Gasometers In U.K.

[Kirby Uncoupler]

Hi Everyone,

    We've all seen 'em, but they are now fast disappearing from the U.K. scene, many have been scrapped, some have become preserved non-working artistic conversions. Most are leftovers from complete Victorian gas works, but starting 100+ years ago, town gas production was shifted to larger plants, leaving many places with just the gasometers for storage, and on into the 1970s natural gas age. Nowadays the official line for their demise, is no longer required, or high land values, pressure can also be controlled via the pipe network, plus they do present a target for terrorism (e.g. Warrington).

     We all know they rise up and down at different times of day, my question concerns the operation of gasometer clusters, of say 3,4,5,6 or even 7 in a group, were they each to serve different areas, or did they work together in sequence serving a common outlet (i.e. one empties, the next one starts to empty, or one fills up, then the next one starts to fill)? I presume they must have had diversion pipework, so as to switch out an empty gasometer (gas holder) for maintenance. Most large holders were telescopic within an external cast iron frame, the more modern (1930s) enclosed type (painted pale blue) were always rare, and are rarer still now, and gave no obvious indication of being empty or full.

             Cheers, Brian.

[SED Freightman]

3 hours ago, Kirby Uncoupler said:

 Nowadays the official line for their demise, is no longer required, or high land values, pressure can also be controlled via the pipe network, plus they do present a target for terrorism (e.g. Warrington).

     We all know they rise up and down at different times of day, my question concerns the operation of gasometer clusters, of say 3,4,5,6 or even 7 in a group, were they each to serve different areas, or did they work together in sequence serving a common outlet (i.e. one empties, the next one starts to empty, or one fills up, then the next one starts to fill)? I presume they must have had diversion pipework, so as to switch out an empty gasometer (gas holder) for maintenance.

 

Whilst true that a certain amount of storage is afforded by the high pressure network, the current woefull lack of UK gas storage capacity cannot have been helped by the privatised industries desire to dismantle holder stations and convert them into development opportunities.

My local Holder Station (2 holders) was dismantled a couple of years ago after a period of disuse, the site also contained a pumping station and much valvework, so having watched the holders rise and fall for over 50 years, I believe they were not interlinked but operated as two quite separate storage vessels.  Routine maintenance (painting and minor repairs), back in the days when such activity was carried out, was normally done with the holder full, it being quite interesting to see welding repairs being undertaken on occasions ! Of course when the older type of holder with three or four sections is at its lowest point, it still contained gas and would have needed to be purged before any internal work or examination could take place. There were no staff employed on site and everything appeared to be controlled remotely, not sure where from, although until closure of the Waddon Marsh (Croydon) gasworks their control room apparently monitored the Sevenoaks Holder Station.

[Danemouth]

When I started work in Wales Gas Board back in 1965 I was told the story of a gasometer in North Wales in the days before natural gas and transmission grids. A small town had a coal gas plant and single gasometer. Now their highest load was of a Sunday lunctime when the pressure on the district would drop. So the Manager and his wife would take deckchairs and sit on top of the holder - their weight would help keep the pressure on the district up.

 

That would be an unusual feature on a layout 😀

 

Dave

[GRUNFOS]

The pair adjacent to washford heath yard, only just taken down for HS2, worked as a pair and counted as a single gasometer. [largest in uk I was once told when I was standing on the top!]

Paul.

Edited August 4, 2022 by GRUNFOS
spelling

[MartinRS]

I signed-up on the Academia.edu site just to get a number of card models of gas holders. Since then I have received numerous papers on gasometers. This is the Wiki page of the company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academia.edu

Edited August 4, 2022 by MartinRS
typo

[Michael Hodgson]

I seem to recall the gas board used to object to the term gasometer and insist that they should be called gas holders. 

Nobody took any notice of that though!

 

I also remember that Camping Gaz (a French company) used to sell a spring balance designed to weigh their refillable cylinders, calibrated from empty to full, which their sales literature described as a "portable gasometer". 

[Nick Holliday]

8 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I seem to recall the gas board used to object to the term gasometer and insist that they should be called gas holders. 

Nobody took any notice of that though!

 

I also remember that Camping Gaz (a French company) used to sell a spring balance designed to weigh their refillable cylinders, calibrated from empty to full, which their sales literature described as a "portable gasometer". 

As I understand it, every gas works had a gasometer, which was the equipment needed to measure the quantity of gas being produced, before it was stored in the gasholder. Unfortunately, and rather confusingly, the g**meter name got applied incorrectly fairly early on - even the Ordnance Survey used both terms apparently at random, at least from their Victorian editions.

[johnofwessex]

Interestingly enough, the first lot of gas from a new charge of coal had a very high Hydrogen content and some gasworks would store this in a separate holder for use by gas balloonists, they even had a take off field complete with gas supplies for them!

[JeremyC]

Not all gasholders visibly rose and fell. There were two at Granton gasworks in Edinburgh that had an external cladding that hid the working parts that were presumably the same as any other gasholder.

https://www.scottish-places.info/features/featurefirst6437.html

Granton also had one open frame type.

 

 

[SED Freightman]

1 hour ago, Nick Holliday said:

As I understand it, every gas works had a gasometer, which was the equipment needed to measure the quantity of gas being produced, before it was stored in the gasholder. Unfortunately, and rather confusingly, the g**meter name got applied incorrectly fairly early on - even the Ordnance Survey used both terms apparently at random, at least from their Victorian editions.

Prior to the end of town gas production, Sevenoaks Gasworks had a Meter House which is presumably where the gasometer was located.

[Kirby Uncoupler]

Many Thanks for the replies so far.

      I prefer the well-estabilished term "gasometers", it has more of a ring to it than the official "gas holders" term, plus a gasometer is a crude measuring device anyway, you can tell at a glance whether the pressure is up or down. My recent interest was sparked(!) by the 2013 book "London's Lost Power Stations And Gasworks" by Ben Pedroche (The History Press), which is excellent, plus I grew up in the era when local gas works and power stations were being abandoned, later to appear derelict in countless 1970s/80s action films and TV series. If it was an ITC/ITV series, like The Sweeney/Professionals/Avengers, you just knew the big punch-up with the baddies, would take place on one of these disused sites, more often than not at Southall gas works. Having said "disused", the gas company would still often retain a presence in a small corner of a site, for control and/or storage, it was mostly the old town gas producing buildings, with their multiple retort ovens, that were completely abandoned.

       I can vaguely recall even earlier in the 1960s, being driven past these evil looking places like Beckton on the A13, or Angel Road, Tottenham on the North Circular, belching out the yellow sulphurous fumes, and the associated eggy smell, that made you want to throw up for the next mile and a half.

       Going slightly off-topic, during the same period, smaller local electric power stations were also closing, many only working when peak demand was required, supply was switching to the new (1960s) CEGB megawatt stations, located away from large cities. 

I remember the Islington power station, by the ECML at Caledonian Road, it had started as a small local supplier, being later taken over by larger concerns, and eventually sidelined, usually only working in winter months. I used to see it every day, walking to school, it was fairly compact with wooden cooling towers and a very tall octagonal chimney, by the end of the 60s it had gone cold. Walking past one day in the early 70s, the demolition men started knocking down the chimney, brick-by-brick, no explosives here in a built-up area, right next to the main line. Like with the gas works, the site was not completely abandoned, it carried on as an electrical switching/sub-station, with new homes and a refuse centre all around it.

      These days in the UK, we can buy our gas and electric from the same company, but there must have been a similar crossover pre-WW2, in some situations. My family lived in an old Victorian house, when re-decorating you could see the marks on the walls, where gas lamps had once been mounted, but at some stage the house had been converted to electric power. In the cellar were some ancient cast-iron fuseboxes, that by the 1970s, urgently needed replacing. At the time, I was puzzled by the cast initials "G.L.C.", I thought Greater London Council, can't be? Then the penny dropped, it stood for "GAS LIGHT and COKE company!

                                                   Cheers, Brian.

[Flying Pig]

Has anyone seen the tide going in and out on Tollesbury Quay?  That's achieved with nothing more than a bucket of water and a small diameter hose connected to the layout.  The bucket is raised onto a stand and the tide comes in, but slowly because of the restricted flow, and the opposite when the bucket is placed on the floor.

 

It struck me the same technology could be used to make a working gasholder by connecting the hose to a balloon supporting the upper section.  The gasholder could rise and fall slowly during an operating session, a nice gimmick for an exhibition layout and no noisy motors. 

[BernardTPM]

I remember the large reinforced concrete bridge at Beckton over the road to North Woolwich which had the letters 'G L C C' cast into it. There had once been an embankment to one side (the 'Beckton Alps' to the other side) but the embankment had been removed. The bridge was removed some time in the mid. 1970s, I think.

[Kirby Uncoupler]

18 minutes ago, Flying Pig said:

Has anyone seen the tide going in and out on Tollesbury Quay?  That's achieved with nothing more than a bucket of water and a small diameter hose connected to the layout.  The bucket is raised onto a stand and the tide comes in, but slowly because of the restricted flow, and the opposite when the bucket is placed on the floor.

 

It struck me the same technology could be used to make a working gasholder by connecting the hose to a balloon supporting the upper section.  The gasholder could rise and fall slowly during an operating session, a nice gimmick for an exhibition layout and no noisy motors. 

 

Nice idea, but rising tides and falling tides, take roughly plus or minus six hours each, or are things speeded up in fantasy modelling world?😃

I've also thought of applying some water float technology to a gasometer, but how many hours does an average gasometer take to empty or fill? Is it worth all the trouble, watching paint dry would be more exciting by comparison? Maybe a three position up/down/half full option would suffice? 😂

Recreating the smell of an old town gas plant would be more obvious, and I know a few people who could help me with that. Box of rotten eggs anyone? I won't tell you how we re-created the odour of the modelled sewage works.    BK

[Flying Pig]

9 minutes ago, Kirby Uncoupler said:

 

Nice idea, but rising tides and falling tides, take roughly plus or minus six hours each, or are things speeded up in fantasy modelling world?😃

I've also thought of applying some water float technology to a gasometer, but how many hours does an average gasometer take to empty or fill? Is it worth all the trouble, watching paint dry would be more exciting by comparison? Maybe a three position up/down/half full option would suffice? 😂

Recreating the smell of an old town gas plant would be more obvious, and I know a few people who could help me with that. Box of rotten eggs anyone? I won't tell you how we re-created the odour of the modelled sewage works.    BK

 

It would definitely need to be speeded up, but operating sessions tend to leave out big chunks of dead time anyway.  The idea is not for any motion to be perceptible, but for the appearance of the layout to be slightly different each time you visit.  The tide on Tollesbury Quay only has to fill and empty part of a creek so it doesn't have to represent the whole tidal range anyway, but it did happen rather quickly when I saw it

 

The problem with representing smells at a show of course is that they have to be overscale to compete with some of the clientele.

[Kirby Uncoupler]

3 minutes ago, Flying Pig said:

The problem with representing smells at a show of course is that they have to be overscale to compete with some of the clientele.

 

Yes, the bad smell dimension would not be allowed on the exhibition circuit (remember the methylated spirit locos at shows?), and would incur the wrath of any exhibition manager, on the grounds of H&S, and fear of driving the punters away. And who would be dedicated enough to recreate prototypical heavy industry smells in their attic/cellar/spare bedroom/garden shed? 😂    BK

[Michael Hodgson]

44 minutes ago, Kirby Uncoupler said:

 

Nice idea, but rising tides and falling tides, take roughly plus or minus six hours each, or are things speeded up in fantasy modelling world?😃

 

Many modellers run to either a sequence or a timetable.  When using time rather than sequence, because of compression of distances, a fast clock is usually used - 6 to 8 times real time being typical.  An 8 times clock allows you to run a complete 24-hour day's timetable in a manageable 3 hours for an operating session.  However a plausible timetable for many lines probably doesn't want much in the way of overnight trains, since the real service would be rather sparse in the small hours, and of course a lot of branch lines closed for the night anyway.

[Danemouth]

When I first started work Wales Gas Board had a single holder in Bute Terrace Cardiff behind the offices that had been decommissioned some time. They decided to remove it so the steelwork was removed leaving a pit about 30 feet deep. Lorries started turning up dumping earth etc. into it. I was having lunch in the canteen one day which overlooked this pit when a lorry backed up to drop its load but was halted. A couple of men came from the cashiers office and emptied several bags of foreign coins, clipped halfpennies etc that had been accumulated from coin meters  over the years into the pit - the lorry was then allowed to tip its load on top of them.

 

One other story from an old hand I worked with. In the war there was a man who used to go on top of the holder at Vorlons in  Barry during air raids and kick off an incendaries that landed on top - how true this is I do not know.

 

Dave

[teaky]

Anyone visited?

 

http://www.nationalgasmuseum.org.uk/

[Wickham Green too]

3 hours ago, Kirby Uncoupler said:

.... who would be dedicated enough to recreate prototypical heavy industry smells in their attic/cellar/spare bedroom/garden shed? ....

You might twist my arm with prototypical heavy BREWERY smells ......

[Kirby Uncoupler]

If it wasn't for the problem of pollution, burning coal would possibly help us out of the current high price of energy, although we might have to first extricate ourselves from this worldwide fixed price arrangement?

From an economic point of view, what's the point in erecting more wind turbines, if we get stitched up paying higher world market rates for energy?

Having said that, if we went back to producing town gas, it would mean more filth in the environment, and lots more new-build gasometers and plant?  BK

[APOLLO]

British Gas back in the 70's built a coal fired synthetic natural gas plant at Westfield in Scotland, to prove the technology (which worked well) and provide "insurance" regarding future (then not fully known) availability if natural gas. The plant was closed when tests were complete.

 

http://catchingphotons.co.uk/blog/power-stations/westfield-development-centre/

 

While I never worked on the production (gas works) side, coal gas was still being made when I started my engineering apprenticeship with The North Western Gas Board at Wigan back in 1969. A dirty filthy place indeed.

 

After the Towns Gas plants were closed and scrapped, holders were still needed at many locations to smooth out the daily flows. Natural gas entered towns via a high pressure transmission pipeline at a constant volume. This meant that there was not enough during the morning / evening peak loads (in winter) and too much in the afternoon / night so holders were used to balance everything out - well it's a bit more complicated than that, and circumstances varied from site to site but generally that is why they were kept so long. Holders were old, and costly to maintain hence their disappearance over the years as technical solutions were carried out so as to be able to eliminate them (usually high pressure line packing).

 

Horizontal high pressure storage tanks known as "Bullets" were built in the 60's. Around 200ft long and 12ft dia they held a vast quantity of gas at (then) line pressure of around 600PSI. They were located near (then) new plants in the NW together with some other locations. Usually 4 or 6 in a line, some were double decked. They were not without their technical problems, One was flexing caused by pressure cycling. They all had to have their supports rebuilt and reinforced. I actually climbed into one once when this work was being carried out. They were works of the welders art - beautifully constructed and very well maintained. (as was everything gas back then).

 

In 1993 I was back working in Wigan when the IRA struck the "old" gas works (Holder station as they became known as then) at Longford, Warrington. A bomb damaged and ignited a large low pressure holder, and this was in the news. What was not in the news was a couple of explosive devices attached to the bullets. These did go off though the over 1" thick special steel barely damaged the paintwork. Half of Warrington would had disappeared had their intended purpose been fulfilled, an occupied block of flats being less than 50 yards away.

 

Bullets quickly went out of favour when local authorities realised the potential for disaster should one of them rupture. And it was not just the local authorities either who voiced concern. Most of the bullets in the NW were decommissioned within weeks of the above incident, and alternative arrangements made for the others. They had mostly all gone by 1996 or so.

 

Other holders were of the M..A.N type, a huge tank with a floating piston inside, again costly to maintain and mostly all gone now.

 

Brit15

[keefer]

There have been a couple of mentions of Beckton. There's a page at disused-stations:

http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/b/beckton/index.shtml

 

Thank you to all the contributors, it's a subject that those of us of a certain age will remember, without really knowing what was actually involved.

Edited August 5, 2022 by keefer

[Kirby Uncoupler]

Many Thanks Apollo/Brit15,

    That was all very interesting, there's nothing like a bit of inside information. Besides the awful Warrington incident, another gasometer incident was what followed the January 1917 Silvertown Explosion. As many will know, during WW1 there was an accident at the wartime TNT purifying factory at Silvertown, in what is now London Docklands. 50 tons of TNT exploded, destroying the factory and surrounding buildings, plus it shattered windows across London. Not only that, but an iron girder or similar, was thrown across the river, which hit and punctured one of two gasometers at North Greenwich, close to the site of the present O2 Dome. The puncture caused it's contents to ignite instantly, creating an immense fireball above, this all happening in the early evening darkness, the fireball lit up the whole of London, as if in daylight. 

       Around 80 people were killed, hundreds were injured, the TNT factory was never rebuilt, and the site remained abandoned until recent years. The damaged gasometer had it's top repaired, and it carried on in use until the 1970s, and was dismantled in the 1980s, although I believe the base layout was preserved, perhaps as a memorial? It's smaller companion gasometer has also been recently dismantled.    BK

Edited August 6, 2022 by Kirby Uncoupler

[Ian Smeeton]

7 hours ago, teaky said:

Anyone visited?

 

http://www.nationalgasmuseum.org.uk/

 

About 20 years ago I had a few hours to kill in Leicester waiting for the Boss.

 

I was the only visitor, but thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

 

I remember Gas Fridges, but, although I had heard of them, the Gas Radio was a revelation.

 

Gas hairdryers might have give today's 'Elf & Safety bods a bit of a heart attack through.

 

Regards

 

Ian