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Stewarts and Lloyds and operation PLUTO


MoominPapa

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This came up in my youtube feed today. Not strictly boating, but the S&L connection gives a bit of an excuse, and I'm sure many here will be interested. Most will have heard of PLUTO, but there are lots of fascinating details in the film which I didn't know about.

 

MP.

 

 

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1 hour ago, jonesthenuke said:

Excellent, never seen that film before. I used to work at Dungeness and the pipeline buildings still exist, though they have long been houses.

 

That is how they where built, diguised as bungalows so that the Germans didn't realise what they where.

My mates Grandad worked on Pluto at Corby works, there wasn't just PLUTO there was also GPSS an entire underground network of pipelines and fuel tanks, many of the pipelines directly fed airfeilds ans soem are still in use, although the tories recenlty sold them all of to a private company.

 

 

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For those interested there is a small book called "PLUTO, Pipe - Line Under The Ocean" by Adrian Searle. ISBN 0 9525876 0 2.

The present Mrs X spent some time being dragged around the remains of the pumping Station at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight but did not really share my interest in the site. 😁

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1 hour ago, buccaneer66 said:

there wasn't just PLUTO there was also GPSS an entire underground network of pipelines and fuel tanks, many of the pipelines directly fed airfeilds ans soem are still in use, although the tories recenlty sold them all of to a private company.

The bridge over the tail of Wharton's lock on the Chester line carries a GPSS pipeline. The markers are easy to see. I guess its immediate ends are probably Stanlow Oil refinery and the wartime oil depot beside the railway at Beeston, opposite Chas Hardern's boatyard. I remember as a kid in the sixties going along there on my Grandad's boat and the grass mounds  over the oil tanks were all mowed and maintained. Now it looks pretty derelict.

 

MP.

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57 minutes ago, MoominPapa said:

The bridge over the tail of Wharton's lock on the Chester line carries a GPSS pipeline. The markers are easy to see. I guess its immediate ends are probably Stanlow Oil refinery and the wartime oil depot beside the railway at Beeston, opposite Chas Hardern's boatyard. I remember as a kid in the sixties going along there on my Grandad's boat and the grass mounds  over the oil tanks were all mowed and maintained. Now it looks pretty derelict.

 

MP.

 

Did a small job once in a very anonymous fenced compound in a field in Cheshire, we had to wait for a chap to come to unlock the gate, slightly annoying as the fence was about waist height but we were under strict orders not to jump the fence.

 

Chap came and he was very much a chap, unlocked the gate gave strict orders to stay off the grassy knoll, we asked what the place was "just a pumping station" and he let us in.

 

Half hour later we left, he locked up and went his merry way, turns out the place was just a pumping station of sorts for the pipeline direct from Stanlow to Manchester Airport, the whole thing felt like some sort of obscure 007 set up, all very hush hush, careless talk cost lives type of thing.

 

There's also a remnant strategic fuel bunker next to one of the canal bridges next to Chester zoo, it's obvious somethings there just not what it is

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48 minutes ago, Batavia said:

Tim Whittle's book "Fuelling the Wars - Pluto and the Secret Pipeline Network - 1936-2015" is an excellent book on the subject.  Tim is an engineer who worked for many years on the GPSS and the book is a result of extensive research.

 

That is an excellent book, I have a copy I couldn't remember the title & it's still packed after a move.

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There was a stoppage at the top of the Northampton Arm a couple or three years ago when some bandits drilled a hole in the branch  of The Pipeline that crosses by the first bridge.

One of the surprising things is that The Pipeline handles multiple sorts of fuel.  Aviation keros,  diesel, petrol, etc. all go down the same tube, one after another,  and are sorted out by careful valve selection at the tank farms.

N

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43 minutes ago, BEngo said:

There was a stoppage at the top of the Northampton Arm a couple or three years ago when some bandits drilled a hole in the branch  of The Pipeline that crosses by the first bridge.

One of the surprising things is that The Pipeline handles multiple sorts of fuel.  Aviation keros,  diesel, petrol, etc. all go down the same tube, one after another,  and are sorted out by careful valve selection at the tank farms.

N

Strong emphasis on the word "careful" is required.  When I was working on an airport tank farm in Asia, a 14 million litre tank of Jet A-1 was put off spec by some idiot cutting the interface badly on the incoming multiproduct pipeline!

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On the Severn below Lincombe lock there are still signs of what looks like petroleum unloading facilities on the bank and an aerial view shows faint circular outlines in the field above indicating buried tanks. I assume this was part of the original system? https://goo.gl/maps/HYY2EbG1UzvFqhqh6 

 

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An old tank farm tends to look like this, it's the now disused Kelmarsh Depot. yours look like the 3 tanks at the top of my picture but even more overgrown.

You can still see where the old rail spur came it at Kelmarsh.

 

5 minutes ago, jonesthenuke said:

On the Severn below Lincombe lock there are still signs of what looks like petroleum unloading facilities on the bank and an aerial view shows faint circular outlines in the field above indicating buried tanks. I assume this was part of the original system? https://goo.gl/maps/HYY2EbG1UzvFqhqh6 

 

 

image.png.039995189ed808e7605290739b2297d8.png

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31 minutes ago, buccaneer66 said:

Thats a multi product tank farm fed from the Isle of Grain, most of the defunk one fed airfields that no longer exist, & some airfields where fed directly by the GPSS.

Since the Sunbury Lane terminal, further upstream closed over 20 years ago, these tanks have been fed by dedicated Jet A-1 lines from IoG and Aldermaston.  Fuel is supplied to Heathrow and Gatwick from these tanks.

I did many projects here over the years, including a solar-powered sheep shearing setup, for dealing with the sheep which at one time were kept to mow the mounds!

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I really have no interest at all in pipes, petrol and war stuff, but that was a fascinating film.    Thanks you for posting it.

 

I still cannot imagine a steel pipe, I guess similar to a scaffold pole, curling around a drum, even a large one.    

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14 hours ago, Greenpen said:

I really have no interest at all in pipes, petrol and war stuff, but that was a fascinating film.    Thanks you for posting it.

 

I still cannot imagine a steel pipe, I guess similar to a scaffold pole, curling around a drum, even a large one.    

 

 

It was a multi layer flexible pipe a bit like a huge hydraulic pipe.

 

Pluto%20HAIS%201.jpg

 

Worth a read https://www.combinedops.com/pluto.htm the above image came from here.

 

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15 hours ago, Greenpen said:

I really have no interest at all in pipes, petrol and war stuff, but that was a fascinating film.    Thanks you for posting it.

 

I still cannot imagine a steel pipe, I guess similar to a scaffold pole, curling around a drum, even a large one.    

I have seen a video recently where a pipeline under the sea IS a  steel pipe, 8 to 10inch?  on a drum uncoiled from the shore and towed out to its destination. Amazing how flexible the pipe is!

The Pluto pipelines  were  more like undersea/ ground electricity cables without the conductors as shown in the post above. In fact many miles were constructed at Glover's Cables in Trafford Park , Manchester

 

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2 hours ago, buccaneer66 said:

 

 

It was a multi layer flexible pipe a bit like a huge hydraulic pipe.

 

Pluto%20HAIS%201.jpg

 

Worth a read https://www.combinedops.com/pluto.htm the above image came from here.

 

Fascinating stuff . Boy weren’t we great. Let’s have a war . Mum used to say nowt like it to get industry going. Sadly not true nowadays.

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17 minutes ago, Batavia said:

Two types of pipe were used - the flexible HAIS one and the steel HAMEL ones.  The latter were 2" or 3" pipe.

 

Sorry , yes, of course. I watched the film after I posted above. Remarkable engineering either way!

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I seem to remember this subject has been discussed before. PLUTO or rather the land part of it from Elllesmere Port (Stanlow) to the Isle of Wight and Shanklin was a huge job, started before the war I think, it then spread out across the country to provide fuel to the main airfields, and became a very complex network. Some of this network ended up with GPSS, so I will have to kill you if I tell you about and other bits a\re now with other companies.
We had a lot of problems with PLUTO where it cross the Droitwich canal at the second lock up from the river. It crossed the lock just into the chamber above the bottom gate recess, so it had to be moved to enable restoration of the lock. This was not a big job, but getting the owners to move, took a huge amount of effort, and it was only really near the end of the restoration that it was suddenly re-routed.
It was this pipeline which was the demise of the traffic from EP to Brum carried by Thos Claytons. There is a pumping station at Kidderminster and after the war in the 50's this was brought into civil usage and thus made it possible and cheaper to road tanker the fuel into Brum rather than bringing it by boat.
If you know what you are looking for its route is fairly easy to discover. As has already been pointed out there is a pumping station at Beeston and you can see the pipe at Whartons Lock. The pumping stations are a standard design and google is good at spotting them. I think most are(were) rail connected.
Normally to swap fuels one sends a PIG through the pipe, which separates the different types. It also allows the pipe to be inspected, if they use an intelligent one, rather than a long rubber balloon.

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I seem to remember coming across a pipeline crossing of the S&W downstream of Dimmingsdale Lock in the form of a self-supporting arch over the canal. It was possible to hear the liquid flow if you put an ear to the pipe. At the time a wasted an hour or so on the internet and worked out where it was likely going from and to, but I can't remember now. Infrastructure like this is fascinating, but scarily unprotected.

 

MP. 

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