Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This 1926 silent black-and-white clip shows steps in the assembly of a steam engine at the Islington railway engine construction and repair plant in Adelaide. The cylindrical steam boiler is shown being lowered as workers below guide it onto its frame. The clip then shows men attaching and tightening bolts by hand. An intertitle reading ‘Ready for duty. A credit to South Australian workmen’ precedes footage of a man oiling moving parts around wheels and pistons. Finally, the working engine pulls out of the plant.

Educational value points

• This clip provides documentary evidence of the methods used in constructing part of a 710-class steam locomotive in 1926, beginning with a team of at least seven men guiding the huge boiler’s descent onto the frame below. A series of shots shows the construction methods involved, including the labour-intensive attachment of parts to the smokebox door and smokestack chimney, and the tightening of bolts that joined the boiler to its base and the cabin to the boiler.

• In a steam locomotive, water is heated in the boiler and the pressure this causes pushes the steam through to the steam box. The driver controls the release of steam from the steam box, forcing the pistons to move. This in turn moves the wheels. The bolts that the men in the clip are attaching to the boiler are part of the reinforcement required to ensure that the boiler can withstand, with a large margin of safety, the extremely high pressures generated.

• Working conditions seen in this industrial workshop of the 1920s show an absence of the safe working practices that would be expected today. Heavy machinery is being lowered from the roof yet none of the workers wears a protective helmet. They use hammers and attach bolts by hand to the boilers but none wears gloves. Despite the dirty conditions most of the workmen wear street clothes, with only one appearing to wear overalls.

• The 710-class steam locomotive, one of which is seen here, was the most powerful ever seen in Australia when it was first introduced in 1926 and was immediately popular with South Australians. Designed specifically for SA rail lines, the locomotive hauled loads of up to 450 tons (457 tonnes) over the Mount Lofty ranges and saved 1 h in running time from Adelaide to the Victorian border.

• The clip’s intertitle applauds the achievement of SA workmen, suggesting that the film may have been partly designed to attract workers to the newly expanded and reconstructed Islington workshops. The Islington Works had been building locomotives since the 1890s but in the 1920s work began on redesigning and re-equipping them to enable the building of new locomotives of the 500, 600 and 700 classes. This required larger teams of specialised mechanics and workmen.

• The clip celebrates an important development in SA’s manufacturing history, the building of new powerful Australian-designed locomotives to replace an ageing fleet of small locomotives as part of a complete revival of the state’s rail system. American William Webb (1878–1936), SA’s railway commissioner, introduced many reforms including upgrading the engine power of SA Railways trains to provide faster services and haul heavier freight loads.