Portland - Town named after cement

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Wonder how many towns named "Portland" were named after the cement that they produced ???

Went for a tour of the old Portland Cement works today.

Built in 1901, it provided a lot of Sydney, and 40% of the market in my state at one stage. Closed in 1992, not long after I moved up here.

Have done all sorts of machinations to get this to stand up, but the old silos are being painted at the present point in time...he's doing a flash job.


Rounded windows are 1901, the square ones came later in extensions. Second below is the front facaade of the "power house"



This was the space for one of the boilers. definitely firetube in it's original guise.



Turbine house...ran into a former workmate who did his apprenticeship there in the 60s...the cranes were entirely manual.


Behind vire of the powerhouse portion.


Crusher building, where the limestone was crushed for the process.



More to come If I can get them to load.
 
1865, they had a burnt limestone thing going.

Beehive kilns, local coal and limestone, the CO2 driven off the limestone to quicklime, and then slaked to hydrated lime that you can buy.

Some of the housing in the district is "lime ash", lime, and coal ash. A bit like roman Concrete.



Modern gear retrofitted into the building for making/fixing mining drills.


Want to show the pic of the shaft on the other side of the wall...the teeth on the gear are wood. As they wear, keep driving them in from behind.
 
Always assumed the cement was named after The Isle of Portland in Dorset (as in the headland Portland Bill) which is pretty much made of limestone and has/had a lot of quarries. If so it'd be a moot point what the secondary Portlands are named after.

Here they seem to make it mostly out of fossilised coral, a few local escarpments on the coastal plain being ex-coral islands marooned by rising sea levels.

They used to make lime by kilning oyster shells (there are some ruined kilns) and there's a trad. boat caulking with a mix of plant fibre lime and tung oil, though there's no surviving trad. boat building I'm aware of.
 
Portland cement was named after THAT Portland.

And many cement producing towns were named thereafter on the product.
 
There is an old cement works in a small town north of Auckland, closed in 1929, and have been in ruins ever since. They actually exported cement to Australia. As teenages we used to hang out there to drink...and drive. Very dangerous as there were some very deep pools or pits, uncovered at ground level. The image I most remember is an out building where a pine tree grew on the roof, the building was under the roots. It wasn't as bad as this 45 years ago.

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warkworth-cement-works-1024x683.jpg


Too far gone for any resto. Someone finally got killed, probably no public access now.
 
Originally Posted By: peejaycruiser
Portland is where I bought the Liberty from. It was slightly warmer there than it was in Lithgow, nearly froze on the spot getting out of the car.


LOL...it's the other side of the Great dividing range...but only 25 km.
 
Cement has its places to this day but is it fair to say iron and steel displaced a lot of Portland cement in building applications?

Thomas Edison wanted to develop a Portland Cement plant (in New Jersey, I think) but it didn't work out.
Of the raw material quarry (much of New Jersey is formerly undersea-like Florida) T.E. said, "I threw two million dollars into that hole and never heard it hit bottom."

Very cool pictures. Thanks
 
My area is full of Limestone. There are several cement plants that make cement out of the limestone. They all started out as gold mines but found it more profitable to make cement. One of the plants still takes gold ore to a gold processing place in Ely,nv
 
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Thanks for sharing! Back when I was in school for civil engineering we did a lot of study/work with concrete. Someone always asked why they still call it Portland.

Its been many years now since I graduated and many years since leaving that field. I still have a healthy respect for it though.
 
Originally Posted By: peejaycruiser
Portland is where I bought the Liberty from. It was slightly warmer there than it was in Lithgow, nearly froze on the spot getting out of the car.


That's my daily commute...not bad, eh ?
 
Originally Posted By: Shannow


That's my daily commute...not bad, eh ?

Don't know about that in winter.
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Along the way a Forester came the other way with a massive ice mound on it's roof and half the windscreen.
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Driving it back was not fun, because of the head gasket issue we butchered a thermostat and pulled the wire on the ac so the fan would run continuous. At one point the outside temp was -1. And I couldn't work out the auto window so it was either up or down.
 
I kid you not, when it snows, you can see Sydneysiders pulled up around sunny corner turnoff (Half way between Lithgow and Bathurst), and pile snow on their bonnet and windscreen to take back to the big smoke...stop in the Thompson's Creek Dam parking bay, take photos, the whole lot.

(Usually range rovers engage in this activity).

(-6 or -7 usually pulls us up most winters)
 
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