C
cat_bones
Guest
Guest
Myself, YBSIRF and Dystopia visited one of the slate mines above Blaenau Ffestiniog yesterday (sorry, i'm not posting the name of the place out of deference to the caving community). This is a fantastic site with a large slate-dressing shed and other assorted mine buildings... we spent hours looking round them all...
The dressing shed has loads of old machinery left lying around...
There's a few old electric trams aswell...
There are some nice dressing stalls with machinery left in situ, with a conveyer belt running the length of the shed onto another belt going out of the building into a tip...
One of Ybsirf's shots...
There's a smithy on site, and like everything else there, it just looks like they all just downed tools and left, expecting to be back!
And some more cool machinery...
Couple more of Ybsirf's shots...
There's a generator building with everything pretty much intact...
After looking at the buildings we travelled through a short tunnel with a weigh-bridge by it, to the top of the incline into the mine, with the winding house intact...
The winding drums...
The battery - the tubs would have been full of brine, with the plates being lowered into them to generate current. There's a few of these underground as well.
One of Ybsirf's shots, looking out of the winding house, down the incline into the mine...
Another of Ybsirf's of one of the stranger looking structures...
and of me at the bottom of one of the large chambers off to the side of the incline...
I've got to apologise for the next few shots of underground - really not equipped to get good shots in that environment!
One of many mine carts lying around the place, some of them still loaded with slate.
One cool feature underground is a large ventilation fan. The tunnel that the fan draws air down breaks into a chamber at one point and to preserve airflow, they built a "fake" tunnel... but my pics didn't turn out too well!
More carts...
One of Ybsirf's of a very heavy duty battery charger...
One of the more bizarre things down there... a garden shed standing in the middle of a large chamber. It was a little break room for the miners, with newspapers from when the mine shut down (1997) left lying around.
And another oddity!!!
We only looked around 1 level, though on previous visits I've gone down deeper (the place is massive) but we were still down there 3 or 4 hours.
Climbing the incline back out...
Oh, and some of the machinery is still in working order...
Sorry for the sheer amount of pics - I took close on 400 myself and could have taken twice that if only I'd got another memory card!
The dressing shed has loads of old machinery left lying around...
There's a few old electric trams aswell...
There are some nice dressing stalls with machinery left in situ, with a conveyer belt running the length of the shed onto another belt going out of the building into a tip...
One of Ybsirf's shots...
There's a smithy on site, and like everything else there, it just looks like they all just downed tools and left, expecting to be back!
And some more cool machinery...
Couple more of Ybsirf's shots...
There's a generator building with everything pretty much intact...
After looking at the buildings we travelled through a short tunnel with a weigh-bridge by it, to the top of the incline into the mine, with the winding house intact...
The winding drums...
The battery - the tubs would have been full of brine, with the plates being lowered into them to generate current. There's a few of these underground as well.
One of Ybsirf's shots, looking out of the winding house, down the incline into the mine...
Another of Ybsirf's of one of the stranger looking structures...
and of me at the bottom of one of the large chambers off to the side of the incline...
I've got to apologise for the next few shots of underground - really not equipped to get good shots in that environment!
One of many mine carts lying around the place, some of them still loaded with slate.
One cool feature underground is a large ventilation fan. The tunnel that the fan draws air down breaks into a chamber at one point and to preserve airflow, they built a "fake" tunnel... but my pics didn't turn out too well!
More carts...
One of Ybsirf's of a very heavy duty battery charger...
One of the more bizarre things down there... a garden shed standing in the middle of a large chamber. It was a little break room for the miners, with newspapers from when the mine shut down (1997) left lying around.
And another oddity!!!
We only looked around 1 level, though on previous visits I've gone down deeper (the place is massive) but we were still down there 3 or 4 hours.
Climbing the incline back out...
Oh, and some of the machinery is still in working order...
Sorry for the sheer amount of pics - I took close on 400 myself and could have taken twice that if only I'd got another memory card!
Last edited by a moderator:
