Category: Heritage
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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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#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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#407 – Steam on the River Dart
OK, time for a few holiday snaps, but mine consist of paddle steamers, factories and steam locomotives;) The River Dart runs through 18.5 miles of Devon countryside and is navigable from Dartmouth to Totnes. Dartmouth is best known for its Regatta and the Naval College, but is also a deepwater harbour, although it sees little…
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#405 – Beyer Peacock’s Gorton Foundry
The Gorton Foundry in 1947, courtesy of Britain From Above Following on from my post on Mather and Platt’s foundry, the (only?) other evidence of East Manchester’s engineering past are the boiler shops of Beyer Peacock’s Gorton Foundry. Like Mathers, the majority of the site has been demolished, but maybe the most significant part…
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Brymbo Steelworks Foundry – Update
A bit of a follow up to the post I made a while back about the foundry roof collapse at Brymbo – I’ve been informed by the Brymbo Heritage Group that the roof has now been safely removed and the walls made safe and watertight. I suppose this is a case of having to move…
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#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…
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#388 – Steam Engines at the Bolton Steam Museum
Bolton Steam Museum is the home of the Northern Mill Engine Society, and as I last visited about 5 years ago, I was overdue a re-visit! The society was formed in the 1960’s when mill engines were being scrapped at an alarming rate, a combination of the sudden decline of the textile industry and electrification…
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#373 – Library of congress images – Bingham copper mine
Bingham Copper Mine, Utah. Carr Fork Canyon as seen from ‘G’ bridge. In the background can be seen a train with waste or over-burden material on its way to the dump. Bingham Canyon, Utah. Ore train at a mine of the Utah Copper Company. Until recently Bingham Copper Mine was the largest open…
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#365 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Yard
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045480/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001024/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992001028/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045487/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001045474/PP/resource/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/owi2001046046/PP/resource/ Having explored inside the railway works, Jack Delano continued his documentation of the Chicago and North Western outside in the switching (shunting) yards. One tends to forget the enormous size of American steam locos until you see them with people next to them, and those depicted in these…
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Brymbo Steelworks Heritage Open Day
All that remains – the empty space in the background is where the main works used to be. Brymbo Heritage Group have contacted me to let me know that they will be open on the upcoming Heritage Open Day on 27th September 2014. It starts at 1030 from the Brymbo and Tan-y-Fron enterprise centre, Blast road,…
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#363 – Library of Congress Images – Chicago Railway Workshops in Colour
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000703/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000725/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000693/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000724/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000693/PP/ http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa1992000647/PP/ In my nightschool studies of the history of photography, we…
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#337 – Reworked Images 3 – Chatterley Whitfield
Another rework, with some quite dramatic changes to the mood. It is somewhat timely as I read this morning that two of Britain’s remaining coal mines are under threat of closure. The storm clouds continue to gather over Chatterley Whitfield with every passing year resulting in further deterioration, and I really don’t know what the future…
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#308 – Chatterley Whitfield
This is a photograph that I missed from my post a while back on Chatterley Whitfield Colliery. The image here shows just how much infrastructure is left at the colliery, and the monumental job of upkeep that, well, hasn’t been taking place. When something like this is busy producing coal and making money, then…
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#307 – Chatham Dockyard 2 – Chains, Trains and Cranes
As well as the ships, the yard is stuffed full of all types of mechanical goodness. There is a short section of the once extensive railway system intact, along with a number of operational steam and diesel engines that work on some weekends. The big slipway is also full of a huge collection of machinery,…
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#306 – Chatham Dockyard 1 – Ships
DING, CLASH, DONG, BANG, BOOM, BOOM, RATTLE, CLASH, BANG, CLINK, BANG, CLATTER, BANG BANG BANG! What on earth is this! This is, or soon will be, the ACHILLES, iron armour-plated ship. Twelve hundred men are working on her now; twelve hundred men working on stages over her sides, over her bows, over her stern, under…
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#305 – Bad News From Brymbo
If you’ve visited my website, you may have already seen this, but I wanted to spread the news through other channels as well. I have had the following sad news from the Brymbo Heritage Group who look after the last surviving buildings of the Brymbo Steelworks site in North Wales. “Due to the snow that…
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#260 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 2 – Apedale
Now this was more like it. Someone at Chatterley Whitfield had told us that there was another colliery, Apedale, that we could visit in Stoke, but it was at the other end of town. As I didn’t have a satnav, I had to follow Bungle at breakneck speed across town to find the…
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#259 – Staffordshire Collieries Part 1 – Chatterley Whitfield
Another one from the archives here, this was an ‘official’ visit to this crumbling edifice on a so-called open day. Actually, that’s being harsh and doing a disservice to our guides from the Friends of Chatterley Whitfield, who are probably more disappointed about the condition of this place than anyone else, and I’m sure…
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#256 – Great North Steam Fair – 3
The thing I like about Beamish is that despite it being a museum, it all feels real. Unlike Disney, who manage to suck the life out of everything in their sterile make-believe theme parks, everything at Beamish is real, and not only that, most of the buildings existed elsewhere before being taken apart and re-sited…
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#255 – Great North Steam Fair 2 – Coffee Pots and a Colliery
I think this is a de Winton engine, similar to the ones photographed on the Geotopoi blog The colliery at Beamish is a real one, well sort of, it’s made up of bits of other collieries that have been rebuilt to form one new one. The steam engine works as well, and the entire setup makes a…
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#254 – Great North Steam Fair 1 – The Steam Elephant
Last year I went to the wonderful Beamish Open Air Museum, and loved it! Only thing was, we went a tad early in the season and not everything was open. Vowing to return, we opted to visit during the Great North Steam Fair, which pretty much opens the season. As we’d already seen a lot…
Mechanical Landscapes 