There was little choice but to buy the 1938 edition of the collected poems of Rupert Brooke I found today. I was looking for some ugly wood art but such seems to be in short supply around the antique market of Ely. Maybe I have to make some instead.
Then I figured I’d go exploring on the way home and followed signs to Prickwillow….where I discovered the drainage museum has a cafe, it seemed rude to drive past without popping in and seeing what it was all about. The museum is housed in an old pumpstation, one which originally housed an old steam engine. That was scrapped some years before the museum was created to preserve these things. They took over when the diesel engine that replaced it was retired, preserving the old engine in situ while the new pump is now housed in a new, considerably smaller, building just next door.
They have since collected some other engines from around the fenland area when they’ve been retired, to prevent their being scrapped too. Some of the engines are incredible machines, with cylinder displacement up to several hundred litres, developing a power equivalent to a modern moderately powerful road car. But doing so at only 250 rpm. Walking around the museum you can see the development of the diesel engine through time, with various superchargers (high pressure fuel/air mixture injection) and blast starters (rather than using a motor to start they inject compressed air to push the piston down, like the exploding fuel mixture, until the engine is moving enough to be turning over). They’re mostly two-stroke rather than four, so all of these engines have massive flywheels, around 6 tons of steel to keep them turning during their non-propelled phase.
The engines themselves mostly date from the 20s, when they were replacing the steam with more modern, and less cumbersome, oil burning engines.
For what must be one of their busiest days of the year it was a little worrying that I was something around the tenth visitor that day, arriving, as I did, around 3:30. Either theres not much interest in drainage engines or they need some more work on their publicity.
Conclusion: a top afternoon out for the serious diesel heads out there, recommended. They’re having a ‘run day’ on 2nd October, if anyone is interested in heading along for that?
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