Abandoned Village, Pesch, DE - July 2012

[PaulPowers]

So I've been working in Germany for a few weeks and decided one evening in the pouring rain to head down to Garzweiler open pit mine to see the Bagger and an abandoned village.

The mine has been expanding for over 30 years now and once it reaches a village the local people get paid off and moved.

This is one of the villages

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[PaulPowers]

And the Bagger

The Bagger 288 is an excavator manufactured by German company Krupp for the mining Rheinbraun. It weighs 13 500 tons, and when its construction was completed in 1978 , became the largest Bagger 288 excavator in the world, surpassing the crawler-transporter of NASA , used to transport the Space Shuttle launch vehicle and the Saturn V

Click the pic to see the full size pic


You can't get the scale of the machines until you see something next to it
The tiny orange dot is a man
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[chizyramone]

Nice one Paul.

Abandoned village and big,bad ass machinery- how cool is that??!!!

 

[UE-OMJ]

I bet it was awesome being there. Nice one. More pics please

 

[UEP-Wales]

Cracking stuff Paul! The Bagger is beyond being massive and it's crazy to see what would normally be huge dumper trucks looking like a dot!

Thanks for posting these up!

 

[PaulPowers]

It was an amazing explore and easily my biggest solo to date

If anyone is interested the Krupp mine company are having an open day in Sept where you go up and actually touch the beast

 

[flyboys90]

Now that was very different.Great report & pics.

 

[perjury saint]

Nice! Plenty to go at there eh...

 

[Breesey]

Awesome! How long did you spend hanging around the village? Great pics. How close did you get to that bagger, it must be very intimidating to be right up close.

 

[PaulPowers]

I was in the village a few hours but couldn't get down the 500 foot drop to the Bagger.

 

[kehumff]

Great report, and very very good pictures, can i ask you where it is, i travel to Germany a couple of times a year to visit the outlaws.

 

[PaulPowers]

it's about 17km SSW on Monchengladbach

 

[night crawler]

I've seen photo's of that thing before but none like that. Could not see the gut but the pick up looked dwarfed by the tracks on the machine, can you Imagen the uproar that would be caused if people had to move out of a village over here because of a mine.

 

[steve2109]

My god, that machine is immense, loved the empty village, thanks for sharing

 

[PaulPowers]

Shame I left my waders at home I found a few german drains but couldn't get in

 

[Sshhhh...]

The bagger looks like something from a sci fi film! Great report, enjoyed

 

[TeeJF]

Some cool pix there!

 

[Ratters]

Wow, great photos & what a place to visit!!

 

[Ninja Kitten]

wow!! look at them machines! massivvvve!! great report..really enjoyed that.

 

[noggin]

awesome and such a shame and a waste great report and pics but you dont need to go to the continent to see industry in action look at the area of northumberland and the army training area of warcop and its abandoned village, tragic.ta very much!