Cottam Power Station
Figured that I should probably post this one, considering it has sat in a pre-written state for most of the year on a file I've nearly deleted several times. Anyway, here goes nothin'
As coal usage in the UK and across most of the western world diminishes, more and more of the goliaths constructed under the CEGB would soon see an end with no successors.
Cottam is one of these and, another among a small collection within the Nottingham Trent valley having been producing electricity along with High Marnham, Staythorpe, Wilford and, with a few more within this pool.
As Cottams' final days loomed everyone's attention slowly turned into an obsession.
It became a subject of many conversations and disagreements.
Having missed the potential for the initial visits it was instantly clear, from the many whispers, that I would be massively out of my comfortable depth at Cottam even with an experienced or knowledgeable leader.
The security system deserves credit, it both works and asserts dominance upon any curious visitors.
A few weeks after closure. After starting our assessment of the station from the public land we were hiding, in the shadows of the bushes along the fence line, as several security teams swept the fields with their immensely bright torches and their blue-flashing lights to mimic a police response in order to weasel out their prey.
A failure, before we could even begin.
The power station, imaged from Rampton, shortly after closure, during the evening hours with the "Cottam amber" clearly visible.
History:
For those wanting to read further than the usual quick history, I'd suggest checking out the "Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants - Cottam Power Station History Book" from EDF.
Hopefully this website link should work:
History - Construction
Cottam is one of many power stations built during the later half of the CEGB's initial years where, from their creation in 1957 by the Electricity Act, they had began planning over 40 power stations from 1958 onwards and began their small construction boom of the 1960's.
Construction was delegated to the CEGB Midlands Project Group who began construction on the site of Mickleholme Farm in 1964.
The design was amongst one of the 13 proposed super power stations, centred around housing up to four 500mw generating units.
This design, despite equipment and manufacturers varying across some as well as orientation, is fairly copy-paste and often gives a lot of the UK's power stations a sense of overwhelming similarity. Outside is where most stations can divide even with their architecture despite being the usual structures of boiler house, turbine hall, precipitators, chimney stack, deaerator bay, and so on.
Notable to this is Cottams' external cladding, designed by the Yorke Rosenberg Mardall firm who had previously designed structures such as Gatwick Airport. They chose a pink-like colouration to blend in with the brickwork of the surrounding area, dubbed "Cottam amber", which makes the station unique to British industry enthusiasts.
The contract to construct the station was handed to Balfour Beatty, the boilers to John Thompson and, the turbine and alternator sets to English electric. British Rail would reopen the rail link 1967 allowing coal to be delivered using the now established MGR system, with a branch-line to Cottam.
After four years of construction work, Cottam would be handed over to the CEGB in 1968 beginning a near fifty years of operation with unit 1 joining the National Grid in June and finally Unit 4 in April 1970.
History - Technical aspects
To keep this short I'll include the usual basic specifications copied from Wikipedia along with some small interesting bits.
Ton - Imperial Tonne - Metric
Water and Boilers.
Boilers were constructed by the Wolverhampton based John Thompson Water Tube Boilers Ltd company with the capabilities to continuously evaporate water at a rate of 3,400lbs per hour with the availability for short-term overloading and consuming up to 18,3000tons of coal per day. The water for the system was sourced from the River Trent although water was only released and consumed from the waterways when required to refill the system to account for liquids lost during evaporation. In total the system required around 57million gallons of water to operate and drew around 25 million gallons from the river at its highest, per day.
Each of the eight cooling towers were capable of cooling around 6 million gallons per hour.
Coal
The coal plant was rather sizeable and was designed for the implementation of another power station, presumably this would be known as Cottam B, if required. It even featured its own control room which was mostly seperate to the main station.
One of the key components, developed in conjunction with BR and its customers of the NCB and CEGB, was the Merry Go Round block-train freight system. In short this meant British Rail could operate block coal trains (single trains with the same type of freight and wagons) straight from the docks, where coal was imported, to Cottam in one continuous loop without the need to shunt or re-organise the train during the process. The trains would then be unloaded whilst moving through, at a low speed, with Cottam capable of handling a normal unload in under an hour. With each individual HAA-type wagon dropping up to 33tons of pulverised coal and later hoppers carrying around 78tonne.
At full capacity the coal yard could accept up to 25,000tons per day with coal sent via conveyor to the stock yard or just over 9,000tons directly into the boiler house bunkers if required.
Units and Generators
Built by English Electric, Cottam housed four 500mw turbo-generators.
These turbines hold eight high pressure stages with steam expanding in the first five sections and then reversing before travelling back through the last three stages. After travelling through the high pressure stage, the steam is returned to the boilers and reheated before another trip through the generator within the two low pressure systems through another eight stages.
The units, 1 to 4, where commissioned and synchronised with the national grid across an almost two year span.
By closure the units operated for almost 1.1million hours combined with unit three having the highest running time of over 129,000 hours (or over 14 years continuous operation) and unit four having the lowest whilst also being first to close prior to the plants' demise.
Unit 1: Synchronised in June 1968
Unit 2: Synchronised in June 1969
Unit 3: Synchronised in October 1969
Unit 4: Synchronised in April 1970
History - Lifetime
Cottam operated for around 50 years with most of the units operating and exceeded the initial designed life expectancy by nearly 20 years at the time of closure.
During the 1990's many of Britain's public companies fell into to private hands with Cottam power station leaving the confines of the CEGB in 1990 into the control of Powergen. Powergen were also in the process of becoming a privatised firm during 1990 and 1991, having been a public company themselves.
Powergen and siemens would construct the Cottam development centre, CCGT, on the site of the Football fields from 1997 and opening in 1999. This station was used to further develop the CCGT technology for other plants and itself.
Powergen would become part of EON in 2004/5.
By 2010, changes with EON saw Cottam transferred to EDF.
EDF would announce the closure of the station for September 2019 in the January, under the premise of challenging market conditions with Unit 4 ceasing operations in April. The final coal delivery would arrive in June.
During September Unit 3 would desynchronise from the grid, followed by unit 2.
Unit 1 would continue to supply the grid until 14:50 on the 23rd of September 2019, marking the end of coal fired generation at Cottam.
As incidents go, there were few, the one which catches the eye is the supposed "Cottam Rocket".
The incident is due to incorrect rigging when lifting a nearly 65ton alternator rotor from unit 3. Supposedly, the rigger insisted on using multiple slings and the engineer overruled the decision. When lifting the shaft began to shift from horizonal to vertical, before dropping towards and through the floor into a live cable tray.
Afterwards, the shaft was left poking through the floor for a few weeks until it could be removed and sent off for maintenance.
Anyway.
Attempt 2
Fast-forward a few months and a small collection of photos kept my interest alive with the station I had convinced myself not to worry about.
On another late evening we were again sat in my dying Peugeot, under the shadow of Cottam, as I turned the interior lights off to the preserve the battery and remove any local attention from the sounds of a whining alternator pulling up outside. We grabbed our stuff and began re-assessing the station with no new routes having been secured past the inital days of closure.
UT and JT were running late which stressed myself and X who were desperate to at least secure a potential chance of success with the limited time that had been planned for.
I sat and observed for movements across the eerily static environment of Cottam, stopping to urinate and scare off the animals which was often followed by a security patrol, whilst XPlorerX did the final calculations of his proposed route.
The evening was now pushing into the morning hours and it became a case of now or never so we dropped into the hellish world of weeds and grass snakes just as UT and Jtza showed up.
Everything was a chaotic blurr and the next time to catch our breath was kneeling between the cooling towers in a state of shock that we made it this far. Our jog continued into the structures around the main station and didn't really halt until we were stripping our warm clothes off in the depths of the boiler house.
"Shit, we are in!?" echoed in my head.
Very quickly our cameras were deployed, before we tried to warm ourselves up from the cold winds by doing miniature exercises. As our cameras absorbed the limited light, we began to observe the perimeter for any signs that we had been tracked.
Looking towards the cooling towers and a fair amount of the ancillary structures to support the plant.
The stars, the lights, the darkness and the imposing view of another goliath.
The night continued like any other as we cautiously clambered around the station trying to make the most of our time.
Deaerator Bay
Boiler House
Turbine Hall
Photographed from the Unit 4 end of the hall.
Overview of the rather jagged and chaotic turbine hall, a contrast to smooth casings and well hidden pipe work.
Viewed from the alternator ends.
As the darkness was ending we needed to get out of the danger zone and back into our cars.
Yet, despite the anxiety of daylight approaching, we stalled numerous times to try our luck at the control room.
Yeah, nah, not happening tonight.
A few moments later, we were out and heading home. With all things considered it was a satisfactory visit.
Still, that control room. I wanted it.
Attempt 3
A few months on, news broke that the control room had been entered successfully and, the window to follow my have already shut.
We attempted the station once again before quickly calling it off.
With so much of our time having been spent driving to Cottam we decided to test a few theories before figuring out that most were likely a rumour.
As we turned our backs to leave, all hell broke loose over the next quarter of an hour.
Fail.
Attempt 4
It was a least a year on by this point and I found myself ferrying our arses back towards Cottam as a somewhat final ditch effort. For a good while it had sat on my mind and no matter how much I convinced myself to give up, it needed to happen. Thankfully a promising lead had came to light on the provision we dressed correctly. Thankfully, after a fairly long trek it had worked out. As the bitterly cold night pushed on, we were again catching our breath under the few shadows created by a mist-diffused moonlight before spending a few hours shivering to sleep on the roof.
As the sun attempted to break through the clouds I walked laps of the roof to warm up and drank what coffee remained in a hastily purchased flask before setting up the tripod.
Deaerator Bay Roof looking onwards to the switching station.
The low mist and clear skies created a special few moments on the roof by myself as you very quickly grasp the scale of the place. Looking towards the cooling towers.
Security having a nose into the drains surrounded by the massive cooling water pipes and the machinery which would eventually be used against the station.
One of the sheltered sections where goods could be lifted through the boiler house to the roof.
The day broke and the mist cleared. As expected and planned, we couldn't leave during the daylight hours without being seen before the tricky sections of the exit. Therefore, the late morning and early afternoon were spent traipsing around every inch of the station we found interesting. Yet, the control room evaded us.
Dead space above the boiler house.
Some pipes
More pipe
In all honesty, the place is just stocked with pipes, I'd be surprised if any former technicians or engineers could name what most of the stuff did or where it all went.
Something I always find interesting is how floors of these stations are named by their height from the ground, also the DA Tanks look like errm yeah...
The aforementioned DA Tanks.
The Turbine hall was now well underway in terms of scrapping.
Clock!
Strangely, the hall looked so much more photogenic in this state.
To Be Continued...
Figured that I should probably post this one, considering it has sat in a pre-written state for most of the year on a file I've nearly deleted several times. Anyway, here goes nothin'
As coal usage in the UK and across most of the western world diminishes, more and more of the goliaths constructed under the CEGB would soon see an end with no successors.
Cottam is one of these and, another among a small collection within the Nottingham Trent valley having been producing electricity along with High Marnham, Staythorpe, Wilford and, with a few more within this pool.
As Cottams' final days loomed everyone's attention slowly turned into an obsession.
It became a subject of many conversations and disagreements.
Having missed the potential for the initial visits it was instantly clear, from the many whispers, that I would be massively out of my comfortable depth at Cottam even with an experienced or knowledgeable leader.
The security system deserves credit, it both works and asserts dominance upon any curious visitors.
A few weeks after closure. After starting our assessment of the station from the public land we were hiding, in the shadows of the bushes along the fence line, as several security teams swept the fields with their immensely bright torches and their blue-flashing lights to mimic a police response in order to weasel out their prey.
A failure, before we could even begin.
History:
For those wanting to read further than the usual quick history, I'd suggest checking out the "Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants - Cottam Power Station History Book" from EDF.
Hopefully this website link should work:
History - Construction
Cottam is one of many power stations built during the later half of the CEGB's initial years where, from their creation in 1957 by the Electricity Act, they had began planning over 40 power stations from 1958 onwards and began their small construction boom of the 1960's.
Construction was delegated to the CEGB Midlands Project Group who began construction on the site of Mickleholme Farm in 1964.
The design was amongst one of the 13 proposed super power stations, centred around housing up to four 500mw generating units.
This design, despite equipment and manufacturers varying across some as well as orientation, is fairly copy-paste and often gives a lot of the UK's power stations a sense of overwhelming similarity. Outside is where most stations can divide even with their architecture despite being the usual structures of boiler house, turbine hall, precipitators, chimney stack, deaerator bay, and so on.
Notable to this is Cottams' external cladding, designed by the Yorke Rosenberg Mardall firm who had previously designed structures such as Gatwick Airport. They chose a pink-like colouration to blend in with the brickwork of the surrounding area, dubbed "Cottam amber", which makes the station unique to British industry enthusiasts.
The contract to construct the station was handed to Balfour Beatty, the boilers to John Thompson and, the turbine and alternator sets to English electric. British Rail would reopen the rail link 1967 allowing coal to be delivered using the now established MGR system, with a branch-line to Cottam.
After four years of construction work, Cottam would be handed over to the CEGB in 1968 beginning a near fifty years of operation with unit 1 joining the National Grid in June and finally Unit 4 in April 1970.
History - Technical aspects
To keep this short I'll include the usual basic specifications copied from Wikipedia along with some small interesting bits.
Ton - Imperial Tonne - Metric
Water and Boilers.
Boilers were constructed by the Wolverhampton based John Thompson Water Tube Boilers Ltd company with the capabilities to continuously evaporate water at a rate of 3,400lbs per hour with the availability for short-term overloading and consuming up to 18,3000tons of coal per day. The water for the system was sourced from the River Trent although water was only released and consumed from the waterways when required to refill the system to account for liquids lost during evaporation. In total the system required around 57million gallons of water to operate and drew around 25 million gallons from the river at its highest, per day.
Each of the eight cooling towers were capable of cooling around 6 million gallons per hour.
Coal
The coal plant was rather sizeable and was designed for the implementation of another power station, presumably this would be known as Cottam B, if required. It even featured its own control room which was mostly seperate to the main station.
One of the key components, developed in conjunction with BR and its customers of the NCB and CEGB, was the Merry Go Round block-train freight system. In short this meant British Rail could operate block coal trains (single trains with the same type of freight and wagons) straight from the docks, where coal was imported, to Cottam in one continuous loop without the need to shunt or re-organise the train during the process. The trains would then be unloaded whilst moving through, at a low speed, with Cottam capable of handling a normal unload in under an hour. With each individual HAA-type wagon dropping up to 33tons of pulverised coal and later hoppers carrying around 78tonne.
At full capacity the coal yard could accept up to 25,000tons per day with coal sent via conveyor to the stock yard or just over 9,000tons directly into the boiler house bunkers if required.
Units and Generators
Built by English Electric, Cottam housed four 500mw turbo-generators.
These turbines hold eight high pressure stages with steam expanding in the first five sections and then reversing before travelling back through the last three stages. After travelling through the high pressure stage, the steam is returned to the boilers and reheated before another trip through the generator within the two low pressure systems through another eight stages.
The units, 1 to 4, where commissioned and synchronised with the national grid across an almost two year span.
By closure the units operated for almost 1.1million hours combined with unit three having the highest running time of over 129,000 hours (or over 14 years continuous operation) and unit four having the lowest whilst also being first to close prior to the plants' demise.
Unit 1: Synchronised in June 1968
Unit 2: Synchronised in June 1969
Unit 3: Synchronised in October 1969
Unit 4: Synchronised in April 1970
History - Lifetime
Cottam operated for around 50 years with most of the units operating and exceeded the initial designed life expectancy by nearly 20 years at the time of closure.
During the 1990's many of Britain's public companies fell into to private hands with Cottam power station leaving the confines of the CEGB in 1990 into the control of Powergen. Powergen were also in the process of becoming a privatised firm during 1990 and 1991, having been a public company themselves.
Powergen and siemens would construct the Cottam development centre, CCGT, on the site of the Football fields from 1997 and opening in 1999. This station was used to further develop the CCGT technology for other plants and itself.
Powergen would become part of EON in 2004/5.
By 2010, changes with EON saw Cottam transferred to EDF.
EDF would announce the closure of the station for September 2019 in the January, under the premise of challenging market conditions with Unit 4 ceasing operations in April. The final coal delivery would arrive in June.
During September Unit 3 would desynchronise from the grid, followed by unit 2.
Unit 1 would continue to supply the grid until 14:50 on the 23rd of September 2019, marking the end of coal fired generation at Cottam.
As incidents go, there were few, the one which catches the eye is the supposed "Cottam Rocket".
The incident is due to incorrect rigging when lifting a nearly 65ton alternator rotor from unit 3. Supposedly, the rigger insisted on using multiple slings and the engineer overruled the decision. When lifting the shaft began to shift from horizonal to vertical, before dropping towards and through the floor into a live cable tray.
Afterwards, the shaft was left poking through the floor for a few weeks until it could be removed and sent off for maintenance.
Anyway.
Attempt 2
Fast-forward a few months and a small collection of photos kept my interest alive with the station I had convinced myself not to worry about.
On another late evening we were again sat in my dying Peugeot, under the shadow of Cottam, as I turned the interior lights off to the preserve the battery and remove any local attention from the sounds of a whining alternator pulling up outside. We grabbed our stuff and began re-assessing the station with no new routes having been secured past the inital days of closure.
UT and JT were running late which stressed myself and X who were desperate to at least secure a potential chance of success with the limited time that had been planned for.
I sat and observed for movements across the eerily static environment of Cottam, stopping to urinate and scare off the animals which was often followed by a security patrol, whilst XPlorerX did the final calculations of his proposed route.
The evening was now pushing into the morning hours and it became a case of now or never so we dropped into the hellish world of weeds and grass snakes just as UT and Jtza showed up.
Everything was a chaotic blurr and the next time to catch our breath was kneeling between the cooling towers in a state of shock that we made it this far. Our jog continued into the structures around the main station and didn't really halt until we were stripping our warm clothes off in the depths of the boiler house.
"Shit, we are in!?" echoed in my head.
Very quickly our cameras were deployed, before we tried to warm ourselves up from the cold winds by doing miniature exercises. As our cameras absorbed the limited light, we began to observe the perimeter for any signs that we had been tracked.
Looking towards the cooling towers and a fair amount of the ancillary structures to support the plant.
The stars, the lights, the darkness and the imposing view of another goliath.
The night continued like any other as we cautiously clambered around the station trying to make the most of our time.
Deaerator Bay
Boiler House
Turbine Hall
Photographed from the Unit 4 end of the hall.
Overview of the rather jagged and chaotic turbine hall, a contrast to smooth casings and well hidden pipe work.
Viewed from the alternator ends.
As the darkness was ending we needed to get out of the danger zone and back into our cars.
Yet, despite the anxiety of daylight approaching, we stalled numerous times to try our luck at the control room.
Yeah, nah, not happening tonight.
A few moments later, we were out and heading home. With all things considered it was a satisfactory visit.
Still, that control room. I wanted it.
Attempt 3
A few months on, news broke that the control room had been entered successfully and, the window to follow my have already shut.
We attempted the station once again before quickly calling it off.
With so much of our time having been spent driving to Cottam we decided to test a few theories before figuring out that most were likely a rumour.
As we turned our backs to leave, all hell broke loose over the next quarter of an hour.
Fail.
Attempt 4
It was a least a year on by this point and I found myself ferrying our arses back towards Cottam as a somewhat final ditch effort. For a good while it had sat on my mind and no matter how much I convinced myself to give up, it needed to happen. Thankfully a promising lead had came to light on the provision we dressed correctly. Thankfully, after a fairly long trek it had worked out. As the bitterly cold night pushed on, we were again catching our breath under the few shadows created by a mist-diffused moonlight before spending a few hours shivering to sleep on the roof.
As the sun attempted to break through the clouds I walked laps of the roof to warm up and drank what coffee remained in a hastily purchased flask before setting up the tripod.
Deaerator Bay Roof looking onwards to the switching station.
The low mist and clear skies created a special few moments on the roof by myself as you very quickly grasp the scale of the place. Looking towards the cooling towers.
Security having a nose into the drains surrounded by the massive cooling water pipes and the machinery which would eventually be used against the station.
One of the sheltered sections where goods could be lifted through the boiler house to the roof.
The day broke and the mist cleared. As expected and planned, we couldn't leave during the daylight hours without being seen before the tricky sections of the exit. Therefore, the late morning and early afternoon were spent traipsing around every inch of the station we found interesting. Yet, the control room evaded us.
Dead space above the boiler house.
Some pipes
More pipe
In all honesty, the place is just stocked with pipes, I'd be surprised if any former technicians or engineers could name what most of the stuff did or where it all went.
Something I always find interesting is how floors of these stations are named by their height from the ground, also the DA Tanks look like errm yeah...
The aforementioned DA Tanks.
The Turbine hall was now well underway in terms of scrapping.
Clock!
Strangely, the hall looked so much more photogenic in this state.
To Be Continued...
Last edited:
