January 2021 Picture of the Month

My first offering for 2021 was actually taken in late 2019 – well who got the chance to take many new pictures during 2020? – and is one of more than two hundred photographs which are included in my delayed new book The Governor – controlling the power of steam machines which will be published in due course by Pen & Sword books. The picture was taken at Claymills Pumping Station in Stretton near Burton on Trent and shows a detail of one of the station's four Woolf-type compound rotative beam engines built by Gimson of Leicester in 1885. The restoration of these engines has been – and continues to be – undertaken to an exemplary standard, including the complete manufacture of a replacement governor for one destroyed when the station was mothballed. The engines are set up as mirror-image pairs in separate engine houses either side of a central boiler house and chimney