Report - Box Factory Drain, Manchester - Feb 2011.

Ojay · Apr 22, 2011

Box Factory Drain, Manchester.

First discovered back in 2009, it went like this..

Spotted this culvert of the River Irk running underneath Middleton bus station and hoped for great things. Mentioned it to Bungle who insisted there were no culverts underneath Middleton bus station. He was wrong, I was right.

Bungle dipped his toe in the water first and near jumped out immediately shouting 'sinking sand, sinking sand!!', I stepped into the river and reminded him he needs to lose some weight With that we wandered in.

Hahaha

That was then this is now....Fast forward nearly 2 years and I really needed to get back into drains, so I decided something simple to ease me back underground

It's essentially a 2 bore concrete box which carries the River Irk underneath a number of buildings, including a Bus Station, Shopping Centre and Factory

The 2 larger bores split and meet at the Infall, reducing in size towards the opposite end, on the Right hand side the concrete box opens up into the 'Great Hall' a short distance from the Infall

On the Left hand side there are 2 CSO's and 2 Surface Water drains connecting, my foot wasn't up to stooping any of these, so may return at a later date

The Infall is inside a LIVE Gas Pumping Station, so didn't hang around too long there before making my way back

I happened to be passing here today and as I had all the gear in the car I thought I would try my luck, My wad0rZ had that distinct smell of turds that I haven't experienced for over 3 months now, this was going to be interesting, not nearly as interesting as the struggle I had getting the fuckers on with my injured foot

Deploy the Crip Stix. I hobbled down to the Outfall hoping the levels would be a lot lower than when I last came here in the wellies and had to abort, my luck was in

As I stepped into the water I got my first whiff of 'fresh' for quite some time, with the biggest grin on my face I stepped forward only to start sinking into god only knows what, this was grim, and as I started to lose my balance one of the crip stix raced up the Irk

After 5 minutes of dicking around I was on my way. Walking up-stream of the Irk wasn't easy, after the sinking shite, it was then rocky as fook for about 50 yards before it changed to slippy concrete and was fairly fast flowing at around 2 foot deep with the recent bad weather

Wad0r fail occured almost immediatley as I had managed to put on the wrong ones FFS :banghead