832 Comments for Westport Generating Station

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

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...

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

Flagator & Jackie B..... I think L&N got sold off and divided up with Honeywell and a few other companies.
If you look real close at the chart recorder on the bottom, you can see a Dymo Label that says Red Mils case expansion.. my guess is that it measured the thermal expansion of the turbine outer casing in thousandths of an inch (Mils). You have to keep an eye on that so the upper and lower halves stay about the same size.
The pens are like a felt tip marker and if the chart stops moving with the pen down, it bleeds onto the chart. (Hold a felt tip marker on a piece of paper and watch the ink stain grow).
It looks like the recorder on the top had 2 channels a blue and a red,,, notice the 2 vertical indicator on the right side.. the bottom one only had one channel.
The insides of these recorders are a maze of tiny gears and pulleys strung with what looks like 6Lb test fishing line and can cause you hours or frustration trying to get them lined up and calibrated.

An interesting mix of colors in this one.

The door seems to glow from within.

I love the title, also. :)

It looks very clean up there, too. It IS huge looking (as I am sure it really is.).

I like this picture also, my eyes move all over exploring all the angles.

A memorable photograph.