Mechanical Landscapes

Category: Black and White

  • #430 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 3

    Saw tooth north light roofs are ubiquitous on textile mill weaving sheds, and can sometimes be found atop the multi storey spinning mills as well. It’s unusual to be able to look down on one from the ground though, but the local topography was on my side here. I’ve never really had the chance to…

  • #428 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 2

    Haslingden. Someone once told me that there are only two types of weather in the East Lancashire town of Darwen – rain, or about to rain. In fairness, this is true of most of the East Lancashire mill towns, stuck in their little valleys or clung to hillsides. From a monochrome photographers perspective this is…

  • #427 – Rossendale Mills – Albert Mill, Haslingden 1

    Going east from the sun-drenched lowlands of Chorley where I reside, the landscape starts to quickly get hilly, and within the many valleys of the West Pennine Moors are numerous former mill towns. Haslingden is one although there aren’t many mills left here. Albert Mill and its characteristic north light windows are almost a landscape…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • #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…

  • 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/

  • USS Iowa at Brooklyn Naval Yard

    Originally posted on Planes, Boats, Trains: Title: U.S.S. Iowa in dry dock, Brooklyn Navy Yard Date: 1901? Photographer: Detroit Publishing Company Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/det1994013759/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…

  • #414 – Library of Congress Images – Streamliners and The Burlington Zephyr

    A high speed streamlined stainless steel express train – is there anything more effortlessly Art Deco cool than this? Dating back to 1934, the Pioneer Zephyr trains must have seemed to have driven straight off the pages of a science fiction comic when compared to the typical steam locomotive of the day.  The power source…

  • #411 – Library of Congress Images – A Princess Coronation in America

    The Duchess of Hamilton with the Royal Blue on Thomas Viaduct The 38 Princess Coronation class locomotives built by the LMS at Crewe works between 1937 and 1948 were some of the finest ‘top link’ steam locomotives built in the UK. For a while, no. 6220 held the world speed record at 113 mph although…

  • #410 – Library of Congress Images – Mackinac Dock

    More steamers! This is a join up of two images to create a small panorama. It’s a bit distorted as the photographer perhaps didn’t reposition his camera too well between frames, but that’s always a problem if you’re photographing things close to the camera. I’ve had to crop quite a bit off the top and…

  • #409 – Library of Congess Images – SS Majestic Outward Bound

    The SS Majestic was launched in 1889 and so was maybe 12-15 years old when this photograph was taken. She held the Blue Riband for a brief 2 weeks in 1891 with an average speed of 20.1 knots. She was taken out of service in 1912, replaced by Titanic. She was placed in reserve in Birkenhead,…

  • #408 – Library of Congress Images – Cramp’s Shipyard

    I’ve posted a few pictures of American naval ships and naval yards over the last year or so, so here’s a slightly different perspective on the subject. William Cramps shipbuilding yard in Philadelphia was a long established, privately owned shipbuilders that built ships for three major conflicts fought by American forces (the Civil War, World…

  • #400 – Library of Congress Images – SS Rotterdam at Holland America Line Terminal, Hoboken

      This is a panorama created from three separate 8×10 glass plate negative scans. Needless to say, the resultant file is rather large! I recently upgraded my computer as my 6 year old PC with 4GB of RAM struggled with files like this, but the new one has significantly more processing power and Photoshop CC…

  • #398 – Library of Congess Images – Main Street Buffalo

    I’m guessing that this photograph was taken by some intrepid photographer climbing a tall riverside gilding such as a grain elevator as for the most part, downtown Buffalo looks quite a low lying city with few tall buildings. What strikes me about this scene is the clear summer sky, as so many of the photographs…

  • #397 – Library of Congress Images – Logging train

    Although huge swathes of Britain were once forested, much of this was cleared in mediaeval times and before for use as fuel and construction materials (for buildings and ships). So by the time the steam railway came along, there wasn’t much left and there was no requirement for railway haulage out of the forests. However,…

  • #392 – Library of Congress Images – River Steamers

      Harbor Springs, Mich., Str. North Land at dock Large river steamers were not unique to America, big Paddle Steamers carried day trippers on British rivers too. Steamers such as the PS Waverley were once a common site on the Clyde, Bristol Channel, and around Britain’s coasts. And, like America, by the 1960’s, their days of…