STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

The biggest (but not the longest, that was at Ross, Bacup) rope drive in Lancashire was the Mons Mill engine at Todmorden. Here's the entry from Arthur Roberts' Black Book and my additions for 'Steam Engine Research Resources', published on Lulu.com..
[Originally called Hare Mill but name changed to Mons when Carel invested in firm.] Sam Mathews[sic], Lancashire Cotton Corporation. Mr H Haigh. 3000hp cross compound engine by Carel Freres of Ghent, Belgium, 1913. 39 ¾”HP. 72 5/8” LP. X 4ft 9 ½” stroke. 160psi, 80rpm. Drop valves on both cylinders. 25ft flywheel, 70 ropes. Trunk guides and tail rod supports. Cylinder steam-jacketed. Airpump LP side from HP crankpin. Water-cooled main bearings. Mishap to barring engine (1961) new one bought from Moston Mill. [George Watkins reported but 4ft 7 ½” stroke. Designed to run the double mill at 200psi but second half never built because of subsidence and bad trade. Five boilers installed with room for two more for full installation. Flywheel 13ft 8” wide for 69 ropes. Weighed 130 tons with crankshaft. Engine dismantled in 1964 and mill closed in 1968. Newton Pickles saw engine running and said it was rough and a wastrel, no doubt partly because it was running below designed pressure and load. This was the largest Carel engine brought into Lancashire.]

[Stanley]

Unknown Woodhouse Mitchell cross compound. From the number of grooves on the flywheel it looks like about 900hp. (Woodhouse Mitchell, Clifton Bridge Works, Sowerby Bridge.)

[Stanley]

The derelict engine house at Woodhouse Mill, Todmorden which used to house a rare grasshopper beam engine.

[Stanley]

A grasshopper beam engine awaiting rescue at Wortley Forge in 1978.

[Stanley]

George Watkins pic of the engine at the CWS flour mills at Hull. Maker unknown but Musgraves fitted new cylinders in about 1913. Scrapped.

[Stanley]

George Watkins pic of the engine at J E Elliott Limited, Holme Shed, Blacko. Bult by C Whittaker and Company of Accrington who later made brickmaking plant. Corliss HP, 14" and slide valve LP, 27" X 2ft stroke. Steam from an Anderton boiler with superheater. Plant scrapped when mill closed in 1959.

[Stanley]

Charlie Meecham's pic of Ellenroad engine at work in the 1960s.

[Stanley]

Charlie Meecham's pic of Ellenroad in January 1970 when it was still running. Butterworth Hall Mill is still there in the background and you can see the chara parked near the boiler house that brought workers in every morning from Wigan. The driver had a job in the warehouse and so the coach was parked all day. The transport was free as was the crèche for the children who came on the coach with their mothers. At this time the engine was running on the left hand side only and this was loaded to over 1500hp at times. There is a legacy on the engine from these days, the left hand pillar bearing for the flywheel shaft had to have water cooling because it tended to run hot.

[Stanley]

One of the hardest worked pieces of plant at Bancroft was the auger that lifted the coal out of the bunker into the stoker hoppers. Over the years it had corroded to the point where it was useless. We had no money for repairs so I trawled the scrapyards till I found this piece of 6" ID pipe which wasn't quite straight but good enough for our purposes. I took it all over to Hey Farm and fitted the 'new' tube over the weekend. Total cure at low cost. This was how we kept the mill going!

[Stanley]

One of the main weapons in the engineer's armoury is to have as near perfect control of feed water supply to the boiler as possible. This enables him to supply the boiler with hot feed water at a high rate under any conditions. This in turn means that he and the firebeater can control stem generation by adjusting the feed water while leaving the fires alone once they have settled down to an efficient firing rate. At Bancroft there was no such control until John Plummer and I pored concrete in the cellar and installed the big Brown and Pickles feed pump at the back. This cured all our feed problems and resulted in a big saving in fuel. Notice that the 4"ID inlet pipe on the right isn't straight. I had to do some imaginative welding to get my connection into the main system in line. Note also that we didn't buy any new pipe or fittings. We mined redundant pipe runs in the boiler house for whatever we needed. Maintenance on a shoe string but that was the way it had to be. The whole installation cost less than £600 in 1975..... That included the pump, motor and the electrical work. The motor is one of Horace Green's from Cononley and is 10hp. A modern motor would be less than half the size but I can assure you that the Green's motor would outlive three modern ones!

[Stanley]

Here's a little funny one for you. If you look carefully at this pic of the condenser at Bancroft you'll see a 1/2" pipe going into the bottom of the condenser below the larger pipe which is the emergency mains feed. This is the pipe to the vacuum gauge in the engine house. Newton once told me that if I ever lost vacuum this was the first place to look because he had been called out more than once to engines that had this fault and the cause was corrosion of this small pipe. Gauges only tell the truth if the connection is good!

[Stanley]

George Watkins picture of the BI engine, 1915 and possibly the last BI engine in Burnley, installed at Edmondsons, Rose Grove. The cylinder on the left is the surface mounted air pump and condenser.

[Stanley]

A DIY engine. Whitelees safe in the boiler house at Ellenroad. All we had to do was put it back together again.

[Stanley]

Three good men. When I rebuilt the Whitelees Beam Engine at Ellenroad we had no money. Cecil Hufton on the left was a pensioner with plenty of time on his hands and the Rochdale Training School lent me a couple of apprentices for the duration. I forget their names, sorry lads, you deserved better. Cecil leaned all the parts and got them ready for us and the lads helped me with the build. Cecil's dead now but I'll bet the lads have never forgotten the job! With all our handicaps we finished the job with one day to spare and steamed the engine for an Open day and engine launch that had been arranged 6 months before. You wouldn't believe some of the criticism I have had over the years about the build but the bottom line is that we did what we set out to do, got the engine back in steam and it has run ever since as a key attraction at Ellenroad. You can't please everybody...!

[Stanley]

Given a bit of luck, the engineer often got good support. Here's Charlie Southwell from Manchester testing the boiler water at Bancroft in 1976. He owned the firm that made the compounds we used and once admitted to me that there was no need for him to supervise me as I was always spot on with the treatment. He said he liked to have a trip out to Bancroft just to see the engine running. Whatever, he was a good man for me and also a very nice bloke, I always looked forward to his visits. Getting the water quality right in the boiler was important and a big contribution to boiler efficiency. In the old days when additives were not understood boilers suffered terribly from scale build up even though many mills blew them down every week and filled with fresh water. It took on average up to 5 tons of coal to get a boiler back up to working pressure. This made proper water tgreatment cheap! At Bancroft we only emptied the boiler when we needed access for inspection or flueing, three times a year.

[Stanley]

The unsung heroes of the industrial revolution. The dirtiest job in the world, cleaning the flues on the boiler. The thing that always surprised casual observers was that the flue dust wasn't like domestic soot, it was almost white. This is because the combustion temperature was so high. In the old days the flue dust was much prized by flaggers because when used as a bed for flags it never moved because of the sharp edges on the grains.

[Stanley]

Some flues were worse than others. This is Swabs at Middleton in 1976. The stack was disused by then but they had run it for years without cleaning out. It was up to eight feet deep in the chimney bottom.....

[Stanley]

You thought I was exaggerating the depth of flue dust in the chimney bottom?

[Stanley]

Swabs chimney was different in many respects. There was its size, 340ft, the internal diameter at the base, 40ft served by four flues which branched off the main flue and entered at 90 degree angles, the ten foot high cruciform wall in the base which gave each entry flue a compartment. The fire-brick liner was only about 30ft high and strangest of the lot, it is the only flue I've ever inspected that had internal lightning conductors. You can see one of the copper tapes to the left of the angle. I think it served 17 Lancashire boilers.

[Stanley]

Stanley covering the bright parts of Bancroft engine with fents to protect them during the summer break 1977. Pic by Daniel Meadows.

[Stanley]

My best friend. As long as you could see the drop of oil in the glass slowly rising to the top you knew that the engine was getting oil via the atomiser in the main steam pipe.

[Stanley]

Oil recirculating pump for one of the flyshaft bearings on Bancroft engine ready for refurbishment in July 1977. Note that iy has had an aluminium pulley added to give another groove for more grip. Amazing how much grit got into the system over the years.

[Stanley]

The massive aquarium lubricator on the flywheel shaft at Ellenroad. Two of them, one each side.

[Stanley]

'Thistle' rod oiler on Bancroft engine in 1978.

[Stanley]

Rare tapered oil can I used at Bancroft in 1976. Good for thin oil but too slow for thick as it operated by valve control and gravity. Very popular on the railways.