Recently, myself and a couple of @Maniac -s from down south got in the car, put some coffees in the cupholders, set course up to a certain Yorkshire coal-fired beauty, and got our hands filthy. Eggborough, nestled between Ferrybridge and Drax, is, if I'm not mistaken, the most fossil fuel UKPS to completely wind down all its units at the reigns of the LCPD. Everyone knows where Wikipedia lives, so instead I'm going to chat a bit of blether to start things of.
Egg is in a lot of ways, if I'm gonna push my luck with what's acceptably anthropomorphic, a power station that strikes me as dapper and refined, to a standout degree. Its ring-shaped pine-tree covered verge around its coal yard is just neat, by a standard of either maths or gardening. Its chimney is debonair. Its turbo lineup, and the way the turbine hall is more-or-less perfectly symmetrical, is gracious and suave. Its control room, up and running the show since 1967, with turquoise very busy workstations at four corners, is classic and elegant. But something else I really like is its ownership story. British Energy, a rather forgettable business operation, ran it through the noughts, before it got taken over by EDF (85% state owned). Then what happened is the birth of a short-lived 5 year energy company called Eggborough Power ltd from 2010-2015, splintering off from EDF to do things at its own pace at its own well-kempt estate, the 2GW (4x 500MW), dapper Eggborough. I find this interesting, given most of our fossil fuel stations were run by the usual German-owned multinational energy companies. Insofar as the pressures of business culture and scope in multinational, multi-station operations and markets, executive board management and all the rest, is rather alleviated from the way Eggborough Power ltd could run their, basically, local business to a nationwide market, what you get left on the control room central coffee table, for instance, is a box of Yorkshire Tea, whereas at RWE's Littlebrook D, you get a flipchart titled business targets. I'm going a bit abstract and off topic here, but there's something weirdly... homely, about the setup at Egg. You get friendly signs around the turbine hall saying 'Keep Eggborough Tidy', 'Let's ALTA Eggborough: Ask, Listen, Think & Act', of which I've not really seen equivalents of at the other UKPS. The bottom line is; it's a class act mechanically, aesthetically, interpersonally, and the rest.
So on with the visit story. The Egg is freshly laid for UE. After the long drive, armed with a bit of homework, we had a look at the lay of the land, and formularised a flight plan. It did indeed appear we had some serious and lengthy work to get down to, so we got our boots on the ground and got in the zone. A rather lot of contortionist antics later, surroundings flitting between light and darkness, ambient and silent, and picking up a sheerly terrific amount of dust, we found our precipice. My trusty, grainy point-and-shoot was of course on the scene and was sprayed from the hip now and then amidst capturing the surprisingly serene atmosphere in the hall. Now I might have the wrong end of the stick here on my technical facts so someone please call me out, but I recall reading that a company named Associated Electric Industries, founded in 1928, built these in the mid 60s, before shortly being acquired by GEC, who as we know built a fair share of the goodies lying around Britain today generating our leccy or not.
Shortly after arriving, I managed to stick my camera on panorama mode and for some reason it took me like 10 minutes to work out how to change it back. Dim of me. Results I guess capture something about the scale and symmetry.
Serenity in there continued. You could hear a pin drop. The lighting was just so, everything was super clear, but it was harsh on the eyes. But onto the next course...
The CR was built at a time when Thunderbirds was an appropriate vision of the future, people had just started docking spacecraft onto each other in orbit, and England won the World Cup with highlights commentated by British Pathe. And since then, they've brought in a few more tables, computers, cups of tea, lightbulbs, and that's about it. Doesn't it look the bloody part! It's also gorgeously symmetrical, much like the hall. Precise yet stylish engineering with a Yorkshire heart. There's not much else to be said really.
Noticing the teabag in the cup looked a hell of a lot like the one I had seen earlier that evening in my own tea back dish back in London from the same morning, we thought we'd better keep it moving. The boiler house was very dark. It was neat and symmetrical in the most vague kinds of ways, but nothing worth getting the flash out for in such circumstances as a 2 months quiet station, we thought. Next we headed to the observation deck. Beautiful weather too, still, dry, but misty. We had a look at the film set. A UAZ-452, a bit of Cyrillic door signs, and a little car crash mock-up set next to admin, was down there. The Rock seems to have his work cut out. We oodled the chimney, and the cooling towers, and the whole surroundings. My camera might not have with quite as much clarity though. But it doesn't really matter eh. And with that it was the reverse route, lengthy and impossible to perform too carefully.
And that's about it!
All the best,
O
Egg is in a lot of ways, if I'm gonna push my luck with what's acceptably anthropomorphic, a power station that strikes me as dapper and refined, to a standout degree. Its ring-shaped pine-tree covered verge around its coal yard is just neat, by a standard of either maths or gardening. Its chimney is debonair. Its turbo lineup, and the way the turbine hall is more-or-less perfectly symmetrical, is gracious and suave. Its control room, up and running the show since 1967, with turquoise very busy workstations at four corners, is classic and elegant. But something else I really like is its ownership story. British Energy, a rather forgettable business operation, ran it through the noughts, before it got taken over by EDF (85% state owned). Then what happened is the birth of a short-lived 5 year energy company called Eggborough Power ltd from 2010-2015, splintering off from EDF to do things at its own pace at its own well-kempt estate, the 2GW (4x 500MW), dapper Eggborough. I find this interesting, given most of our fossil fuel stations were run by the usual German-owned multinational energy companies. Insofar as the pressures of business culture and scope in multinational, multi-station operations and markets, executive board management and all the rest, is rather alleviated from the way Eggborough Power ltd could run their, basically, local business to a nationwide market, what you get left on the control room central coffee table, for instance, is a box of Yorkshire Tea, whereas at RWE's Littlebrook D, you get a flipchart titled business targets. I'm going a bit abstract and off topic here, but there's something weirdly... homely, about the setup at Egg. You get friendly signs around the turbine hall saying 'Keep Eggborough Tidy', 'Let's ALTA Eggborough: Ask, Listen, Think & Act', of which I've not really seen equivalents of at the other UKPS. The bottom line is; it's a class act mechanically, aesthetically, interpersonally, and the rest.
So on with the visit story. The Egg is freshly laid for UE. After the long drive, armed with a bit of homework, we had a look at the lay of the land, and formularised a flight plan. It did indeed appear we had some serious and lengthy work to get down to, so we got our boots on the ground and got in the zone. A rather lot of contortionist antics later, surroundings flitting between light and darkness, ambient and silent, and picking up a sheerly terrific amount of dust, we found our precipice. My trusty, grainy point-and-shoot was of course on the scene and was sprayed from the hip now and then amidst capturing the surprisingly serene atmosphere in the hall. Now I might have the wrong end of the stick here on my technical facts so someone please call me out, but I recall reading that a company named Associated Electric Industries, founded in 1928, built these in the mid 60s, before shortly being acquired by GEC, who as we know built a fair share of the goodies lying around Britain today generating our leccy or not.
Shortly after arriving, I managed to stick my camera on panorama mode and for some reason it took me like 10 minutes to work out how to change it back. Dim of me. Results I guess capture something about the scale and symmetry.
Serenity in there continued. You could hear a pin drop. The lighting was just so, everything was super clear, but it was harsh on the eyes. But onto the next course...
The CR was built at a time when Thunderbirds was an appropriate vision of the future, people had just started docking spacecraft onto each other in orbit, and England won the World Cup with highlights commentated by British Pathe. And since then, they've brought in a few more tables, computers, cups of tea, lightbulbs, and that's about it. Doesn't it look the bloody part! It's also gorgeously symmetrical, much like the hall. Precise yet stylish engineering with a Yorkshire heart. There's not much else to be said really.
Noticing the teabag in the cup looked a hell of a lot like the one I had seen earlier that evening in my own tea back dish back in London from the same morning, we thought we'd better keep it moving. The boiler house was very dark. It was neat and symmetrical in the most vague kinds of ways, but nothing worth getting the flash out for in such circumstances as a 2 months quiet station, we thought. Next we headed to the observation deck. Beautiful weather too, still, dry, but misty. We had a look at the film set. A UAZ-452, a bit of Cyrillic door signs, and a little car crash mock-up set next to admin, was down there. The Rock seems to have his work cut out. We oodled the chimney, and the cooling towers, and the whole surroundings. My camera might not have with quite as much clarity though. But it doesn't really matter eh. And with that it was the reverse route, lengthy and impossible to perform too carefully.
And that's about it!
All the best,
O
