The Industrial Heritage Committee, Inc. will sponsor a tour of the Colonel Francis G. Ward Pumping Station on Sunday June 28, 2009 at 1:30 PM. The station houses five triple expansion water pumping engines built by the Holly Manufacturing Company of Buffalo, NY. Installed in 1915, each engine stands 60 feet tall and weighs 1,100 tons.

The tour is free, no reservations needed. The Colonel Ward station is located at the foot of Porter Avenue at LaSalle Park.

Where is this, what city and state?? Porter and LaSalle sound like Midwestern, but I have no idea to where you are referring.

Buffalo, New York

Wow, FIVE engines. There are a lot more of these remaining than one would expect, they are just not well publicized. I am aware of others in Louisville, Cincinnati, Boston (multiple sites), Phillipsburg (NJ), and horizontal Corliss engines in New Orleans. The Phillipsburg engines ran as recently as 1978-79. Boston ran some triple expansion, vertical shaft, centrifugal sewage pumps until completion of the Boston Harbor cleanup in the 1990's.

What a beautiful building! These pumps certainly indicate a different time, even when civic architecture was something to behold. Notice the copper railings around the pumps and the decorative nature of the railings and the lights! Certainly an impressive sight.

These engines are well preserved and taken care of by the Buffalo Water Department, who appreciate their historical value. In the past the bill payment windows were located in this building and all city residents who came to pay their bills would have to walk along the balcony around the engines to get to the office, so many older Buffalo residents remember these pumps in service.

I gave a presentation at the 2009 Society for Industrial Archeology conference in Pittsburgh about preservation of large stationary steam power, and listed just about all of the known preserved water pumping engines. There are quite a few. About the only place more impressive than Col. Ward may be the waterworks in Cincinnati where five of these engines are placed inside a circular building. The Morgan overhead crane is set up just like a turntable, spinning instead of traveling. Its a one of a kind place.

Stationary Steam,
Do you know of any online pictures of the pumps and buildings in Cincinnati that can be shared?
Thanks in advance,
Mike Tillger

There were pages posted online with Cincinnati water pump pictures (look for "River Road" plant), they may still be live.

I have many photos, but they are too high resolution to attach here. As part of the ASME, we sponsored a tour of them in March of 2005. It was a lot of fun. We crawled all over the place, politely ignoring officials request that we stay on the main floor. The water works also had a scratchy video of the plant in operation.

Our tour included 3 elderly employees who had many stories of their operation and maintenance.

In the case of Cincinnati, the pumps remain primarily because their weight is necessary to keep the pump chamber foundation from rising under ground hydraulic pressure. The new electric pumps (2nd generation) are in the same building, and are shockingly small.

I don't have anything of the Cincinnati water works. I've not been there yet, and nobody else has posted any photos of the place online yet, except a couple of shots on the local ASME chapter's website. I think its probably pretty hard to get any good shots inside the building, since its rather cramped in there.

OK, here are some photos from March 2005.

General directory: http://www.a2soft.com/cincinnatiriverroad/

I have more, but you get the idea. The oil cups are all gone. Some clever admin got the idea to salvage them for scrap decades ago, according to employees.

Note the new railings. They spent a chunk of money to make the site accessible to the public, and then 9/11 made the site too sensitive to open.

Thanks for the pictures.

9/11 didn't do anything. Its paranoia and irrational thinking that keeps the public out.

Is that Corliss valve gear on those monsters?

Jeff

1) I agree the security scare is excessive at water works, but everyone is afraid that some clever guy will drop a vial of deadly stuff in the water somehow. Of course, they could do that with a radio controlled helicopter, or a motor boat out by the intakes on the river, so what is really accomplished?

2) Yes, that is "corliss" valve gear, but I believe this term is incorrectly applied as a generic for any cutoff valve gear. Corliss refers to a patented, trade name of horizontal engine for mill work. I think there were plenty of triggered cutoff valve gear variations.

The exact answer can be found in Hunter, Louis C. "Steam Power; A History of Industrial Power in the United States, 1780-1930", 1985, The University Press of Virginia. This is THE definitive work on the topic.

Some notes: The valve drive has bevel gears with wooden teeth. This was so that if the gear bound up, the teeth would shear and protect the mechanisms. A vacuum release was evident on the low pressure cylinder. Apparently, one employee was killed when climbing around the crosshead when the vacuum rolled the engine unexpectedly. The vacuum release was added later as a safety appliance.

The steam supply plumbing and condensers are all gone. Evidence of the supports and valve wheels are evident in the photos. The condensers were cooled with the product, pumped water. The new electric pumps were installed in the condenser space.

To start the engines, they were barred over by routing water in reverse through the pumps. Hand valves were provided for this purpose.

There was Corliss the man, Corliss the valve gear and Corliss the engine builder. George Corliss invented and patented the Corliss valve gear which consisted of rotary valves placed at the four corners of the cylinders. The idea was to keep the cooler exhaust steam from cooling the valve on its way out, thus causing some of the hotter incoming steam to condense as it warms the valve up again. This repeated heating and cooling of a single valve engine is a major inefficiency in steam engine design. With four valves, two intake and two seperate exhaust valves, the condensation was kept to a minimum.

Yes these pumping engies do have the Corliss type valves and operating mechanism, but no they were not built by the Corliss Steam Engine Co. They were built after Corliss's patents had expired. IT was such a good design that nearly everyone started building Corliss valved engines after the patents ran out.

I just wanted to say a big THANKS to Stationary Steam for posting this, and to the Industrial Heritage Committee for arranging the tour of the Col. Ward Pumping Station. I took a road trip out to Buffalo over the weekend for the tour (I'd never have known about it if I hadn't seen it posted here), and I just have to say, words like impressive and amazing simply don't do justice to the place, and that's with the engines sitting cold. I can only imagine what it must have been like to see them under steam!