Steam Boilers of the World
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How Steam Boilers Changed How We Live
Steam boilers heated our homes and schools, powered factories, and moved trains and ships. This page will tell their story, from early steam to today's modern boilers.
Steam Boilers of Ireland
For the families of Cork, who carried their skill and their stories across the ocean.
Cork: Where Ocean Steam Began
On April 4, 1838, the small paddle steamer Sirius left Passage West in Cork Harbour. Her captain was Lieutenant Richard Roberts, a Passage West man. Eighteen days later she reached New York, the first ship to cross the Atlantic from Europe under steam the whole way. Crowds lined the harbour to cheer her off. Part of her paddle shaft still stands near Passage West today. Cork put steam to work on land too. In 1834 the distillery at Midleton bought a steam engine from England. It helped the big water wheel when the river ran low. Wheel and engine worked side by side until the old distillery closed in 1975. Cork's city waterworks on the Lee Road had a Cornish pumping engine in 1858. Its three boilers came from the Cork Steamship Company's foundry. Between 1904 and 1907 the city put in two Lancashire boilers and three big triple-expansion engines. They pumped Cork's water until the late 1950s, and you can still see them today.
Ireland: Cork waterworks engine room. Photo: Podstawko, CC BY 4.0
Dublin: Steam at the Brewery and the Rail Works
At the Guinness brewery at St. James's Gate, a narrow-gauge railway was laid between 1873 and 1877. Its little steam engines hauled goods around the brewery. Most were built in Dublin, to a design by the brewery engineer Samuel Geoghegan. The railway ran until 1975. The Great Southern and Western Railway opened its Inchicore works in Dublin in 1846. In 1939 Inchicore built No. 800 Maedb, one of the three biggest steam engines ever built in Ireland. She ran over 480,000 miles and is now on show at the Ulster Transport Museum near Belfast.
Ireland: Guinness brewery locomotive. Photo: nzsteam, CC BY 2.0
Ireland: Guinness brewery locomotive. Photo: NearEMPTiness, CC BY-SA 4.0
Belfast: Boilers for the Titanic
At Harland & Wolff in Belfast, workers built the boilers for the Titanic. There were 29 of them, with 159 furnaces between them, made to work at 215 psi.
Ireland: No. 800 Maedb locomotive. Photo: NearEMPTiness, CC BY-SA 4.0
Peat and Power
Ireland has a lot of bog and not much coal. In 1950 the power station at Portarlington became Ireland's first to burn sod peat in its boilers to make electricity.
Keeping Steam Alive
In 1964 a few people who loved steam founded the Irish Steam Preservation Society in Stradbally, County Laois. They still hold a steam rally there every August bank holiday weekend, and they run a narrow-gauge steam railway.