bonus question,

for an orange what was the spider used for ?

Was it a pill box, Tom?

You can't come in without a tie!  

Did it collect the cooled water/steam from one of the cooling towers and funnel it into a pipe, to return it to the power station.

Long shots at snooker when you couldn’t bridge with your own hand.

Times up,,

Its from the mining times, I'm told it was a coal washer, So Sir Bob is nearest and gets chocolate spider at the Christmas Dooo

It's a coal washer. . Bet I'm right!

Am I right in thinking the washed coal was then carried by barge up Wigan Flight to Wigan Coal & Iron Company Ltd to be pressed?

Northern Mine Research Society - www.nmrs.org.uk

Its for pulling a bearing off a shaft,

If you consult the maps, it is not where the colliery was, it is in fact in the middle of a sewerage plant that stood there.

Mr Tom

I can't find your topic which has a picture and question of the Westwood Spider in it, but here is a pic of the coal hoppers at Westwood Power Station under construction, wooden shuttering was used to form a mould into which runny concrete was poured, which then set like jelly, but a bit harder ....



http://www.wiganworld.co.uk/oldgallery/showgeneral.php?pic=ww26b.jpg&subopt=westwood&w=938&h=690


Now I know those aren't the spider, but the spider looks to me to be a smaller version of those hoppers.

Spider



So I think the spider was a hopper into which coal was emptied, which then fell down on to a conveyor belt, which then transported the coal from the coal storage area, into the power station

It’s this thread of Tom’s, Sir Bob - bonus question

Great photos

At the base of the hoppers there are large diameter water pipes, I'm told by the occupier ( Kevin) that the water came in and washed the coal, That might tie in with caddys discovery that it was on a treatment plant, That would make sense as water would be available in a water treatment plant at high pressure to wash coal, It is on an old railway line route from the westwood Power station,

A guess of mine is that those hoppers were left by the demolition company, at the request of the council to have some sort of monument to be positioned on the site as a memorial to Westwood Power Station, because originally a marina was planned to go on the site there.
o

who knows ? So do you mean the marina that was built at Plonk Lone was originally intended for on Peasons flash ?

oaplum wrote:who knows ?   So do you mean the marina that was built at Plonk Lone was originally intended for on Peasons flash ?

As I recall when the power station was demolished, it left a very big blot on the landscape and even when the power station was working, the area around there in between Lower Ince and Poolstock was a blot on the landscape, it was horrible and the council came up with a plan post demolition to transform the site, the plan inclooded, building a marina and building houses and factory yoonits at the then named Westwood Park

But to open up the Westwood site, a major infrastructure project was required in order to access the site properly, in the form of building two new big bridges over the canal and moving the River Duggie, but this stalled due to the fact that after demolition of Westwood Power Station in 1989 in 1990 the country had another recession which lasted until the late1990's so there was no government money for anything to be done with Westwood and so the council just covered the site in a layer of top soil and planted a few bushes and also the fabled route 225 should have been built during this time, this would have been an extension to the M58 from Orrell going through and joining the M61 at Bolton, but this was shelved awaiting funding from 1990 until Tony Blair cancelled it in 1997 so the council decided to build the link road itself, in sections going via the Westwood site, with a predicted timeline of a 100 years to build the road through from the M6/M58 junction at Orrell up to the M61 it has taken from 1997 to 2018 for them to start building the first bit of the road from Goose Green to Westwood ...

In 2005 the major road project was begun, to open up Westwood, as previously stated, this involved moving the River Duggy and building two new bridges and moving all the roads around there in preparation of the link road from Goose Green terminating at the new junction there and it took them three years to do all the works at Westwood ...

Despite all the above I still think it is used in a game of snooker.