Mill Engine at Milnrow

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

My antipodean friend, Sam, sent this this link for our enjoyment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL45nT8WhQk

… It’s 23+ minutes long, so ideal for the Tea Room.

MichaelG.

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[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

Last steaming day I went to they couldn’t get a decent fire going. Lord only knows what they will do when coal is banned

[V8EngParticipant @v8eng]

I find it slightly amusing that your atipodian friend sent a utube link about a uk attraction.

Nice and interesting to watch monster machinery so thanks to them.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Sam is, of course, an emigré and has memories of seeing such beasts in action when they were still doing useful work.

MichaelG.

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

You don’t have to be an emigre to remember them. I lived in Leeds and my dad was a builder. The best thing for laying flags is clinker from a chain grate stoker, and the mills just wanted rid of it, so we’d turn up in his waggon and just load up. I was only little, so got to look at the engines. Remember that the national grid and electricity generating infrastructure back in the 50s was not as it is now, if you already had an engine, boiler etc, it made sense to keep it.

The air quality was a different matter. In Pudsey, which nestles between Leeds and Bradford, the pigeons had learned to fly backwards to keep the soot out of their eyes. Seriously, all the buildings were black, and the haziness in many old photos isn’t due to poor photos, it’s the air quality. Even into the 70s in South Lancashire we were regularly sent home from work early because of fog, the turn in to the car park off the main road was marked by watering cans full of paraffin with rags stuffed down the spout blazing away.

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Such engines date back LONG before folk began worrying abiut NOx.

I grew up in an agricultural, rather than industrial, city, but can remember fogs so dense that you had to stand at the bottom of short lampost to see if the gas was alight! You couldn’t see across the road!

No wonder the London smogs killed people.

We need to preserve such machines from our past. There are still lessons to be learned by those too young to have seen them operating.

Already, the world has lost too much experience of those who have done it before.

Twice, i was sent on brainstorming sessions to cure problems that had been, to me, fairly recently solved.

Each time that i said that we had solved the problem on a legacy product, my fellow brainstormers did not know what had been made previously!

So they were hell bent on inventing a wheel to ease moving things!

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat the mistakes.

Howard

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