Museum
Powerhouse Ultimo
Level 3/500 Harris St, Ultimo NSW 2007
Century-old steam engine museum inside a former tram power station, with a working eighteenth-century rotative engine at its heart.
This guide to Powerhouse Ultimo in Sydney follows the Whitbread engine, a nine-tonne steam engine built by James Watt's firm in 1785 to crush malt in a London brewery, and the Australian scientist Archibald Liversidge, who saved it from scrap and shipped it to Sydney in 1888. It traces the building itself, a former Ultimo tram power station that shut down in 1963 before reopening as a museum in 1988. The engine is currently packed away in conservation storage while the building is rebuilt around it.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.