Recently myself SammyDoubleWammy and Cloth Head (non member) hit the road in search of European Heavy Industry, the whole trip was pretty much planned around visiting this place, somewhere I have wanted to see since Dr Howser's excellent report a year or so back.
We have talked about it more than a few times but finally got around to making the trip over, despite how much we planned and plotted using google/earth maps, all this tends to go out of the window once you're on ground level due to the sheer size of the place.
This huge steel works once employed 9,000 people but has been closed since 2002, there has been some demolition but the majority of the site remains as it was, you can almost trace the history of the site as you wander around, from the 100 + year old Tandem Steam engines which used to drive the rolling mills, unidentified Flywheel engine, ancient GHH Turbines, newer Siemens Power Units, Some kind of Linde Horizontal and Vertical Units which I have no idea what they did, every building and every turn holds something different and seriously impressive, the smell of dirty oily heavy industry still lingers in the air, needless to save we all loved this place big time, we spent 6+ hours exploring it and still missed bits, It's right up there with the best places I've had the pleasure to explore.
Throwing up a handful of images just wouldn't do it justice, so due to the size of it it's getting an equally large report, hopefully you won't get bored.......
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We have talked about it more than a few times but finally got around to making the trip over, despite how much we planned and plotted using google/earth maps, all this tends to go out of the window once you're on ground level due to the sheer size of the place.
This huge steel works once employed 9,000 people but has been closed since 2002, there has been some demolition but the majority of the site remains as it was, you can almost trace the history of the site as you wander around, from the 100 + year old Tandem Steam engines which used to drive the rolling mills, unidentified Flywheel engine, ancient GHH Turbines, newer Siemens Power Units, Some kind of Linde Horizontal and Vertical Units which I have no idea what they did, every building and every turn holds something different and seriously impressive, the smell of dirty oily heavy industry still lingers in the air, needless to save we all loved this place big time, we spent 6+ hours exploring it and still missed bits, It's right up there with the best places I've had the pleasure to explore.
Throwing up a handful of images just wouldn't do it justice, so due to the size of it it's getting an equally large report, hopefully you won't get bored.......