Westonzoyland Pumping Station Visit

This weekend I went to the Steam on the Levels event held at Westonzoyland Pumping Station. The station was originally built in the 1830s to drain the Somerset levels to avoid flooding. After falling out of use, it has been taken over by a preservation trust who restored the original Easton & Amos engine and then went on to build a selection of sheds full of other stationary steam engines all ran off of a portable boiler.

I took a large selection of photographs, to numerous to post here, but have picked out a couple of the more interesting ones to put on here, and have put the rest onto the Flickr Account.

Firstly, a steam powered bottle washer. These were used in dairies to clean the glass bottles used to provide milk in. A small steam turbine drive through gearing the rotating brush onto which was placed a glass bottle for cleaning.

A set of 'boiler bogies' were on display that were used for moving large boilers around for installation into their place of use. 

Finally, I loved this little water wheel that they had operating outside. The small pump would have been used to provide fresh water to an estate or something similar. You will notice the pump feeds water back to the header tank - what's all this fuss about perpetual motion, this bunch of volunteers seem to have cracked it!

All in all a very good day out! I would recommend a visit to the museum if you are in the Somerset area!

In case you missed it earlier in the post, here is a link to their website. http://www.wzlet.org/ they also have a blog which you can see here...http://wzlet.blogspot.co.uk/.

The Engineer