Hard hat mania on display! I did not realise that stationary steam engines could leap up and fall on to onlookers heads. I suppose if one of those massive beams did fall from the ceiling the hard hats would protect people from being crushed.
Been there, it's so impressive. Excellent video but could do with a commentary instead of the music, though I understand if you are just a casual visitor you may not have the necessary knowledge to provide one.
Ah, the beautiful wonders of Victorian engineering 😍 Great music choice - Suk sounds very English here - but once the din of the machine and public starts, it's pretty pointless.
Remember seeing the insides of that building and the engine when it was derelict many years ago. My father was the site safety officer when he retired from the Kent Fire Brigade. Absolutely fantastic to see the building and engine restored. Would love to visit when I am back down that way.
Here in Auckland NZ we still have a beam engine housed in its original mid-Victorian brick pumphouse, as the centrepiece of Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT). Commissioned in March 1877. Coal-fired boilers operated a steam engine driving a 16.3 tonne, 6.25 m diameter flywheel and 7.3 m beam operated twin pumps raising up to 13,600 cubic metres of water per day to the Ponsonby Reservoir.
And there's more "oop north" too ! Visit the Bolton Steam Museum to see all varieties of steam engines built for the cotton mills. However, one of the last mills to be built, Kearsley Mill, in Prestolee village, built 1906, although steam-powered, the steam drove steam turbines connected to generators. The mill machinery was all powered by electric motors. The electric age had started and steam turbines are still used to generate it.
@@Chief-Instructor Some people just want to be annoyed. I thought it was hard to hear over the talking and it probably wouldn't have mattered if you took it out, but it wasn't annoying. In fact, it's kind of fascinating that you can hear the music and people talking over the sound of that obviously powerful engine and pump.
The very definition of "magnificent"! I see the other two pumps setting there, I assume that's what this station looked like, cleaned up a lot, back in the day, years after the station was new. I wonder what it must have felt like working there, both when the machines and the paint were new, before time and neglect took their poll and in the Edwardian Age, when machines were just machines and not Art?
@@davidgold5961 I suspect it would have been hot as Hell in there, all year around. Even though those big tubes are the pumps, they probably were pretty tight while the seals on most steam engines of that time leaked like crazy with steam and hot water everywhere. Probably pretty noisy too. The two other pumps in the shot have been steam cleaned so they aren't caked with greasy dirt but I'll bet they used to be. But that would have been later, after the newness wore off and such engines where in many places and not so artistically housed nor cared for.
When investors were not bean counters and took actual pride to build magnificent machines the result was astounding. Imagine the replacement in a shipping container placed randomly by sewage company nowadays.
That was absolutely breath taking! I feel like I was just watching a ballet in some grand palace... yet it's a steam engine in a sewage pumping station... I just don't get why we can't have such incredible spaces today...
Thanks for your feedback :-) I procrastinated over whether or not to add background music, as I worried that some may find it distracting. Hopefully I got the balance right!
" I just don't get why we can't have such incredible spaces today..." It ain't rocket science. It's because it costs a lot of money. There's no reason we couldn't have ornamental cast iron architectural details in today's sewerage lift stations ... except that it costs a lot of money, and there's not really any point in it. As a taxpayer, I'd be pretty pissed off if my municipality spent a couple of extra million dollars of tax dollars putting decoration inside a sewerage lift station, that was only going to be seen by the employees of the sewerage utility.
