ELECTRIC ROOM (CMT Trail stop 4)

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CMT TRAIL STOP 4 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS:

Now here we are in a room that was added in 1937. I think it is quite interesting to see that the architectural values are slightly less than in other parts of the building. The windows are just oblongs, the roof is flat, it is really not such a lovely room. It's called the Electric Room because in here in front of us we can see a big green toad- like thing called a Crompton and Parkinson motor and that ran, underneath us, a pump, it wasn’t used very much because electricity was tremendously expensive and if you could use rubbish to run steam or gas from next door it was much better to do that. There is an electricity story here because we did generate our own electricity at pumping station. When the pumping station first opened they would have used oil lamps in order to light the place, a few years later they introduce gas lighting around but they then thought we’ve got this steam we can generate power so they introduced a little generating station which we can see through there behind you on the right, if we just walk through here, there we go, through the doors. And this plant would have used the steam to generate electricity to illuminate the pumping station and this is a time when this part of town did not have mains electricity so it would have been a little beacon of light in the middle of this part of Cambridge and it also powered next door we can see through the window there is a house and that is the Engineer's House where the Engineer in charge used to live and it is said that if his electricity started going off a little bit then he knew the steam pressure was going low and he’d better come and ask the workers what was happening.

EN-ROUTE TO VALVE YARD (stop 5) Now we going to walk down the Engine Room past the dials but carry straight on this time. As we are walking by you need to watch out for various pipes that are around. You can see that one of them has ‘danger hot’ written on it and in the past that would've had steam going through it and it would have really burnt you if you touched it. We’ll keep on going, past the trapdoor on your right which takes you down to underneath the engines but we not allowed to go there, only the engineers can go there and on our left we’ve got a rack of marvellous, huge spanners. So then we’ll go round to the left here and out into the Valve Yard.