Boatnerd Discussion Forum

Negative, I wanted to go to the scrapyard tour but we were pretty sick from Friday to Saturday & spent the morning trying to get some sleep. Jr & I wandered out in the afternoon but we made it as far as the Buffalo waterfront for a few shots of the dredge stuff going on & called it a day. Kids bring this stuff home from school & it just kicks your butt, I'm still not a 100% & it's been 4 days!

brian in buffalo did you make it to the welland canal on the weekend?

Great video. Thanks.

The Hamilton Pumphouse engines are indeed incredible too, and the museum is open year round instead of just one day a year. Although only one engine runs in an electrically driven demo mode now, you do get to experience the action close up, sort of from "within" the engine. Being parallel beam types, they could be hard to restart if they happened to stop on top dead center. Lucky guests are sometimes allowed to use a hand "turning bar" to engage the holes around the perimeter of the flywheel on the non driven engine to experience what it's like to line things up for a steam startup.

http://www.hamilton.ca/CultureandRecreation/Arts_Culture_And_Museums/HamiltonCivicMuseums/SteamMuseum/
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_B_4cN5eHg[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBdJQYbGZJM[/youtube]

visit the steam technolgy museum in hamilton ont there massive steam engines were in operation the last time i was there

I took the tour of the Col. Ward pumping station a couple years ago, and I highly recommend it. Those engines are truly an amazing sight to behold. Picture a three-story-high triple expansion steamship engine (a few key differences like the valve gear, flywheels, etc, but you get the idea) sitting on top of a two-story-high pump base... then line up five of them in a row! Everything about these things is massive, the flywheels alone are 20 feet in diameter. Unfortunately they don't run anymore (the boiler house was scrapped out in the 1970s), but even sitting cold, they are very impressive and beautiful machines.

The Welland Canal BoatNerd gathering this coming weekend coincides with an opportunity to tour the Col. Francis G. Ward Pumping Station in Buffalo at 2pm Sunday the 18th. Steam freaks might find the five ~60 ft tall Holly engines interesting, as smaller versions were used to power lakers such as the SS Canadiana.
http://www.buffaloindustrialheritage.com/
http://www.smokstak.com/forum/showthread.php?t=92116
http://www.buffaloah.com/a/porter/ward/ward.html