Boiler House Basement

The boiler house of West Ryde Pumping Station sits at the centre of the Station No. 2 complex, the tallest section of the building, positioned between the engine house to the east and the economiser house to the west. Below the boiler house floor, this basement holds the large pipe runs and machinery that were integral to the steam plant above. Rust covers the metal surfaces throughout. Dust layers every horizontal plane. Filtered light pushes through grimy windows, catching the texture of corroded iron and steel that has not been in active service since electrification removed the steam plant in the years leading up to 1982. Station No. 2 was commissioned on 15 September 1921, built by William Adams and Co. Ltd., State Monier Works, and Refshaw and O'Brien for the Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage. At completion it was the largest steam-powered water pumping station in Australia, supplying water to the northern suburbs via reservoirs at Chatswood, Pymble, Wahroonga, Hermitage, Mobbs Hill, and Beecroft. The boilers were fed by pulverised coal, a method adopted between 1922 and 1927. Coal arrived by railway to the reinforced concrete coal staith and was dropped into roof-level bunkers, then gravity-fed down into the boiler house. By the late 1960s, West Ryde Pumping Station was the last remaining steam-powered station in the entire Sydney Water system. Progressive electrification through the 1970s replaced the steam plant. By 1982, 13 electric pumping units plus one standby had been installed, with a combined capacity that made the station the largest domestic water pumping station in Australia at that time. What this photograph records, captured in 2015, is the basement level as it sat after decades of disuse: pipe runs intact but corroding, machinery standing in the accumulated quiet of a place that once ran continuously to keep water moving north across Sydney.