You’re getting a bit of a pick ‘n’ mix here, first off it is big power in Belgium with a few extras thrown in and secondly a lot of track in Spain and Portugal.
Shouts to Fishbrain, Dan, Dicky & Yaz for Belgium and Nckt & Dsankt for the southern mission!
Let me ease you in, this is Gigawatt power station, it goes by loads of cool european names but nobody really cares about em.
At one time it was Belgium’s largest thermal power station, opening in the 1960's and closing down in 2012, leaving behind a playground of cooling towers, turbines and anything else you can think of.
Next on the list is Diesel Farm, I don’t really know anything about this place apart from its fun to get into. You can turn all the lights on which is handy and the computers are still fired up in the control room. I found a couple of slides in one of the rooms of the station getting kitted up, so I scanned em through!
6 & 7
After not really deciding where to sleep, we drove to Brussels and spent most of the night hiding from worker trains in the metro and generally looking suspect walking along platforms in the closed stations. On a plus side we did jump up the Palais de Justice for a kip as it was pretty damn cold outside.
Just before we headed home on the eurotunnel, we took a peek inside this place, I’m not sure what to call it, I just know everything was turned on. Including me.
On to level 2. We drove just over 3000km, the hire car got absolutely pasted, we kept waking everyone up in hostels and thought on more than one occasion that we were gunna get murdered sleeping in forests. Standard trip eh.
Starting from BCN we drove down towards Valencia hoping to catch some of its quietly explored metro, this didn’t really happen and I only grabbed a single photo before we moved on. We stopped briefly for an old hospital on the coast before landing in Benidorm to check out the rooftops.
After more miles we stopped in El Chorro to check out the walkway. Developers have destroyed it and now you will never actually plant your feet on the old concrete and metalwork. A short jaunt to Gibraltar saw us at the hot meat counter in Morrison’s, followed by a night in a forest after checking out Seville and then ten minutes in Faro as it’s a terrible place.
We put some time in and ended up in Lisbon, checking out its small but run-able metro. Even finding an empty ticket station and a few raccord tunnels along the way. Lisbon metro opened in 1959, runs four lines carrying 154 million people per year.
Onwards to Madrid saw us facing the hardest challenges of the trip, the metro along with the trains get absolutely battered by graffiti writers and the network is solid. They don’t have any lights on in service so you end up going down on numerous occasions, luckily with the power sitting up in the roof you don’t get fried. First running in 1919 the 8th largest metro network in the world runs 2000 units for 1.5 billion people per year.
Once we left we dropped into a small empty town that has had a huge road network put in place that no one uses as well as checking out some MiG’s laying up.
Last but by no means least, Barcelona. It was our start and end point, the city saw us running down the AVE – Renfe lines, with the overheads popping and cracking, they’re only turned up when something is coming through at high speed! Nckt and the Spanish lads are leading the way in regards to exploring the entire network here, so we even nipped down for some up close action in the regular metro.
All shot on Kodak 200 and Ilford 400 with a few speeding tickets thrown in the bag for good measure. Catch y’all soon!
