7 Comments Posted by Frederick

As a modern operating engineer I would of loved to see this old school machinery in its prime. Beautifull!

The fly ball governor was belted to the flywheel. It in turn controlled the corliss valve gear preventing over speeding of the engine as well as maintaining a set speed as set by the operating engineer.

That is whats left of a smallish water tube boiler

What remains of what was called a spreader stoker for the boiler. Looks like the boilers were also retrofitted with oil burners that have been scrapped from the round holes in the boiler fronts.

It is a 3 cylinder steam engine driving a electrical generator. The smaller unit is indeed an exciter. Looks like copper scavengers had quite a haul with this one.

The tank is called a suction accumulator. Its purpose was to prevent liquid ammonia from carrying over to the ammonia compressor. As these compressors are piston types any liquid entering them would severely damage them beyond repair and cause a massive ammonia leak.

The square holes in the flywheel were for inserting a square steel pry bar into in order to turn the machine by hand during maintenance or repairs. The term for that was barring over the machine.