Beam Engines
The four steam engines were built in Leicester by Gimson and Company and today are rare examples of Woolf compound rotative beam engines. At the time these engines were built they were considered an old-fashioned but very well-practised design, as many engine designers had turned their attention to horizontal and early vertical designs instead.
These engines are rated at 200 hp, at 12–19 rpm, of which they pumped 208,000 imperial gallons of sewage an hour (263 L/s).
All four engines have been restored back to working condition, by a dedicated team of volunteers: the Leicester Museums Technology Association. It is the only engine house in the world where you can see four working examples of the same beam engine in one building.
Current projects in the engine house are the on-going maintenance of the latest restored engine, No.4 (restored over a period of some 10 years by the volunteers).
Read more about this topic: Abbey Pumping Station
Famous quotes containing the words beam and/or engines:
“What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the ship that will cross the sea,
We plant the mast to carry the sails,
We plant the planks to withstand the gales—
The keel, the keelson, and beam and knee—
We plant the ship when we plant the tree.”
—Henry Abbey (1842–1911)
“America is like one of those old-fashioned six-cylinder truck engines that can be missing two sparkplugs and have a broken flywheel and have a crankshaft that’s 5000 millimeters off fitting properly, and two bad ball-bearings, and still runs. We’re in that kind of situation. We can have substantial parts of the population committing suicide, and still run and look fairly good.”
—Thomas McGuane (b. 1939)