CycloMe: Markfield Beam Engine

The Markfield Beam Engine is run by a team of volunteers who steam it up and show it to visitors a few times a year. When used to pump two million gallons of sewage a day, the engine consumed four hundredweight (200 kilos) of coal per hour. It now uses red diesel and costs £500 each time it's run, so donations are gratefully received.

Markfield pump house, part of the former Tottenham Sewage Works.

This remarkable engine was built by Wood Brothers, of Sowerby Bridge, Yorkshire, between 1886 and 1888. It was commissioned on the 12th July 1888 and saw continuous duty from that time to around 1905, when three additional steam pumps were added in a new engine house. Before this period raw sewage simply flowed into the River Lea, despite drinking water being extracted further downstream, causing pollution and cholera. With the growth of the population in Tottenham and the arrival of the railway terminating at Stratford and bringing cattle to London, the amount of sewage meant that this engine was badly needed to pump the effluent in pipes into Joseph Bazalgette's sewage system.

The cast iron flywheel is twenty-seven feet in diameter and weighs approximately seventeen tons.

The engine is a rotary beam engine believed to be the last engine produced by Wood Bros., and the only surviving eight column engine in situ. The strange looking contraption (on the left of the above photo) with two balls is called a Watt governor, after James Watt, who used it in his early beam engines. Watt did not, however, invent the governor: similar devices were employed in wind and water mills many years earlier.

Engineers use a lever to turn the 27ft diameter flywheel to get the engine going.

The beam stands 17 feet above floor level and is almost 21 feet in length. The eight supporting columns are of the Doric style, in hollow cast-iron, and the general design of decoration, notably the use of the acanthus leaf motif, follows the "only the best" attitude of the Local Councils and industrial designers of the day.

The engine is a rotary beam engine believed to be the last engine produced by Wood Bros., and the only surviving eight column engine in situ.

The parallel motion linkage, invented by James Watt in 1784, converts the curvilinear motion of the beam into straight-line motion.

The engine uses the double-expansion compound system, developed by Arthur Woolf around 1804, whereby the steam is first let into a high-pressure cylinder, where it is allowed to expend half its pressure before being let into the low pressure cylinder, to do further work before being condensed. The exhaust steam is then condensed and the hot water is recycled to produce more steam.