Comments

Why would a state hospital have a theater?

I'd like to think the white is peeling away to reveal the pretty blue color. A wonderful photo, Mr. Motts. Your site made me ask my mom about the days when she worked in a sanitarium. She didn't have too many freaky stories, though. :(

Go ahead.... push it.. I dare ya... it's just one tiny little button... what could possibly go wrong????

Good old Babcock and Wilcox.... the people who brought you Three Mile Island.

Duct tape... the miracle fix for everything from a hangnail to nuclear reactors.
Two valves and one hand wheel..... sometimes that's done for a reason. It keeps someone from absentmindedly closing or opening both valves at the same time....

Fred hit the nail squarely on the head.... They're called stator windings and the red color is a special insulating paint called Glyptol

Looks a lot like the chairs they have in the dialysis unit at the local hospital.

Another awesome gallery!
I work in a power plant, so I can relate to a lot of these pictures. I cant help but think about the people that worked there... What they went through every day just to feed their families. When this plant went online it was hard dirty work that could kill you in an instant.

I'm going to guess and say that was part of an oil gun. It's common for large coal fired boilers to be started with fuel oil. You spray the oil and steam into the fire box. The steam atomizes the oil and then the oil is ignited. Next you blow coal which is ground into a fine powder into the fire box. The coal dust doesn't really burn... it explodes. At that point, you shut off the oil and steam and the combustion will keep going as long as you keep feeding coal dust and air to it....

Just a guess.. but this looks like it might have been the main generator control panel. As Mike K said the R and L means raise and lower. It probably controlled the governor valves to the turbine and were used to raise or lower the turbine speed so that the generator was at the correct speed and phase when it was connected to the grid.

Motts has got it right.... it's an expansion loop to allow the pipe to expand and move when the superheated steam hits it...

Oh and Motts that's not a prop it's a real sink. *da-da-tsh*

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week, tell your friends.

Looks like they took everything but the kitchen sink. *da-da-tsh*

They're supposed to live twice as long in captivity...

Probably an inspection port so an operator can see the combustion in the boiler.