The Number 3 Pump Station is the third of the eight constructed as part of the steel pipeline now known as the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme, that stretches from the Mundaring Weir in the Perth Hills, 560 kilometres to the east Kalgoorlie in the eastern Goldfields. The scheme is a series of pump stations drawing from a nearby reservoir and pumping water through the conduit pipe to a receiving tank for the next pump station to replicate the process. A plan to provide potable water to the newly discovered goldfields in Coolgardie and later Kalgoorlie, only received the state government’s serious attention when it seemed the prosperity in the goldfields was not going to be as short-lived as predicted.[1] The state government introduced the Coolgardie Water Supply Loan Scheme and a loan of £2 ½ million was raised in 1896. C Y O’Connor, the Public Works Department Engineer in Chief devised a scheme using eight pumping stations to pump water from a reservoir constructed in the Darling Ranges to Mt Charlotte between Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. The pipeline would follow the newly laid Eastern Goldfields Railway which was completed in 1894.[2] Despite intense political and media backlash opposing the scheme and particularly attacking O’Connor and his department which resulted in a 1902 Royal Commission and O’Connor’s suicide the same year, the project was successfully completed by January 1903 and is still operational today.Each pump station was designed to house two main large areas, a boiler room containing boilers and economiser and a pump room housing Worthington triple expansion engines manufactured and shipped from England. The first four stations each had three boilers and three engines, two boilers were needed to generate enough steam to power two engines with one of each in reserve. The last four stations only needed one boiler and one engine each. Again each station was supplied with a spare boiler and engine to ensure continual operation during mechanical repairs, maintenance and cleaning of the boilers.The amount of water required each day was determined at the Mt Charlotte Reservoir. Levels were taken and using the party line telephone system a message of how many litres to pump was delivered station to station down the line to commence the day’s operation. Each station Engineer would recalculate this amount by including their local consumption needs. In the first few years the pump station workers kept the water flowing six days per week but with the rising numbers of people settling in the areas supplied by the pipeline many stations including Cunderdin worked three shifts per day seven days per week. [3]The Number 3 Pump Station operated from 1902 until 1956 when it was decommissioned and its operations taken on by an adjacent electrical control centre.  The boilers and engines in fact most of the equipment from Number 3 is long gone, sold off for scrap metal. Despite the machinery being stripped from the building there are objects that remain to represent the pump station’s former functional life. In 1967 the Cunderdin Historical Society formed and sought permission to use the former pump station as the site for a regional museum. The Society Chairman, James Stokes, wrote to the Public Works Department requesting items for the museum.  The society particularly wanted an engine from Gilgai, the Number 7 pump station which was due for demolition. It is due to the efforts of the Historical Society volunteer members that the building was protected against similar demolition and the objects that form part of the Goldfields Water Supply Scheme Collection held at the Cunderdin Museum which opened in March 1973.[4] 1. J Placid Stokes, Cunderdin-Meckering A Wheatlands History, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1986, p.42.2. ibid., p.433. R Hartley, River of Steel: A History of the Western Australian Goldfields and Agricultural Water Supply 1895-2003, Access Press, Bassendean, 2007, p1904. J Stokes, Lets Tell A Story The first twenty five years of the Cunderdin Museum, Cunderdin Museum Collection, 1998