Pump it!

Ir.D.F. Woudagemaal pumping station, Lemmer, The Netherlands

You probably wouldn’t even notice it if you were driving past.

Just off the main street, a few hundreds metres down a small side road, is a brick building with what looks like a small lake in front of it.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the building is elegantly designed, with a lovely symmetry and large windows between the bricks.

From the outside, you would never know what is inside, though. Even if the sign on the building saying ‘Ir.D.F. Woudagemaal’ gave you a clue.

Inside this building are the mechanics of the largest steam-pump station ever built. It is a masterpiece of engineering and the most technologically advanced steam pumping station in the world. Most remarkable of all – it is still in use.

The Wouda Pumping Station is on the edge of the Dutch city of Lemmer, a small residential centre in the north of the country. The station was built in 1920 and was just another battle in a long war between Holland and water.

Much of the Netherlands was once covered in water and was unusable for anything – but the country needed space for agriculture and for residential development.

A long process of removing the water and making the land habitable began centuries ago and I’ve written about some of the older techniques used at Kinderdijk and the Beemster Polder.

They were extremely innovative for their time but seemed old-fashioned (although still quite effective) by the time the Wouda Pumping Station was conceived.

Steam power was going to be the new technology that would bring the Dutch husbandry of water into the twentieth century.

The steam pumping station in Lemmer was not the first. The Dutch had started using steam to replace windmills in 1825 (a century earlier) and by the end of the 1800s there were about 700 of those pumps in operation across the country.

They were much smaller, though, and hence were easier to design and build. The challenge with this new one was the sheer scale of it.

The reason the new pumping station had to be so large and powerful is because it was going to be a key part of preventing flooding in Friesland. It is capable of pumping 6 million m³ of water per day out into the sea.

Today, it still has the ability to do this, although it’s generally only used in extreme situations when the other main pumping station in the area has reached capacity.

Visiting the Ir.D.F. Woudagemaal pumping station

So, because the Ir.D.F. Woudagemaal pumping station is technically operational, it is always being maintained so it is ready to go with very little notice. But because, in reality, it is rarely used, the whole compound is normally open for visitors.

You can only go inside as part of a guided tour but they leave regularly from the modern visitors centre that has been built next to the original building.

The visitors centre has a museum and a very slick 3D movie which you can watch while you wait for a tour to start.

On the afternoon that I turned up – after walking for half an hour from the Lemmer bus station – there was just one last tour left. I was the only person there but that was not a problem and I got a personal look around the inside.

The guide has a tablet with audio commentary in different languages for each spot along the tour, so you don’t need to be able to speak Dutch.

My guide, a friendly retired engineer who volunteers as a guide once a fortnight, could speak English perfectly well so we chatted and I asked questions.

He showed me the huge boilers that produce the steam, explained how it then made its way to the pumps, and let me look into the apparatus where the water would be pushed through when the system was firing on all cylinders.

The Ir.D.F. Woudagemaal pumping station is fascinating.

I always love seeing the industrial sites that are on the World Heritage List and marvelling at the scale of human invention. But it adds another level when the mechanics are housed in a building that has been designed with aesthetics – and not just function – in mind.

This World Heritage Site is a little out of the way and may not be something you would naturally pass by on a trip to the Netherlands but it is easy enough to access by public transport or car and is worth visiting.

>> More info here about the Ir.D.F Woudagemaal pumping station

This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For more info click here. You can see all the UNESCO World Heritage Sites I’ve visited here.

To help you plan your trip to the Netherlands:

• What to expect in the historic centre of Amsterdam
• The best art museums in Amsterdam
• Explore the countryside of Van Gogh
• The incredible factory that’s now a World Heritage Site
• See the engineering genius of the Dutch firsthand
• How the Dutch protected their capital by controlling water
• For architecture fans, this house will blow your mind!
• How a simple rabbit took over the world
• Visit the best windmills in the Netherlands
• How you can stay the night on a boat in Rotterdam’s port.

Let someone else do the work for you:

You may also want to consider taking a tour in the Netherlands, rather than organising everything on your own. It’s also a nice way to have company if you are travelling solo.

I am a ‘Wanderer’ with G Adventures and they have great Netherlands tours for the young and budget-minded.

You could consider:

• Berlin to London on a shoestring (6 days)
• Budapest to London on a shoestring (12 days)
• European Trail (26 days)

When I travel internationally, I always get insurance. It’s not worth the risk, in case there’s a medical emergency or another serious incident. I recommend you use World Nomads for your trip.