The Ellenroad Ring Mill Engine is steamed on the first Sunday of the month (except January for boiler inspection).

[citation needed] Ellenroad mill was situated on flat land alongside the river in Newhey (archaically "New Hey".

More significantly the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway built the Oldham Loop Line through Milnrow and Newhey in 1863.

During the boom of the late 1880s, a limited company, the Ellenroad Spinning Co. Ltd, was formed to build a new mill.

They chose the well-respected Oldham architects of Stott and Sons to manage the design and construction.

Work commenced February 1891, and the first cotton was passing through the card room in May 1892, the final mule was installed and in operation by December 1892.

Because this was a Stott mill, it is likely that the whole of the machinery would have come from one supplier and this would have been Platt Brothers of Oldham or failing that Dobson & Barlow.

At this point in its history it might be expected that the mill then followed the conventional course of its contemporaries: the industry peaked in 1912 when it produced 8 billion yards of cloth; The First World War of 1914–18 halted the supply of raw cotton; and the British government encouraged its overseas colonies to build mills to spin and weave cotton.

However at 2:30 pm on 19 January 1916 the headstock of one of the two mules tended by JW Taylor in Number 2 Spinning Room caught fire.

Though it was of fire-proof construction on the patent triple brick arch method, the iron girders had been subjected to great heat and dousing with water, and this caused them to fracture.

Mules still produced the finest spin, but that was a more niche market, and money was now made with rings.

[7] Many mills were converted to ring frames, but the most efficient ring frames required a greater floor height, and the positioning of the floor support pillars (and hence the bay size) needed to be changed in order to achieve the greatest spindle density.

The four-cylinder triple-expansion horizontal engine by J & W McNaught was rebuilt as a twin tandem which would deliver the extra power required by the increased number of spindles.

[8] The J & W McNaught single triple-expansion horizontal engine, with Corliss valves on the HP, was reconfigured in 1916 into a 3000 IHP twin tandem.