Terrific new website from the folks dedicated to the creation of a museum (and the preservation of the giant water-pumping steam engines) at the Chestnut Hill Waterworks in Boston.

While not railroad preservation, this website and these giant engines cannot be missed! Nice job, gentlemen!

http://chwaterpumps.com/index.htm

As an Operating Engineer who runs stationary steam equipment for a living, as well as a steam locomtive engineer and firemen, I would love to see this older machinery preserved, but it looks like this engine room might bite the dust. It would be a shame to see this pumping station dismantled and "developed" . Is there not an alternative availble to save the engineroom as a operating museum?

Please realize that the Chestnut Hill Pumping Station is divided into three parts:

1. Low Service Pumping Building
2. Boilerhouse and Coal Storage
3. High Service Pumping Building

The Low Service Pumping building, boilerhouse, and coal storage buildings will be gutted and adaptively reused. However, the plan is to perserve the High Service Pumping building with the steam pumps illustrated intact as a museum.

This is one of the first such mixed-use plans I have seen for an industrial site like this, and I hope it succeeds. I would love to see the Low Service building and it's steam pumps preserved as well; but this is a good compromise, and one that should be fully supported. The site has a whole stands a much better chance long-term being redeveloped in this manner than trying to save the entire structure intact as a museum. It is a large station, and like many similar sites would have to depend on government subsitites to survive as a museum alone; ticket sales would not cover the mammoth restoration and maintenance bills.

This was precisely what I hoped would happen with the Solvay Coke Plant compressor house in Milwaukee; and I very much would like to see this one succeed as an alternative to the all-or-nothing museum OR adaptive reuse OR tear-down-and-rebuild plans I have seen the past. It dovetails with the RYPN Editor's thoughts on developing large inner-city train stations as part rail museum, part retail development proposal rather than the mini-mall developments tried with mixed results in the past.

-James Hefner
Hebrews 10:20a

Surviving World Steam Project