PLANS to demolish Cockenzie Power Station’s coal handling plant have been announced.

When the power station closed a year ago, it was calculated that about 36,000 freight trains had made coal deliveries to the nearby coal handling plant during the lifetime of the station.

The coal handling plant/coal store, south-east of the power plant it served and accessible by road via the B6371 (the ‘coal road’), supplied the power station with coal via a giant conveyor belt.

Hopper wagons would bring 914 tonnes of coal to the store every day by rail.

The coal to fuel the station would then be loaded onto the conveyor belt and sent to the station’s boiler room, where it would be sampled and then ground into a fine powder.

The coal store had the capacity to keep 900,000 tonnes of coal on site at any one time. Its demolition will involve taking down a steel weighbridge and lighting stations, removing railway tracks and a concrete tunnel, and filling in pits and underground tanks with tonnes of crushed concrete.

ScottishPower, which owns the site, has applied to East Lothian Council for a Certificate of Lawfulness to go ahead with the work.

No date has been given for the start of the deconstruction work and no details about future plans for the coal store site have been given.

A ScottishPower spokesman said: “This demolition is all part of the plans for Cockenzie Power Station.” The decomissioning of the main power plant continues, with its iconic twin chimney stacks not expected to be removed until late this year/early next year.

ScottishPower has still to decide whether to go ahead with plans to replace the power station with a new gas-fired plant.