Category: Black and White

#426 – Library of Congress Images – Steel Mill Panoramas

I’ve never worked in the steel industry but I’ve visited the steelworks at Redcar and Scunthorpe and it’s an industry that, as a photographer, continues to fascinate me. The sights, smells and sheer physical size and complexity of the plants are rivaled only by oil refineries. The American steel industry, like the British one is…

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#424 – Library of Congress Images – street running trains

I posted some Library of Congress photos of coal trains running through the streets last year. This is something I noted as being quite unusual in the UK. These are some more examples, and this appears to be a full blown express train. This is idle speculation on my part, but I suspect that due to the way…

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#423 – The secret railway…………….

Following the wander round Rhydymwyn, I was asked if I wanted to see some abandoned trains nearby. Now that’s the kind of offer that I can’t refuse, so we drove back towards Mold, parked the cars and made our way across some fields. Hidden away from view in some trees is this small collection of narrow…

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#422 – Rhydymwyn Valley Works, aka The Mustard Gas Factory, Part 3

The Atom Bomb Connection Rhydymwyn was used to house gaseous diffusion machines with the objective of separating the uranium isotope U-235 from U-238 as this was thought to be the quickest way of producing enough material for an atom bomb. The site was chosen for a number of reasons – there were empty buildings of the right size, it…

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#421 – Rhydymwyn Valley Works, aka The Mustard Gas Factory, Part 2

  This pencil graffiti has lasted surprisingly well considering it is supposedly 70 years old……   Being a regular visitor to both derelict and active industrial sites, I’ve walked across all kinds of surfaces, but never a rubberised one. The site roads on the southern section were coated with a rubber like asphalt designed to stop…

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#420 – Rhydymwyn Valley Works, aka The Mustard Gas Factory, Part 1

The landscape of Britain continues to be littered with the remains of past conflicts. From the Napoleonic era forts of the channel, through to the likes of Chatham dockyard and old ordnance factories, pill boxes and ammunition dumps – you don’t have to look that hard to find something. I’d previously visited the remains of…

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Lifting an Engine

Originally posted on Planes, Boats, Trains:
Title: Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lifting an engine to be carried to another part of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad shops for wheeling Date: March 1943 Photographer: Jack Delano Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001022482/PP/

#417 – Library of Congress Images – A Beyer Garrett in Iran

I posted a while back some pictures I took of the former Beyer Peacock works in Manchester, and it coincided with stumbling across this photograph in the Library of Congress of the trains run by the allied forces on the Iranian Railways in WW2. I actually posted some photographs of British built 8F’s on the line…

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