In the 1940s, the Millway oil pumping station included a coal-fired boiler house that used coal supplied by the railroad to make steam to run the pumps, a pump house with three large pumps for Southern Pipeline Co. and two smaller pumps for National Transit, and a smaller manifold building that allowed oil to be switched among various lines through the facility. The pumps provided 750 to 900 p.s.i. into 6-inch and 8-inch pipes, and the larger pumps had flywheels 14 feet in diameter that weighed seven tons, with one revolution pumping about half a barrel of oil. The boiler house contained five boilers that turned filtered water from Cocalico Creek into steam, with three powering Southern Pipeline Co. pumps and two used by National Transit, and ashes were hauled to an on-site dump in a cart running on narrow gauge railroad tracks. By 1882, National Transit Company owned a petroleum pipeline extending 260 miles from Colegrove, McKean County, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia, and this line included five pumping stations, with Millway as the last before Philadelphia; a branch line extended from Millway to Baltimore. At the beginning of the petroleum era, western Pennsylvania was the world's leading producer of crude oil, and the pipelines moved that oil to coastal ports for refining and ocean transport. During its working life, the Millway station also served other pipeline companies such as the Southern Pipe Line Company, brought oil from West Virginia, and toward the end of its operation in the 1950s moved products from east to west. The station was once associated with 43 large oil storage tanks located northeast across Cocalico Creek and Rothsville Road, and after the pipelines were completed, station employees maintained their section of right-of-way by hand, with Millway workers mowing the entire pipeline route to Philadelphia using scythes. Edwin Leeking worked at the Millway Station from 1935 until the late 1950s.