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Report - - Alsthom/Kratos-Trafford park-24/5/07 | Industrial Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Alsthom/Kratos-Trafford park-24/5/07

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romanian1

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Alstom (formerly GEC-Alsthom) (Euronext: ALO) is a large French company whose businesses are power generation, railway signalling; and manufacturing trains (e.g. the TGV and Eurostar as well as Citadis trams) and the world's largest ships (e.g. Normandie and the Queen Mary 2). According to the company website, in the year 2004/05 Alstom had annual sales of over €13.7 billion, and employed more than 69,000 people in over 70 countries. Its headquarters are located in Levallois-Perret, near Paris.

The name of the company derives from the French region of Alsace and the surname of the engineer Elihu Thomson.

The premises in trafford park have been vacant for about 5 years now and have had several planning applications turned down.
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Visited with userscott and lawrence.

To be honest we only really headed over to Trafford park to escape the stockport rush hour traffic, and after seeing the security presence at northern foods and failing to find anywehere else to have a crack at, having done the chill factor a couple of months previously, i suggested we take a look at this site.

We wandered on and headed over towards the offices, finding what i suspect is part of a weighbridge and a fantastic piece of old machinery.

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The offices themselves were pretty trashed, graffiti everywhere and evidence of wiring theft but there were still one or two interesting pieces of documentation knocking around.

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Then as there was very little else decent to see we headed for the roof, which at two or 3 stories isnt the greatest of heights but i figured i could probably get a decent shot of the trafford center to illustrate how close we were.
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From here it was wher i spotted access to the other more interesting looking "workshops" type building so we headed down and in.

after a wander through some fairly nondescript corridors, we came across a large warehouse type area which appeared to be some sort of storage area for the trafford centre and contained all sorts of things like floor tiles, carved benches and even part of a clock.
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From here we came across what i assume was the main workshop area.
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It was at this point i'd just wandered off on my own through the doors seen in the previous picture leaving the other two in a different area, i'd only been there thirty seconds or so when i heard scott shouting me, so i headed in the direction of his voice and he appeared through the doors in front of me saying "theres a roomfull of blueprints and maps in there mate".

That was it, i was off like a shot in the direction he was pointing, to be greeted by one of the most awesome sights in terms of documentation ive seen so far since ive started exploring, (which admittedly as you know, isnt long)plans for the trafford centre, artists iimpressions of it before it was built, maps of every area of manchester dating back to the late 1800s some printed on canvas, a real treasure trove and theres thousands upon thousands of them.
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Heres lawrence rifling through a TINY portion.
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No pics of the maps at this time im afraid but one or two may have found there way into my posession so i will photo them tomorrow and add them to the report then, i was majorly excited as i found one of Altrincham where i live which even has my beloved budenberg gauge factory on dated 1908.

Anyway, we finished up the site and headed off after this, only one or two shots after all the excitement of finding the documents.

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Athough scott couldnt resist sitting in the roadroller before we left.

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