Queen Street Mill, Harle Syke, Burnley - 04/07/15

This is the Queen Street Mill, one of 7 weaving mills that were built in Harle Syke area of Burnley, Lancashire. The Queen Street Mill is now the only operational mill out of the 7 & is owned & operated as a museum by the local council, It is also the worlds only operational steam driven weaving shed, and as such has been featured in various films & tv programs such as the Kings Speech & Life On Mars. The mill has two huge Lancashire Boilers, with equally as large Economisers fitted to the rear of them. The slightly older of the two boilers isn't used and still has the 1960's automatic stokers fitted, the slightly later 1901 boiler is the one that they use, which has had the automatic stokers removed and is manually stoked to show what it was originally like - it is also slightly easier to manually stoke, rather than use the automatic stokers, as these still needed to be loaded by hand, which meant standing with your back to them & throwing the shovel full of coal over your shoulder in order to get it up in to the loader; trust me when I say it's awkward enough manually stoking the coal without dropping it all over the floor, as whilst my brother found the knack, I just couldn't get the loading of the right-hand side of the boiler right with more coal going on the floor than in the boiler! Anyway, the required operating pressure of the boiler is 60psi, but our teacher likes to keep it up at more like 70psi, because it's easier to keep the pressure up, rather than letting it drop too much & then having to constantly battle to get it back up to pressure (he used to fire & drive steam locos such as Princess' & Duchess' in the LMS region for the last 10 years of operational mainline steam). You may have seen the 650hp tandem compound horizontal twin cylinder stationary steam engine in the main hall at the London Science Museum, which was from the Harle Syke Mill, one of the other 6 mills and was just a couple of streets away from the Queen Street Mill; well the engine in this Queen Street Mill is simply a slightly less powerful, 500hp single cylinder version of the same engine (although apparantly during the latter 30 odd years that the mill was in service, they overclocked the engine & ran it at 750hp - nowadays they have it basically on tick over at 75hp, as it's only running a few looms).
For more info on the Harle Syke Mill visit:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harle_S...
For the Queen Street Mill visit:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_S...
If interested in visiting the Queen Street Mill visit:
www.lancashire.gov.uk/leisure-...