As my stay in America rolled into October I headed out of Chicago and Eastwards on an overnight train towards Buffalo, intending on spending the day with a few contacts I had made before I flew across to the States and exploring what the upstate NY city had to offer. Well at least that was the plan.
I always knew the train from Chicago to Buffalo was going to be a long one, I planned to do the trip between the two cities overnight arriving in Buffalo at around 8.30am. The train left Chicago nearly an hour late, and slowly rumbled it's way onwards. That should have set alarm bells ringing because, as the train was on a major freight route, the freight trains have priority. And because we left late, everything went out of sync. I tried to get some sleep, and eventually awoke at 6.30am. The chipper train announcer came over the tannoy and happily announced we were running four and a half hours late, as if it was perfectly normal. Which, to be honest, in America probably is. Eventually, I stumbled off the train in a soaking wet Buffalo six and a half hours after we were supposed to turn up - a train journey that was timetabled to take 10 hours had actually taken 16 and a half. I could have flown from Heathrow to New York and back again in the time it took for me to get from Chicago to Buffalo.
Anyway, first port of call after I fell off the train was food, I devoured some pizza slices and soon we were on our way in the relentless rain - if you aren't familiar with 'lake effect' weather look it up because thats what we were exploring in! Basically it occurs when a large body of water acts like a weather machine independant of the wider climate which is capable of producing periods of localised torrential rain, hail or snow for minutes or hours at a time and that weekend Buffalo was right in the middle of a severe bout of it.
After we re-organised our plans first port of call was perhaps Buffalo's most famous abandoned spot, the so-called 'Silo City'. Silo City is the name given to a number of enormous grain silos in one area of Buffalo, we tried to talk our way into the main Silos as one of my companions knew the security guard but he wasn't playing ball - later it turned out there was a paid photography workshop tour going on in there that day. So we went further down the river a little bit and made tracks for the two standing alone - the Cargills Pool Elevator and the absolutely enormous Concrete Central Elevator which is just under half a mile in length and one of the biggest single buildings I've ever seen - even bigger than Grand Moulins de Paris in Lille. Sadly due to some absolute morons getting stuck in the higher levels of the silos a few years ago all the stairs were cut off, so unless you fancied some major spiderman climbing there is no way of getting on top any more. Had it been dry and warm I may have attempted it but it was blowing a gale and pouring with rain so I decided against it.
Here are some photos from both Cargills and Concrete Central, both follow roughly the same design but Concrete Central is unbelievably massive.
More from Cargills here
It's quite hard to get the scale of this place from photos. It's enormous.
Last shot, the angry sky over Cargills...
More from Central here
Thanks for looking
I always knew the train from Chicago to Buffalo was going to be a long one, I planned to do the trip between the two cities overnight arriving in Buffalo at around 8.30am. The train left Chicago nearly an hour late, and slowly rumbled it's way onwards. That should have set alarm bells ringing because, as the train was on a major freight route, the freight trains have priority. And because we left late, everything went out of sync. I tried to get some sleep, and eventually awoke at 6.30am. The chipper train announcer came over the tannoy and happily announced we were running four and a half hours late, as if it was perfectly normal. Which, to be honest, in America probably is. Eventually, I stumbled off the train in a soaking wet Buffalo six and a half hours after we were supposed to turn up - a train journey that was timetabled to take 10 hours had actually taken 16 and a half. I could have flown from Heathrow to New York and back again in the time it took for me to get from Chicago to Buffalo.
Anyway, first port of call after I fell off the train was food, I devoured some pizza slices and soon we were on our way in the relentless rain - if you aren't familiar with 'lake effect' weather look it up because thats what we were exploring in! Basically it occurs when a large body of water acts like a weather machine independant of the wider climate which is capable of producing periods of localised torrential rain, hail or snow for minutes or hours at a time and that weekend Buffalo was right in the middle of a severe bout of it.
After we re-organised our plans first port of call was perhaps Buffalo's most famous abandoned spot, the so-called 'Silo City'. Silo City is the name given to a number of enormous grain silos in one area of Buffalo, we tried to talk our way into the main Silos as one of my companions knew the security guard but he wasn't playing ball - later it turned out there was a paid photography workshop tour going on in there that day. So we went further down the river a little bit and made tracks for the two standing alone - the Cargills Pool Elevator and the absolutely enormous Concrete Central Elevator which is just under half a mile in length and one of the biggest single buildings I've ever seen - even bigger than Grand Moulins de Paris in Lille. Sadly due to some absolute morons getting stuck in the higher levels of the silos a few years ago all the stairs were cut off, so unless you fancied some major spiderman climbing there is no way of getting on top any more. Had it been dry and warm I may have attempted it but it was blowing a gale and pouring with rain so I decided against it.
Here are some photos from both Cargills and Concrete Central, both follow roughly the same design but Concrete Central is unbelievably massive.
More from Cargills here
It's quite hard to get the scale of this place from photos. It's enormous.
Last shot, the angry sky over Cargills...
More from Central here
Thanks for looking
