My capable associate heard some rumors of a locomotive cemetery somewhere North of here, so hiho, hiho, it's off to raid other people's derelict rusty crap we go, packing gear in the urbexmobile and hope for the one evening of non-teutonic cloud cover all month.
Lucky us, we had a beautiful setting sun over the acres of rusting long-haul behemoths, some of them dating from the former East German Reichsbahn and repainted in DB livery. The graffers and vandals had gotten there ahead of us and done a bit of a job smashing up and incinerating some of these engines, but there were still enough intact ones to keep us busy for a few hours, without even starting on the huge array of derelict rusting freight trucks standing right next door.
At some point, a van turned up and a corpulent East German in a fluorescent vest started stomping around the area, finally shouting at us to not destroy his babies any more than they'd already been knocked around. What do you do when spotted? Why, run, of course. Or, be a lazy friendly fat bastard like yours truly and put on a big shit eating smile and say hello. He really didn't give a shit, his only admonition was to bring a red vest next time so we wouldn't get flattened by the non-existent express trains running through the dead end. Fair enough. And then he actually showed us around the place and started rattling off inane details of engine types, locomotive weights, model histories, suspension details, maintenance plans, what what what.
The guy genuinely loved trains, and was employed to watch out for them as they waited for refurbishing - apparently you can even put something back into service that's been stripped, smashed, burned, rusted, and gutted. German engineering.
More at Flickr because my damn page still isn't up and working nicely.
Lucky us, we had a beautiful setting sun over the acres of rusting long-haul behemoths, some of them dating from the former East German Reichsbahn and repainted in DB livery. The graffers and vandals had gotten there ahead of us and done a bit of a job smashing up and incinerating some of these engines, but there were still enough intact ones to keep us busy for a few hours, without even starting on the huge array of derelict rusting freight trucks standing right next door.
At some point, a van turned up and a corpulent East German in a fluorescent vest started stomping around the area, finally shouting at us to not destroy his babies any more than they'd already been knocked around. What do you do when spotted? Why, run, of course. Or, be a lazy friendly fat bastard like yours truly and put on a big shit eating smile and say hello. He really didn't give a shit, his only admonition was to bring a red vest next time so we wouldn't get flattened by the non-existent express trains running through the dead end. Fair enough. And then he actually showed us around the place and started rattling off inane details of engine types, locomotive weights, model histories, suspension details, maintenance plans, what what what.
The guy genuinely loved trains, and was employed to watch out for them as they waited for refurbishing - apparently you can even put something back into service that's been stripped, smashed, burned, rusted, and gutted. German engineering.
More at Flickr because my damn page still isn't up and working nicely.