Lithgow Blast Furnace - Historic Engineering Marker #15 Lithgow, New South Wales, Australia
By Team MavEtJu on 11-Oct-15. Waypoint GA7561

Lithgow Blast Furnace - Historic Engineering Marker #15

Blast Furnace 1 (75 feet high x 19 feet diameter) with Its 4 Cowper stoves of similar height to preheat the pressurised air, was built between March 1906 and April 1907, when it was blown in. The great engine house was built simultaneously, with a pump house annexe to the east and a turbine annexe to the south. The Parsons turbo blowing engine was it seems, the first steam turbine engine in Australia. The other original engine was a Davey vertical single cylinder tandem blowing engine.

The coke bins in the raw materials gantry were also built by Sandford on the west of the blast furnace; the gaunt brick walls still stand, but the timber beck of the bins has long since disappeared.

In September 1906 the first railway siding was opened off the Dump Road of the Coal Stage (the now demolished coal-loader) to facilitate the building of the complex and thereafter to service the works. There was no direct rail link between the Blast Furnace and the Steelworks until 1914.

In 1913 Hoskins built a second blast furnace to the north of No. 1 furnace, to a very similar design, again with 4 Cowper stoves. This created the need for more power and the engine-house was expanded by south extension to the turbine annexe for another Parsons engine.s It is likely that there wee already a second Parsons engine as stand-by: certainly there were 3 by 1925.

Simultaneously the 80 Belgian coke ovens were built, the gantry crane was installed and in 1914 a long extension to the railway system joined the Blast Furnace at last to the Steelworks. This railway ran from the coal stage down to a new (and surviving) bridge over Inch Street, curved to avoid Eskbank and crossed Union Street and Tank Street on level-crossings. Another track, opened in 1913 went to the coke ovens in Oakey Park, crossing the Zig Zag Colliery's siding, again on the level. The sidings were lifted in 1928.

Further extensions took place in the engine-house area in 1919 and finally in 1923, when the largest steam engine ever built in Australia, a Thompson horizontal compound tandem blowing engine, was installed. This 1923 brick facade had 3 narrow windows and a circular ventilator in the gable: the following year a matching brick facade was built on an east extension of the 1913 turbine annexe and this is very clear in the Black Book distant view of the works.

Contents of the plaque:

This is the site of the blast furnace and auxiliary plant erected by William Sandford in 1906-7 and extended by the Hoskins company in 1913. Until 1928 it served the Lithgow iron and steel industry: the first continuously economic producer of Australian steel, which made possible the establishment of other steel-producing centres at Newcastle and Port Kembla.

DEDICATED BY THE INSTITUTION OF ENGINEERS, AUSTRALIA 1992

Note! There are two plaques, one at the above coordinates and one at S33° 28.516' E150° 10.242'. Either of them is fine :-)

When logging this virtual, please add a photo of yourself or your GPSr at the plaque.

For more information, please see the nomination PDF at the Heritage Register at the Engineers Australia website: Proposal