Bucyrus-Erie BE1150 Dragline Excavator at Swillington, near Leeds in Yorkshire. It’s preserved as a tribute to the ‘Sunshine Miners’, those miners who worked in the nearby opencast workings. I blogged about it last year, thought I’d mention it again, as it’ll be open again for the annual Heritage Open Days on 11-12th September, and if you’re into big mechanical engineering, you really…
Category: Industrial Landscape
#125 – Tilted Compositions 2
Site of what was (I think) the Group 2 area of Royal Ordnance Chorley, now Buckshaw Village. It’s all been cleared and graded, this single lump of reinforced concrete is pretty much the only remnant of anything resembling structural engineering. From a photographic perspective, the tilted compositions hasn’t worked here – a super wide angle lens would have been…
#123 – Loch Of Tranquility?
A group of us had gone to Scotland for a very pleasant week at a ‘castle’ on the bank of Loch Long, and I’d done a bit of research to see if there was anything in the vicinity worth exploring. The only thing easily accessible was the abandoned Admiralty Torpedo Testing Station at the other…
#121 – Hot Work
It’s easy to see industrial sites through rose tinted glasses when walking round old, derelict sites or museums, but I’ve spent my career in factories and I know that even today, industry can be hot, hard, sometimes dangerous work. This old foundry is a great example of that – podging rods such as this were used to tap the hot…
#120 – Cupola Flowers!
Like all abandoned sites, nature has taken up where it left off before the site was developed.
#117 – Lethal Processes
I don’t know what this building used to do at Royal Ordnance Factory (ROF) Wrexham, but I suspect it was something dangerous that involved making or processing something lethal. Either way, it’s remained unused for over 60 years, the only evidence left being the foundations for something, and a large sunken pool of water at one end…
#116 – Grown Up Scalextric – Chassis
One I missed from the series of images that I posted from the Leyland Test Track. I’ve since been told that this is probably a wrecked computer monitor, but I saw it and noticed the word ‘chassis’ on it’s base and thought it appropriate. It’s perhaps not as prominent in the composition as I’d have…
#115 – Pattern
Pattern found in the foundry. Note sure why, but casting patterns are often painted red (although you can’t see that in this photo). There were quite a few patterns left around the place, quite surprised they’d not gone on a bonfire when the place shut.
#113 – 13
Huge bowl mounted on a railway wagon for transporting iron round the works. Sometimes photos work just as well in colour as they do in black and white, this is an example of that, as the rich brown texture of the image is such a dominant part of the composition. By converting to black and white,…
#112 – Terex
This giant dumptruck had its engine removed before being dragged by a bulldozer up the hill to its current resting place. I can only imagine the strength of the guy who apparently sat in the cab and steered it while it was under tow as without an engine there’s be no power steering!
Mechanical Landscapes 