The pumping station on the summit is a beam engine, Victorian, kept by volunteers and steamed twice a year for visitors, and the rest of the time it is a museum with a cold boiler. Every night at one it runs. The beam goes up and down, the flywheel turns, the pump rods go, and the hour meter on the new electric pump beside it, which is the real pump, shows two hours run with the pump off at the isolator. The summit pound is full. It does not rise. The water is going somewhere.
I am the volunteer engineer at a canal pumping station, which means I look after a Victorian beam engine that the canal does not need, and it runs without me.
The engine.
A beam engine in a stone house, built to pump water from the river up to the summit pound, because a summit pound leaks and every lock worked takes a lockful from it. It was replaced by an electric pump in the sixties and kept, and the volunteers steam it twice a year, and the rest of the time it is cold, and polished, and still.
At one every night it runs.
The running.
The beam goes up and down. The great iron beam across the top of the house, which takes four men an hour to get moving with steam, moves, with the boiler cold and the firebox empty and the pressure gauge at nothing. The flywheel turns. The pump rods go down into the well and up, and the sound of the pump is the sound of water being lifted, which is a sound you cannot fake, and the outfall into the summit pound, which I have stood at, runs. Water. Out of a pipe from a pump driven by an engine with no steam in it, for two hours.
The hour meter on the electric pump, which is a different machine entirely, beside it, off at the isolator, turns. Two hours a night. As if the station as a whole were counting the work.
The summit pound does not rise. The water goes in and the level is the same.
What has been checked.
The engine. It is a beam engine. There is no way to make it move without steam and it moves.
The house, at one, by me, on the gallery, by the beam. It started. The sound of it starting is the sound of a very large thing deciding to move, the creak and the take up, and it started the way it starts under steam, and there was no steam, and it ran, and the house shook the way it shakes, and the gauge said nothing, and the firebox door was open and cold, and I could hear, under the engine, somebody walking the floor below, the engineman's walk, the round, oil can, gauge, oil can, the way the old hands did it, every five minutes, and the smell of the oil, which is a smell I know, and the smell of pipe smoke, which I know too, because the man who drove this engine for forty years smoked one and the house still smells of it on a hot day.
Who.
The station's engineman. Forty years. He had driven it for the canal company and then, when the electric pump came, he had stayed on as its keeper, unpaid, and had steamed it for the visitors, and had kept it, the volunteers say, as if the canal still depended on it, and had said, often, that the electric pump would fail one day and then they would see.
He had asked for his ashes to go on the summit pound. The canal company had said yes. They went in from the outfall, with the engine steaming, and the volunteers say it was a good day.
He is pumping. Every night. Two hours, which was his shift, on an engine with no steam, into a pound that has his ashes in it, and the pound does not rise because the water is not the point, the point is that the engine runs and the summit is kept, and a man who said the electric pump would fail one day is not going to let the summit go short for want of a night shift.
What is done about it.
The hour meter on the electric pump shows two hours a night that the pump did not run and the company's energy return has asked why a pump that is isolated logs hours, and I have said, it is the engine, and they have said the engine is a museum, and I have said, not at one in the morning.
What I do.
I look after the station.
An engineman on a night shift had a mate. A boy, or a man, who did the firing and the oiling and sat with him, because a beam engine at night in a stone house is not a thing you watch alone. He had a mate for forty years, several, and the last one left when the electric pump came, and he drove the engine alone for the visitors after that, and at night, now, he is alone again.
So I am his mate. At one I am on the floor of the house, with the oil can, and when the engine starts I do the round. Oil can, gauge, oil can, every five minutes, the way I was taught by a man who was taught by him, and I say the things a mate says, which are, she's running sweet, and, pressure's holding, which is a lie, because there is no pressure, but the engine does not know that, and at three when the beam slows and stops I say, that's the shift, and I put the oil can on its hook.
The summit pound has risen. Not much. An inch, over the year I have done this, which the company's gauge shows and the company cannot explain, because the electric pump has not run more and the leaks have not got less, and I think it is because the engine is pumping properly now, with a mate on the oil, and I think that an inch on the summit is the engineman telling me the electric pump was never going to be enough, and that he was right, and I am not going to argue with him.