PUMPS AT ELLENROAD

[Stanley]

PUMPS AT ELLENROAD

The pump room at Ellenroad is a bit of a gem isn't it.  The M&P underwriter is a good pump and virtually in as new condition of course because they never did any service beyond occasional topping up of the sprinkler water tank on the tower and even this ceased some time after WW2 when an automatic M&P electric centrifugal pump was installed.  I scrapped that when we were doing the engine house up as the target date for the refurb was 1920 and I used the independent six inch inlet pipe from the jack well for the condenser supply for the Whitelees beam engine.
 
The Pearn three ram is a big one and we never used it as it was belt driven from the system of countershafts that originally powered the exhauster room (for sucking in the carding room waste) the dynamos and the Pearn which was the normal boiler feed pump for five Lancashire boilers.  The CI feed main had been left full of water and was cracked at several points by frost so it had to go.  Besides, we needed to upgrade the boilers to automatic working on safety grounds and so I installed another small Weir, two electric pumps and a small horizontal steam pump in the new pump room next to the firing floor.  This small horizontal pump is interesting because it came originally from the Budenberg Gauge Company.  When they were building the new factory near Altrincham in the 1930s they had a lot of opposition because of anti-German feeling and so much of the equipment they used was imported from Germany. In those days they were called the Schaeffer Budenberg Gauge Company of Magdeburg, Germany and the German connotations were like a red rag to a bull with the locals. (The fact that the factory had a flat roof was rumoured to be so that they could mount guns on it to defend the plant). The feed pump is German, I forget the make, and Newton Pickles and I completely overhauled it and installed it at Ellenroad as part of the deal I did with Richard Budenberg whereby they refurbished all our gauges to new condition free of charge.

The ‘big Weir’ pump in the original pump house is a bit of a dark horse. When I was doing it up I was intrigued by the fact that several parts of it weren’t standard. For a start off it’s a three legger and there was something about the water bucket that seemed strange and so I got in touch with a nice man at Weirs in Glasgow and he looked it up for me in the records. I was right, it’s a non-standard pump which was made originally for ICI as one of a pair which were intended to pump sulphuric acid. The bucket, liner and rod are stainless steel. I forget the dates but as some time these pumps became redundant and I think they were returned to Weirs as part of a deal for replacement pumps. They sold them on and Ellenroad Spinning company bought this one in about 1940 I think. Shortage of materials during the war ensured that it went to Ellenroad in original condition. So, it’s quite possible that the pump is unique. I did have it running at one time to fill the boiler (through the cracked main) so that I could do a completely illegal steaming test. The pump was fine but it’s intake pipe from number three jack well outside the pump house wouldn’t deliver, almost certainly because the foot valve had sealed onto its seat. I hadn’t the time or money to muck about and so I tried the Underwriter and its eighteen inch suction main was fine. The Weir has fire hose connections on it for emergency use and so has the Underwriter so I connected it to the Weir and pushed water up the feed main to the boilers like that. My biggest problem was getting the delivery low enough, I burst a couple of fire hoses before we got the flow right. You might wonder why I didn’t simply fill the boiler from a fire plug. At the time I was doing all this we had no mains water or electricity either in the engine house or on the original mill site as the demolition was going on at the time. The River Beal was my only source of water.

I filled the boiler right to the lid and fired it by hand until we had everything warmed up, 100psi on the gauge and a reasonable water level, remember once we had pressure we couldn’t put any water in because the cracked main lost it as fast as we pumped. That was when Newton and I ran the engine but I’ve told that story before. I have been told since that I was crackers to take the risks but I’d inspected the boiler and knew my engines well enough to know that we weren’t in that much danger, besides, I knew that if I didn’t prove the boiler and engine I would never get the initial go-ahead from Coates to go ahead with the saving of the engine. So, totally illegal and very interesting but it was the crucial step to convincing the powers that be that the project to save the engine was feasible. Think of HSE regs now, nobody will ever have a play-out like that again! Newton and I were like dogs with two tails! Happy days…..

SCG/22 May 2006