134 Comments for Armour Meat Packing Plant

Thanks for another great gallery Mr. Motts.

I would hate to work in there.

I agree, Angie. And as eldokid says, thanks for the link to the climber's story. Stomach-churning.

Thanks for the info; sure if I find myself in St Louis again I'd love to return here.

Nice remark Mica. Great sense of humor.

As Frederick says. The wheel directly below the governor is the governor drive pulley.
Does anyone know whether this was a double expansion engine, or a two-cylinder single-expansion?

This is just a guess, but it looks like either a triple-expansion steam engine or a three-cylinder Diesel engine; the double-ring thing on the end of the shaft would be an alternator, and the little bullet-shaped thing to the side/right of it is likely an exciter dynamo, as you suggested.
If you go back, could you try (without killing yourself!) to get close enough to that engine to look for a builder's plate?

On other large engines, the holes in the flywheel were to engage the gear on a "barring engine," a small engine used to rotate the big engine's crank into the starting position.

Jay Leno is a big fan of steam powered machinery, cars, etc. and I believe he has a machine similar to one of these. I saw a video of him starting one of these up, pretty cool. I guess when you have money to burn like him, you can collect this stuff to restore and play with.

Thanks for the link above to the story of the man that climbed one of these. That was s pretty harrowing story! I can almost guess which stack it was looking at the missing bricks at the top of the one.

That is a HUGE corliss engine. I would hope that it could have been saved.

Holes in thw flywheels were used bar it over, meaning a bar was placed in a hole to turn the machine.

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