Goldfields Water Supply Scheme - Pipeline

Pipeline

The pipes were manufactured locally from flat steel sheets imported from Germany and the United States. Mephan Ferguson was awarded the first manufacturing contract and built a fabrication plant at Falkirk (now known as the Perth suburb of Maylands) to produce half of the 60,000 pipes required. Hoskins Engineering established a factory near Midland Junction (now known simply as Midland) to produce the other half.

When built, the pipeline was the longest fresh-water pipeline in the world.

The choice of route for the Eastern Railway through Northam, rather than York, is indicative of political patronage, as well as the avoidance of some other early routes to the goldfields.

However, there is evidence that the explorer of the 1860s Charles Cooke Hunt had access to wells and tracks that were utilised in the 1890s. These subsequently affected the routes of telegraph, railway and the water scheme. The wells were made in conjunction with the local knowledge of aboriginals, and also utilised land at the edge of granite outcrops.

The pipeline ran alongside the route of the earlier route of the Eastern Railway and the Eastern Goldfields Railway's for parts of its route, so that the railway service and the pipeline had an interdependence through the sparsely populated regiomn between Southern Cross and Kalgoorlie.

The scheme required significant infrastructure in power generation to support the pumping stations. Communities oriented to the maintenace of the pipeline and pumping stations grew up along the route. However, with improved power supplies and modern machinery and automation, the scheme now has more unattended pumping stations operated by fewer people required to live along or close to the line.