Eggborough isn't all that far from me, so my first visit most certainly wasn’t my last. From those early days I watched from the inside as the place changed. From pristine and sparkly to quiet and relaxing over the course of a few years, the machines that make steam and electricity were gradually replaced with the kind that make a big mess, eating away at the heart of the beast.
Each visit had its own merits, and I had some fun times looking around this one. Eating eggs in Eggborough, just because, you know, eggs! I fucking love eggs! They were the chocolatey kind. Oh and the chimney incident! Yeah. Chimney incident. I’ll get to that... Read on, my friends.
The interestingly square-shaped chimney towering above the power station, viewed from the coal yard
Visits over the years included such friends as @The Amateur Wanderer, the man himself @Ojay and I'm pretty sure his good colleague @OjayTESTING popped along for at least one of the visits, our favourite oddball @Terminal Decline, @little_ boy_explores, PrettyVacant and of course the omnipresent @SpiderMonkey. On one memorable visit in the presence of @Speed and @clebby we came very close to meeting some of the workers who entered the control room kitchen just after we had devoured their dessert. I fucking love dessert! It was the caramel kind.
Anyway enough about all that, what is this Eggborough, anyway…?
History of Eggborough Power Station
Eggborough Power Station is one of the three giant stations in the Aire Valley, constructed by the CEGB on the banks of the River Aire, close to the Selby coal seam. Eggborough was the second of those to be constructed, following on from Ferrybridge further up the river, and before Drax a little further down the Aire. The first units were online and producing electricity by 1967, and the full 2 gigawatt capacity was up and running by 1970.
Electricity was generated using 4 x 500 MW Associated Electrical Industries (AEI) turbo-generators, with steam supplied from 4 x Foster Wheeler Boilers. The generating units, station layout and facilities were a replica of Eggborough's sister station, Ironbridge B, only this time round everything had been doubled up.
Eggborough Power Station (image from the official opening booklet, 1970)
The station was commissioned and initially operated by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) and became the property of National Power upon privatisation in 1990. British Energy bought the power station in 2000. British energy was purchased by EDF in 2009, however Eggborough’s lenders had the option to purchase the station the following April. On 1 April 2010, EDF transferred Eggborough to the plant’s bondholders. In January 2015 the sale of the power station to Czech Republic-based Energetický a průmyslový holding was finalised.
Eggborough had faced the threat of closure for a few years, and in 2018 it was announced it would close by September that year. The power station stopped generating on 23 March 2018.
Turbine Hall
Turbine hall, 1970, with No. 1 generator in the foreground
Turbine hall, 1970, with No. 1 generator in the foreground
Eggborough Power Station had four 500 MW turbo-generator sets manufactured by AEI. The large turbine hall, as with the entire station, was an almost duplicate of Ironbridge, only with double the number of units. The HP heaters were situated between each unit and form a prominent feature of the turbine hall.
General view of the turbine hall
Unit 1
Unit 1
View across units 3, 2 and 1
Unit 3 turbines and generator set
Unit 1, it's old-school switch panel and the tiled floor of the turbine hall
Unit 2 HP turbine end
Condensers and Feed Pumps
Condesers under the turbines
Units 2 and 3 Boiler Feed Pumps
Unit 1 Starting and Standby Boiler Feed Pump
Boiler House and Mills
The boiler house at Eggborough Power Station contained the steam generating boilers and pulverised fuel mills. When the station was on full load each boiler would burn about 200 tons of coal per hour, giving a total for the whole station of 19,200 tons per day.
Poipe poipe poipe poipe
Base of ash hoppers
19 of the 20 PF Mills
Mills
Above the mills we find the coal feeders and the bottom of the bunkers.
Continuing up, the top of the bunkers.
Forced Draught Fans
Compressor Room
The compressor room was pretty nice, tucked way at one end of the boiler house
Control Room
The spacious and airy central control room at Eggborough contained the control desks for all four units, plus engineering and station services. Each unit had its own control station, wrapping around the corners of the square layout. Engineering and controls for station facilities were placed in the centre.
I'm pretty sure this is the most original control room I've seen in any of the big stations - all the panels are pretty much unmodified.
Workshops
Coal Handling Plant
The 345 acre coal storage yard at Eggborough power station had a capacity of 1.75 million tons of coal, which is equivalent to 15 weeks supply. Fuel was originally drawn from the Yorkshire coalfields and consisted of small coals unsuitable for domestic use.
Coal stacks and the power station as seen from the drone
View over the coal plant from the bunker house roof
Paddle feeder and conveyors below the rail unloader
Interior of the rail unloader
A giant boom stacker was used to deliver coal to the stock yard at a rate of 3,000 tons per hour, and reclaimed using a bucket-wheel at 1,500 tons per hour. This was the first such system to be used in the UK. It was quite a piece of kit! I'd wanted to see this but wasn't sure it worth the risk of going outside into the coal yard during daylight. After seeing a recent report from Eggborough featuring this machine, it became even more tempting. It was very quiet around the site on this particular day, so decided to head and shoot it. It worked out well.
Chimney and Cooling Towers
I promised you a story, didn’t I. Well, for (probably) the first time in umbex history, we had to dob ourselves in to the police...
Getting to the base of the chimney, we were pretty surprised to find it wide open. We would later hear from the police that they had received reports of some people removing locks at the site earlier in the day, so we must have just got lucky. Up we went! It's near enough 200 meters to the top, or ~1000 steps (whichever sounds most impressive) and is about as tiring as I expected a chimney climb to be (this being my first). We'd only been up there a few minutes when I spotted a police car driving around the site. "Hey, @Terminal Decline", I said, "there's a police car driving around the site, do you think it's here for us?". His reply, "there's another parked at the bottom of the chimney" indicated that was most likely the case. We took some shots and before long they buggered off, leaving us to it. Curious.....
We made our descent, wondering what to expect. Finding the door had been locked was amongst the worst of our fears. I pushed the door. Bugger. It didn't budge. Double bugger! We tried all the obvious things - looking for another way out (there was none!), banging on the door, shouting, and a bit of frantic Googling to try to find a phone number we could call to get hold of somebody at the site. We knew the only way out was for security to unlock the door, and they weren't going to do that without involving the police, so our last resort was more awkward that anything.... "Hello, 101 none emergency..." the very polite officer answered with. "Hi, yeah.... " this really is fucking awkward, I thought, "we're trapped inside the chimney at Eggborough Power Station".
An hour later, and the door swings open, revealing the high-vis uniforms of four police officers and two security guards glimmering in the bright daylight outside. It turns out they had no idea we were inside until we called. Security had found the unsecured door and reported it to the police. They never even thought somebody might be up there, so wasted no time in locking it up. The police were really sound and gave us no hassle at all, and we enjoyed the ride in the blue and yellow chequered taxi back to the car.
The above image, for anyone that's interested, is a double panorama. First, I created a standard horizontal panorama using three images, which I un-bendified using the Adaptive Wide Angle tool in Photoshop. This left a big gap at the bottom of the image, so I stitched that pano with another image I'd taken looking directly down the chimney, and hey presto! There are a few stitching issues, but still pretty cool I thought.
16mm (on full frame) version for comparison with the above image
Cooling towers
View towards Drax
View towards Ferrybridge
Top of the flue ducts
I stole this composition from Terminal Decline
Demolition
Between August 2021 to July 2022 the main structures were demolished using explosives, forever changing the familiar skyline and views from the M62
Bye bye Eggy... I fucking loved you!
Might as well finish with a couple of people shots then...
Who dis handsome young man with the shiny polished head? Note the lack of anything to stop people dropping off the edge :/
Clebby models his entry for Miss Power Station 2018
Thanks for looking!
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