LIKE the Lancashire boilers they made for export all over the world, many workers at the famous Foster, Yates and Thom foundry in Blackburn are still going strong - though their old workplace shut down long ago.

So there's sure to be a good turn-out at their reunion a week tomorrow at the town's Longshaw Unity Working Men's Club, like at the first one held last year when around 100 ex-FYT employees gathered to swap reminiscences and old photographs like these lent to Looking Back by former boilermaker Bernard Shorrock, 69.

The 1950s view of the boiler shop is in the firm's giant Canal Works in Manner Sutton Street, where at its peak 1,500 men turned out steam engines, boilers and massive machines for industries worldwide.

The men seen working on the boiler in the foreground are making it leak-proof using pneumatic caulking guns which drove strips of steel into the joints between the heavy metal plates from which it was made. It was a task that generated a huge racket and damaged the hearing of many employees.

"When I started there in 1947, they were turning out at least one Lancashire boiler a week," recalls Bernard, of Suffolk Street, Mill Hill.

Indeed, it used to be a common sight in Blackburn to see teams of horses and, later, heavy lorries hauling huge boilers, giant vessels and heavy machinery out the works which had grown from little more than a blacksmith's shop when the business was founded in 1824 by William Yates. Boilermaking - and lots of jobs - ended in 1964 when industry's increasing switch from steam to electric power made their manufacture no longer economic.

The massive foundry, then employing fewer than 200, shut completely in 1973 when production was switched to associate factories in the industrial conglomerate which had earlier absorbed the firm.

But its boilers carried on working far longer in testimony to their solid construction and the heavy engineering expertise that had gained FYT a global reputation.

"The firm made boilers of all sizes, in steel ranging from half an inch to 1 inches thick, and the biggest-ever weighed 75 tons," says reunion organiser George Woodacre, 65,of Great Harwood, pictured far right in the mid-1950s group of boiler shop apprentices.

"To test them, they were filled with water from the canal outside the works which was pressurised to two-and-half times whatever their working capacity was."

But while these pictures recall that lost era and the friendly, home-from-home atmosphere that he says prevailed at Canal Works, George wonders where are the hundreds of others known to have been taken of the factory and its workers by the late Danny Shaw over many years after commencing a boilermaking career there in 1914.

If readers have any clues or would like details of the reunion, call George on 01254-887677.