February 7, 2009: Mechanical Mecca

I got up at 11:00, sipped down a coffee and started the day. The goal for the day was to visit the Zollverein Shaft XII coalmine and coking plant, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Essen. I got to the Ratingen Ost train station and waited for 30min for my train to come. It took about 40min of bumpy train riding to get there. I wandered around Essen for about half an hour then decided to ask where this place was. The nice lady at the info desk sold me a day pass for the public transit and told me which tram to take. I took the wrong one.

20min later I found myself in a place that I did not think was in the right direction. I was right; I was way out of the way. I waited for a train back to where I came from and finally was on the right tram. I got off at a place that looked like a giant triumphant mechanical engineering tipi. This was the lift into the main mine shaft at Zollverein. I walked in through the gates, in the rain, and was drawn to a massive orange glowing escalator. My love for glowing things shone through and I boarded it, not really knowing where it led. I got off after a good 75m of escalatoring and found myself in a room filled with what I later found out was coal sifting machinery.

This was cool! I walked back and forth between massive gears, coal elevators, coal sifting claws, gauges and a thousand other things that if operating looked like they could shred a person like cheese. I was all smiles and took my time checking out spur gear systems with gears 1.5m in diameter. The place was dimly lit to make it seem more ominous. After having my fill of this room, it took quite a while, I decided to move on and I figured out that there was a display of golden medieval church memorabilia in the basement. I paid the 3 Euro to get in and followed a massive orange glowing staircase down into the abyss. There was gold as far as the eye could see.

This exhibit was held in what used to be a series of coal storage silos. They had added floors where there previously had not been and cut doors where there had not been doors before but the walls were still pitch black from all the coal that had been stored there. I walked between these amazing gold scepters, angels, crucifixes and candleholders but I really just wanted to be in the rain walking around the coking facility. So that is where I went.

The next hour and a half was magical. I did not see one person in the whole hour and a half, all I heard was the sound of rain falling on metal and I was in a MASSIVE WWII era coal processing facility. I followed piping racks around, taking time to look at all the pipe supports and justify to myself why they were there. I looked at expansion loops and bellows expansion joints and got a kick out of the fact that there was probably some 1940’s coop student designing these things. This place had nothing that was built small, the chimneys were huge, the outbuildings were huge and there was railway tracks crisscrossing the place. I had to sit down to really take in how beautiful this place was.

I finally picked my jaw up from its dropped position and left this place to go for dinner. Some schnitzel and a beer at a small restaurant opposite the coal plant finished off the experience. I caught a tram and an S-Bahn home and typed up the days experience, in point form before going to bed.