DESTRUCTOR FLUE (CMT Trail stop 9)

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CMT TRAIL STOP 9 WORDS SPOKEN BY CAMBRIDGE MUSEUM OF TECHNOLOGY'S CURATOR, PAM HALLS:

Now I’d like to take you downstairs to the flue. Watch your step as you go down. So we are now in a tunnel underneath the boilers probably about six foot high and this is the flu and in here accumulated all of the smoke from burning the rubbish and the coal and the coke and it was sucked along the flu and then you can see out of the window here the chimney and the flu linked up with the chimney and out the smoke went all over Cambridge. The one story about this is obviously if you have a chimney at home you have to have it swept from time to time because soot piles up likewise soot piles up in here. So the workers, once a year, had to sweep this area out and shovel the soot that had accumulated out but unfortunately couldn't shut down the boilers they had to keep running because if you don't have the boiler going then the sewage starts to backup and then everyone gets ill. So they would have to swathe themselves in wet sacks and with all heat around them and the boiler going above them they would have to run in, do their shovelling and run out very quickly and take it in turns just to keep this this area clear, so not a very nice job to do.

LOOKING AT THE NUMBER 4 BOILER So if we can walk back up the stairs now and turn right and in front of you, you can see Number Four Boiler which was installed in 1923. It didn't burn the town's rubbish I think the reason was that by the 20s the energy that was in rubbish had gone down, people were putting different things into their rubbish and so they decided to install a new boiler which ran entirely on coke and this is the boiler that we still like to use today whenever we can and it is much bigger than the others that we just looked at, it has 80 tubes inside it, it's a very powerful thing, it’s about as big as a bus really and we have to take great care with it, it has to be inspected every year because if it exploded it would take the entire museum building out with it.

EN-ROUTE TO ASH TUNNEL (stop 10) Now will go out through the door we came in by and head towards the Ash Tunnel. Watch the steps as you go by, so let's go back through the Pumping Room now, and do watch out for the wheels on the ground because you might trip over them. These two little things that the sticking out, they are called steam men and they were very important part of these two engines, they regulated how they worked so that the engine driver didn't have to do quite as much work as he would have done if they didn't exist. Their posh name is a differential valve gear mechanism but their working name is steam men. Out of the door so we are heading through the yard here and here we are in the Ash Tunnel.