Exploring the Abandoned Eggborough Power Station - Before Demolition 

Why was Eggborough notorious?

You'll know one or two lads from Agecroft then👍🏼

@@freespirit1975 We mainly had, in the UK large stations, General Electric Company (GEC) (not the US GEC!) and Parsons - the company of Charles Parsons. The UK fleets was standardised over a number of ranges so rebuilds and swaps could occur, the down side was that they insisted that the UK nuclear power stations had to use the same turbines, with a higher boiler port temperature, which really was not good for nuclear stations operation. The Parsons 660MW units were the first to break the million HP scale, which is more amazing considering that twenty years prior 50MW was considered large. Also, from memory, and others may correct me as I could well be wrong, I believe the 660's were the first to use electric vs mechanical (nearly Watts style) governors at that size. What's more incredible is that they were hydrogen cooled stator cores and now that size can be air cooled! PS I appreciate these were 500MW units. They were really quick to load however.

I say to people until you've stood on the HP end of a steam turbine on a winters evening peak, do you really have no idea of the energy in a power station: respect to the Unit Controllers!

I see that West Burton is getting a new lease of life as one of the UKs locations for a nuclear fusion power plant. All I can remember from West Burton was the Asbestos.

Good point about someone actually designing this! That's what I was thinking when watching this. Amazing

That looks like the place featured on the 1970s Album cover, PXR5 by Hawkwind🤔

Cheers fellas :)

You guys should do an explore together, 2 great channels, cheers. 👍👍

My favorite channel

I really like your video buddy keep up good work

Excellent post. These engineering achievements should be preserved in the digital space, as in years to come they could prove very useful for training apprentice engineers, or for technicians who may need a refresher before attempting to repair an identical asset which is still functioning. We have lost so much of our structural engineering past. It really is very sad as we once achieved such great things.

@@residentelect It's unfortunate that the people with the money and the bureaucrats in charge of things tend not to have the kind of vision needed to do anything other than just tear such things down.

@@StubbyPhillips When Didcot A (built in the same era as Eggborough) was closed in 2013, they dismantled a great deal of the control room and gave it to the Oxfordshire county archives. There was a plan to do something with it in the town, but I don't know what happened to it. I went around the plant quite a few times and it was amazing - engineering on an epic scale that we'll never see again.

I worked in there ,installing control gear for a new soot blower control panel , fitting instrumentation into the existing control panels was no easy fit , very heavy gauge steel to cut through, but very interesting at the time .

The "greenies" think they want limited electricity; until they have to do without, that is! 🇺🇸 😎👍☕

It's all part of a bigger plan

Yup..used to work there, still running ok on the day it stopped mainly

Maintenance and repairs to the aging facilities costs too much.

One word “rust” . It is warfare to battle the elements.

Yes I agree thankyou for documenting & your dedication been able to look back at this place means something and maybe others that worked there

You also support them trespassing by watching these video's. I have just done this and I want to ask why do you have to trespass? Why cant these guys go to the proper people (perhaps old managers or workers) with the proper liability insurance and proper Personal Protective Equipment (Steel toe boots, high vis) and make a real documentary.

k bye

Ditto. I've toured Willington coal power station and also Sellafield nuclear plant as a kid. I ended up designing places like this though so looking around them these days isn't so exciting!

Way back in the early 70s, my old man worked at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, another great example of 1960s CEGB design & build. I was lucky enough to get a guided tour around the turbine hall, control room, and inside the base of one of the cooling towers - this great video brought those memories back.

Same here, I took the Dungenss B tour pre-9/11 which closed them off. The power of the alternator sets at full speed was, as you say, awesome - the whole ground shook.

You ever work at Drax?

No but a lot of the guys had

Former CEGB fitter here👍🏼

Looks almost Soviet at times or is it the other way round? Tesla battery power stations probably would look the same if they can last 60 years!

That is what is so depressing. These places come from a different Britain that was competent and forward looking. I bet 99% of the equipment in this station originated in the UK, a situation that is unimaginable now.

Exactly, and that's why the government can't afford to decommission Drax power station, which is just down the road from Eggborough. It has capacity to power over two million homes by burning biomass, making it unfavorable to the Green lobbies, but that is a hell of a lot of people who would be without power if it was ever closed and not replaced with a suitable facility.

It had bugger all to do with the dash for gas, that was back in the 90's. It was the dash to go green that killed it.

There was bigger.but not now

Such a shame. Looked like the equipment was very healthy as if it could have lasted 30+ years to 2050 like it was designed to.

Ha, Rugely was a baby in comparison. Did 2 outages there. We were there, on the roof when A station came down and all TV reception was lost in the town.

You put it right. I also film "urban life", but that ain't a film set where you can just direct things. Most of my best footage is, ironically, the less choreographed ones because I captured said event, not that I had a time to put my tripod up or something!

The music sounds like Banco de Gaia. I have the album on CD and it is great.

The owners stopped anyone takin anything whatsoever... didnt stop us though

Its what u get when u sell to foriegn firms,,, they rip everything of all profit then leave

Watching the tinsley towers drop was a sad moment, glad we attended though.

Sad ending, it is gone. Kuddos for documenting it before it was destroyed. All of that equipment looked so healthy, like if it could have lasted another 30+ years to 2050 like it was designed to. What a tragedy.

This country would probably have eight or nine third-generation nuclear power plants by now if the Tories had not sold British Nuclear to the French in the early 90's. Also our plants were the best in the world, we were the only country to run gas-cooled reactors that literally could not explode no matter what you did to them (because gases can't boil into a vapor like liquids can). We built gas-cooled Magnox reactors in the 60's and then gas-cooled AGRs in the 80's, and had John Major not done what Tories do best - and sold off one of our industries - then around the year 2000 we would have built a third generation of gas-cooled reactors. Instead the French are building a single power plant at Hinkley Point that is a water-cooled reactor of their own design that is being financed by China, the cherry on the cake being all the Tory supporters whining about its connections to France/EU and China when every plant in the UK old and new would be British had it not been for the Tories in the first place. The party that between 1979 and 1997 sold off anything with Britain in the title, British Steel, British Gas, British Leyland, British Nuclear, even partially selling off British Aerospace (Now BAE Systems) who build our fucking military. Even now that the Tories and our economy are in the gutter your average Daily Mail-reading turnip still insists that Labour would be worse because they are "Marxists" and "socialists", when did we turn into 1950's America with this 'Red Menace' nonsense? Socialism rebuilt this country after the war, it gave us the NHS, cheap power, and incredible innovations like Concorde and the SR.N4. I give up on Tory/Brexit idiots. This country deserves every single thing that is going to happen over the next couple of decades of decline because imbeciles outnumber those capable of basic common sense, and we live in a democracy - can't say fairer than that.

@@krashd spot on. You just couldn't make it up.

The CEGB was a great employer.