Rivets

The rivets in this photograph are not decorative. 7 hand-driven rivets mark the face of a steel column inside West Ryde Pumping Station, the same station that has moved water to Sydney's northern suburbs without pause since Station No. 2 was commissioned on 15 September 1921. Rust blooms across the grey metal in orange and brown patches, heaviest at the rivet heads where moisture has worked its way in over decades. A blurred arched window sits behind, one of the arched-headed steel windows original to the 1921 complex. The column remains part of a working building, not a relic. West Ryde Pumping Station sits at the corner of Victoria Road and Hermitage Road in West Ryde, NSW. 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 developing northern suburbs beyond the harbour, via a 24-inch main from Potts Hill. Before it existed, northern Sydney's water supply crossed the harbour through a single 9-inch submarine main. Station No. 2 was built between 1916 and 1921 by William Adams and Co. Ltd., State Monier Works, and Refshaw and O'Brien. At completion it was the largest steam-powered water pumping station in Australia. The 1921 construction also incorporated electrically welded steam piping, an early industrial application of the technique. Reinforced concrete chimneys had been constructed on site in 1918, a relatively early use of that material for industrial purposes. By the late 1960s, West Ryde Pumping Station was the last remaining steam-powered station in the Sydney Water system. Full electrification was completed in 1982, with 13 electric pumping units plus one standby installed, serving approximately one-third of Sydney's metropolitan area. The station was listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 15 November 2002 and received an Engineering Heritage National Marker in October 2017. This photograph, made in 2015, records the steel and rust of a column that was already old but had never been taken out of service.