Plaques

The plaques sit on an interior wall of West Ryde Pumping Station, weathered by more than a century of humidity and industrial atmosphere. They carry names and dates, the kind of record that utility buildings accumulate across long operational lives: commissioning milestones, personnel, moments someone thought worth marking in metal or bronze and fixing to the wall. The station behind those plaques has a history that repays attention. Station No. 1 was completed in 1891 by the Harbours and Rivers Department and handed to the newly formed Metropolitan Board of Water Supply and Sewerage. It was the mechanism by which water first reached the northern suburbs at scale, pumping via a 24-inch main from Potts Hill to reservoirs at Ryde Hill and Chatswood. By 1906 it housed the first steam turbine engines installed in a pumping station anywhere in Australia, and the first independent electric power generators of sufficient capacity for self-contained operation. Station No. 2 followed between 1916 and 1921, the larger facility absorbing the capacity that Station No. 1 could no longer meet. It was commissioned on 15 September 1921 as the largest steam-powered water pumping station in Australia. Its reinforced concrete chimneys, raised in 1918, were among the earlier industrial applications of that construction method in the country. Electrically welded steam piping, a pneumatic ash collection system, and pulverised coal fuel for the boilers followed across the next few years, each representing current best practice at the time of installation. Station No. 1 ceased operating in November 1930 and was demolished in 1961. Station No. 2 has not stopped. Progressive electrification through the 1970s and completed in 1982 replaced the steam plant; by that point the facility was the largest domestic water pumping station in Australia. The NSW State Heritage Register listed it in 2002. Engineers Australia awarded it an Engineering Heritage National Marker in October 2017. The plaques photographed in 2015 record some fragment of that continuity. The station was still pumping the day the photograph was taken, as it had been every day since September 1921.