Claymills 2025 - An Overdue Visit

Steam rallies are family friendly events in my books. I can get my steam fix and Yuehong can indulge in her favourite pursuit of people watching. I find it hard to get excited any longer about 'steam on the rails', it's plastic and lacks spontaneity. After I graduated in 1972, I had nearly 40 years travelling for 'real steam', mainly to Asia but also Africa and one or two other places but that all came to an end (as did the steam itself with just a few exceptions) when we sold up in China and bought a bungalow in the UK and a flat in Penang, Malaysia. I became an active gardener and an armchair gricer. 

The pumping station at Claymills had long been on my 'to do' list but despite the entreaties of two senior members of the International Stationary Steam Engine Society, for many years there had not been a steaming day there which coincided with a gap in our calendar, mainly because most fall on bank holiday weekends when I am very careful not to use the kind of roads which we had to use to get there.

Claymills is understandably less fashionable than better known similar places like Papplewick where enough money was available to decorate them as temples to the Victorian era. It's not ornate, it's very functional although if you look closely at the engine house for the C and D beam engines, you can see some nice touches which will be added to the other engine house (A and B engines) which is definitely still restoration work in progress.

I have never worked out how to make a satisfactory photographic record of large beam engines, what you will find at the end of this report are a few pictures which I hope will give an impression of what we found at this 'end of season' steaming. However, the main part of the report covers Claymills' other joy, the smaller stationary engines (and portable engines), all of which had their part to play here during the station's working life. Claymills was originally established to deal with both Burton-on-Trent's sewage and also the vast amount of organic waste from the town's many breweries. Originally I guess that both were conveniently dumped in the river where it would have been a health hazard. Initially a channel was dug so as to carry it all away from the town so it could be put in the river here instead but even in Victorian times this turned out to be unacceptable. The solution was to pump it to land some 3 miles away (in Derbyshire) which was then used for farming but straightaway the associated smell around the pumping station was unbearable. The final solution was to 'lime it', much as bodies were during times of plague! It was not a total solution as this created a mass of 'insoluble salts' (calcium and magnesium sulphates) which very quickly blocked the large pipes which then had to be scraped (or chipped) clean regularly. It was the presence of these minerals in the local water of course which was responsible for the success of the brewing industry in the first place.

Much of the information here is taken from the operating trust's website which is a far more comprehensive guide to operations than I have given, https://claymills.org.uk. Chris Allen has kindly provided the description of the beam engine operation.

Click on a picture for a larger version and click on that to return to this page.

I was pleasantly surprised to find this 8 HP Ruston Proctor portable engine (52074/1917) outside the AB engine house. Despite the gaping holes in the boiler and firerbox it was 'in steam' courtesy of the main boiler house. It would have originally worked at the associated 'sewage farm' before being retired here. A second similar engine, Ruston Proctor (30355/1907), more complete in some ways but minus its wheels, is in the museum. It was originally used at Roundhouse Farm where it drove the lineshaft that in turn drove the barn machinery. When that role was electrified it came to Claymills where it was used in the lime shed to drive the lime mixers via a belt drive from the flywheel. As steam was available from the main boilers, its own boiler was surplus to requirements and the engine half buried in concrete.  

Adjacent to the outdoor portable engine is this 'mobile' steam winch which I was told was a product of Waddington of Barrow in Furness.  It was apparently used to scrape out the lime waste from the pipes, using small boys for the job no longer being considered acceptable! There is another (which I missed) which is mounted on a rail wagon hauling display, coal for the boilers arriving from the adjacent main railway line. That one is by John Wilson of Birkenhead, more famous (in my limited experience) for making railway steam cranes.

The other 'mobile' engine was a small locally manufactured Buxton and Thornley pump which was used near the limeshed.

The consistency of the waste being processed was such that it needed to be constantly 'agitated'. This engine of unknown origins 'drove paddles on a long shaft down in the sewage culvert beyond the wall with a chain from the far side of the fly wheel'. The trust's website shows a Pearn's pump used for water for the lime slaking process here but either I missed it or is has been moved elsewhere.

Next door is the workshop which still contains equipment driven by a lineshaft. Next door to that is the blacksmith's forge which includes a working steam hammer, something I have a soft spot for since I saw (a 'real') one at work in Howrah, India back in 2008 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noDf6bmZw5w). 

The dynamo room has a Buxton and Thornley steam engine. 

It drives a Crompton dynamo, the oldest working one in the country, said to date from ca 1900. Also present is a 1900's vertical steam engine also driving a dynamo. As the works operated '24/7' the availability of electric lighting was a great advance on the original gas lighting.

Returning to the museum, we see the first and largest of the other stationary steam engines. At first sight it might seem like a tandem compound engine but in fact the forward cylinder is a condenser, this being the only engine so equipped here. It worked to drive the centrifugal storm water pump. 

.On the left is another agitator engine driving paddles. Note the chain drive. The blue engine is a Bennis Westminster engine used to drive the experimental sewage treatment plant, next to it is a small Sissons engine with a Lee Howl pump for boiler feed water.

This Hughes pump was also used in the experimental sewage treatment plant. I have seen many similar in the sugar mills of Java. Finally here is a Bailey pump used on the chlorinator at Burton swimming baths - I doubt many people risked swimming in the river in those days!

There are a number of engines in the Boiler Feed Pump House, this large Buxton and Thornley pump (left) is now back in use following an overhaul of the pump end. This Bennis Westminster stoker engine on the right drives the mechanical stokers via the overhead lineshafts. Not shown is the vertical Halls feed pump which is also primary power. There is a further standby boiler feed pump (not shown as it was under active maintenance during the visit) but it is normally used to supply the cooling water for the beam engines.

Finally we come to the 'driving floor' where the Tammy Land Girls ensemble were performing for the punters when I visited, at first I thought they part of the numerous volunteers on site, but it seems that they are regularly seen at events inn the area ('Tammy' isn't just my daughter's name, it also alludes to the nearby town, Tamworth). Once they had finished, it was time to start the B engine. The engines here are double acting Woolf rotative compounds built in 1885 by Gimsons of Leicester, who also made those at Abbey Pumping Station in Leicester. They have a pump at each end so the pumping loads are balanced around the beam centre. The pistons are alternately pushed up and down by steam above and below with steam being transferred from one end of the high pressure side to the opposite end of the low pressure side then on exhaust from that to the condenser where condensation produces a partial vacuum to help it along. Key to the ultimate success of these engines will have been the development of valve gears which open and close at the right time although this is actually done manually at start up. The large flywheel for the engine can be seen in the background.

This is the top of the valve chests of the D engine, the larger low pressure cylinder is nearest the camera and, every few seconds, the connection to the beam above will appear.

These are two of the beams on the top floor of the CD engine house. The ends of these actually follow an arc (of a circle); one of the key engineering designs was to translate this into straight line motion when connected to the engines/pumps, a development attributed to James Watt.

On the left is the sewage pump on C engine, that for the D engine is on the right. The other picture shows a 'small barring engine' used to get everything in the right position before starting steam admission to the main engines. Such stationary engines would have been commonplace by the time that Claymills was first opened, but these were actually added later.

Woolf designed a parallel compound engine which coupled the high pressure cylinder of a Trevithick simple expansion engine with an engine with a condensing cylinder of Watt's design. The beauty of this was that Woolf recognised that the outlet pressure of the first was comparable to the inlet pressure of the second. The two cylinders could work in parallel ('cross compounds' which happens at Claymills and most pumping stations) or in succession (tandem compounds). Click here to return to the main text.

Both arrangements are also seen with conventional stationary steam engines we have seen quite a few in rice mills in Asis.

For example most of the engines we have seen in Thailand are locally made tandem compounds (click here for an example).

By way of contrast, those in India are mainly UK made by Marshall of Gainsborough (click here for an example).

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