Phasing Out of the Original Eight Steam Pumping Stations Print Page

The plaque commemorates the phasing out of the original eight steam pumping stations of the Goldfields Water Supply.

The eight steam powered pumping stations commissioned in 1903 were located at Mundaring Weir where there were two, one above the weir and one below the weir, Cunderdin, Merredin, Yerbillon, Ghouli, Gilgari and Dedari.  

No 8 Pump Station at Dedari was last of the original steam powered pump stations to operate, the engines were shut down for the last time in 1970.  

In 1903 the first water was pumped from Perth to Kalgoorlie, 600 kilometres east, along the newly built Coolgardie Water Supply pipeline. The pipeline was the vision of Charles Yelverton O`Connor, Chief Engineer of Western Australia from 1891 to 1902, who managed what many people considered was the impossible, to pump 22,700 cubic metres of water from the plentiful supplies of Mundaring Weir (East of Perth), lifting it 355 metres with only eight pumping stations, and delivering it to the dry goldfield towns 600 kilometres away. This major engineering feat was treated with much scepticism by the press and politicians of the day whose unprecedented criticism of the project drove O`Connor to suicide a year before the pipeline became operational.

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