitted with vices, drill presses, lathes, and a small overhead crane for lifting heavier components. Tools hang on a peg-board behind each bench. Spare parts and bearings are racked on shelving along the back wall. The flooring is concrete, marked with the wear pattern of decades of fitter and welder traffic. A single fluorescent strip lights each workbench from above. The room smells of cutting fluid and old grease, even after forty years of disuse.

Large thermal power stations like White Bay had to maintain themselves. The workshops on site handled the bearing repairs, the gasket changes, the small fabrication jobs, and the general maintenance that kept the plant running between scheduled major overhauls. Each workshop covered a section of the plant: mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, boilermaking. The workshop in this photograph is one of the mechanical workshops. After 1983 the work stopped. Some tools were sold off; most of the heavier benches and machine tools were left because moving them out cost more than they were worth. The workshop has been quiet since the day the plant closed.