26 | the rail engineer | november 2012
feature
“It’s on the right.” “No, it’s straight on.” “In 100 yards…turn left,” intones the dispassionate satnav voice. “It can’t be, I can see it. Turn that thing off!”
writer
Grahame Taylor Looking down the shaft at the new staircase.
be fair, Shore Road pumping station is T odifficult to reach. Network Rail’s project manager Simon Barraclough and his colleague Behnam Sarani had been doing battle with their belligerent satnav that had already succeeded in sending them on three circuits of Birkenhead and was determined to have them drive back down through the Mersey tunnel to Manchester.
Flooding Back in the 1880s the engineers of the time had slightly weightier problems to deal with. The Mersey railway company aspired to drive a tunnel under the river through permeable and fissured sandstone. They knew that they would encounter large quantities of water and this presented a major challenge with the real possibility of the tunnel being inundated if not carefully controlled. Their solution was to drive three tunnels the railway tunnel, a tunnel for ventilation and one for drainage. In the end, the ventilation and drainage headings were combined under the deepest part of the railway tunnel. The drainage scheme involves a deep-level heading driven on a rising gradient from each side of the river meeting at a central high point just below the main tunnel. At the Birkenhead and Liverpool banks, two deep shafts were sunk to take the water that flows back from the centre. Both are around 170 feet (52 metres) deep. The Liverpool shaft is 15ft (4.5m) in diameter, the Birkenhead shaft 17’6” (5.3m). Pumping stations were built over the shafts and water has been pumped out continuously ever since.
Industrial archaeology
Litter problem
The Shore Road pumping station in Birkenhead is a tall, narrow but imposing building set back from the road. There is a constant sound of rushing water and the hum of heavy machinery. Just inside the main entrance, the first impression is of gantries, handrails and steel latticework, all set in a cavernous and labyrinthine structure. Looming silent and dark over all the modern paraphernalia are the remains of the original beam pumping engine occupying the vast height of the building. Up on an intermediate gallery the dial of the Hardings Improved Counter shows that it stopped on stroke number 0061362. Of the shaft there is no immediate sign. But lean over the handrails, peer down through the gratings and it’s a different matter! And it’s a sharp pull back from any temptation to linger on industrial archaeology. There is work going on in the shaft. Hammering, flickering lights, voices echoing, radios crackling, and down, down, way down, almost out of sight, is the gently heaving limpid black water in the sump 170 feet below.
The modern pumps are, of course, electrically powered. They are heavy submersible machines that have to be lowered down the shaft from a permanent gantry. Once upon a time it was possible to reach the water in the sump via a precarious arrangement of timber staircases and landings. Each staircase was very steep about 75° - and had only a rudimentary rope handrail. Coupled with the fact that the shaft is, by definition, a confined space and that the timberwork was in poor condition, it is not surprising that the staircase access fell into disuse. But, on the face of it, is there any real need to get down there? A combination of retail outlets and fire regulations have forced a revisit to the stygian depths. Retail outlets sell stuff. Stuff is wrapped in packaging. Packaging is discarded. Fire regulations say that there must be no litter bins in the Merseyrail Loop so packaging becomes litter. It is dropped on the platforms and finds its way onto the tracks. It gets blown into drainage gullies and eventually, courtesy of the
Plunging