Coal fired Power Stations

I've been reading that the last UK coal fired power station is due to close. I'm wondering if anything is being done to preserve some of the heritage of this highly significant industry.

 

Admittedly it was over twenty years ago when I was there, but there was an impressive display of heavy electrical machinery at MOSI in Manchester - I assume the link being Ferranti.

Trouble is... turbines are *big*. There's stuff at Battersea, perhaps?

 

Hopefully at least one or two of those elegant landmark cooling towers. We would miss them if they were all demolished.

 

I really hope you are being sarcastic...

 

I'm trying to imagine the cost of maintaining one and keeping them safe. Locally there was a plan to keep one of the brickyard chimneys as part of a heritage centre to commemorate the industrial history of the area, but it was quietly dropped one day: probably for similar reasons.

 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I like them too.
And we aren't the only ones.
https://www.theguardian.com/artandd...-towers-are-architectural-gems-lets-save-them

 

I didn't mention their looks (although I find them brutal and ugly).
I was more thinking of the horrendous cost of maintaining them as also mentioned by @The Green Howards

The author of the Guardian article speaks very romantically of the towers and shows a picture of a family having a picnic in the shadow of 4 towers and a power station. Now let's be realistic - how many families are likely to do that? I would say it ranges from zero to maybe 5 at a push.
Is the author and the 20th Century Society prepared to stump up the hundreds of thousands of pounds (maybe into the millions) to maintain even a couple of towers into the future? I'm guessing probably not, but they'd really like the Government to stump up the cash...

 

Possibly not. But those are arguments that have gone for a lot of historical buildings.

I remember eating in a hotel in Telford, and looking down over the top of Ironbridge Gorge towards the power station. Those cooling towers looked alien yet also an important part of what made the area what it was.

Their loss is about more than the purely economic value.

 

There is very little at Battersea other than than the building and one control room. The display at MOSI was better. It would be difficult to preserve a power station in such a way that would allow people to understand what they did and what it was like to work in one

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I remember going round Richborough Power Station aged about 10. At that age and level of knowledge of physics, I struggled to grasp how the big machines in front of me actually turned water into electricity.

 

I have a friend who used to work in one near Retford: one of his safety inductions pointed out that if you saw a cloud of 'steam' (read: water vapour) a few feet away from a pipe, then for heaven's sake don't walk between that pipe and where the cloud of steam was unless you wanted to be cut in two... as it indicated a high pressure leak of steam from one of the turbine pipes.

 

BBC reporting on the closure of the last coal-fired power station today;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq5e4n5z888t

Does this mean the end for all the MGR hoppers too?

 

I grew up near Ratcliffe-on-Soar and that block of 8 cooling towers, visible for miles around, is such a local landmark that I always feel like I'm "nearly home" when I see them (even though I no longer live near there). I too would be sorry to see them go. As a child, when visiting my Grandparents, we must have passed half a dozen coal-fired power stations on a 50 mile journey. All gone now, except that one. Surely one should be kept as a monument to that particular era?
Note I said 'should'. I am less certain about 'could' for the reasons others have mentioned.

 

Last coal was delivered by rail to Radcliffe on 28th June 2024. GBRf had the honours of transporting it from Immingham.

Incidentally, last use of proper MGRs ie. HAA wagons was in August 2010. One minute they're everywhere, next they've all gone. At least a few survive in preservation, mainly at Chasewater Railway.

 

To see coal trains - large ones - the place to go is The Powder River Basin in Wyoming.

 

For me, "nearly home" was the brickyard chimneys on the approach to Peterborough.

 

On the subject of safety, a few years ago I attended a health & safety presentation given by the MD of the company I was working for. He mentioned that, at the time the cooling towers were being built, the average was one fatality per 100 feet of height of each tower.

 

I felt the same about my home town station of Didcot. All the coal fired stuff is gone now, Didcot 'B' runs on gas. As a glider pilot I also miss the guaranteed thermals that formed above the cooling towers when the station was generating. Very useful to 'get you home' on a day when the weather turned for the worse. As an aside did anyone else get the false snow just downwind of the cooling towers on really frosty nights? The steam from the towers used to freeze and fall like very fine snow for about a mile or so downwind.

 

As a former GWS volunteer, I always liked seeing the cooling towers as I came towards the end of my 2 hour 'commute' from Essex on Fridays evenings.
PS. I don't know about false snow, but I am sure the temperature inside the Didcot chain link fence was at least 2 degrees colder than outside it!

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy9l57nk0qo

A call to preserve the cooling towers from a writer.

You pay for it then.