Graph Paper Close Up

A sheet of graph paper sits inside West Ryde Pumping Station. Its grid lines are still visible, faded ink markings crossing the ruled surface. It is a small, paper record from a facility that has never stopped working. Station No. 2, the Federation Freestyle complex that survives today on the corner of Victoria Road and Hermitage Road, West Ryde, was commissioned on 15 September 1921. At the time of its completion it was the largest steam-powered water pumping station in Australia, built to replace the capacity of the original 1891 Station No. 1 after that facility was exhausted by 1916. The builders were William Adams and Co. Ltd., State Monier Works, and Refshaw and O'Brien, working to a brief that required the combined station to serve reservoirs at Chatswood, Pymble, Wahroonga, Hermitage, Mobbs Hill, and Beecroft. The station ran on steam through the late 1960s, by which point it was the last steam-powered station remaining in the Sydney Water system. A progressive electrification program across the 1970s concluded in 1982. By that point, the station held 13 electric pumping units plus one standby and a combined capacity of 700 ML/day, making it the largest domestic water pumping station in Australia at the time. The machinery changed; the fabric of the 1921 complex remained. Graph paper was a standard instrument in the measurement and management of a site like this one. Daily readings, flow calculations, maintenance records, operational logs. The sheet in this frame is one piece of that record-keeping, caught in 2015 against a backdrop of a station that was then, and remains today, an active part of Sydney's water supply infrastructure. West Ryde Pumping Station was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 15 November 2002 and received an Engineering Heritage National Marker in October 2017.