tarboat's photos

Lift tower at the rear of the1857 built Big Mill at Leek, fomerly part of the Wardle & Davenport Belle Vue Mills complex. This mill remains empty and derelict although there are plans for it to be to redeveloped as apartments.

An endangered scene. SY 1545 departs Zhengyang Colliery, on the Chengzihe system at Jixi, with a load of spoil. The large number of people working on track and signalling around the yard are preparing for the electrification of the line down to Dongcheng and up to Xinghua. A new substation was being built just out of shot to the left, and major trackwork improvements were also being made.

In the Arra Mountains of Tipperary are the Killaloe slate quarries. These quarries flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but now stand idle and derelict. There is still some slate quarrying on a small scale at one of the quarries. In past times a lot of the finished slate was shipped out by barge from a pier on Lough Derg.

Ditcheat Manor departs Froghall and crosses the Churnet in the middle of the Bolton copperworks site.

61994 Moves onto its train at Cheddleton on a bright winter day.

Home of some of my favourite beers. Robinson's Unicorn brewery in Stockport.

45231 and 45407 simmering outside the shed at Buckley Wells.

Huts everywhere at Snape Farm Prisoner of War camp, Weston.

Works pilot at the Sujiatun workshops that undertakes repairs to industrial steam locomotives was this 1959, Chengdu built GJ class tank locomotive.

Pingdingshan is not the sunniest of places and most of the time seems to be enveloped in gloom and smog. In typical conditions JS6429 moves the empties out of the yard at Shenxi and heads for the collieries to the west.

Behind the admin building at the locomotive depot at Baotou steelworks. I wonder how long it will be before these old tank locomotives are recycled through the furnaces.

In Beijing the approach to cleaning windows on tall buildings is rather different from that in Manchester.

There is a lot of house clearance going on in the Potteries. Street after street in this area was either boarded-up or had just a few properties still occupied. Ludlow Street has almost certainly been razed by now and the community has been scattered across the city. I met an elderly lady in the street who complained bitterly that people were being rehoused miles apart from each other and she hated the idea of being separated from her friends and neighbours.

It's forty years since mining ended at Astley Green and the trees have taken over most of the derelict land between the pithead and the canal. One headgear still stands along with its enginehouse and the few other buildings that make up the mining museum here. Without maintenance how much longer will it be before it is declared unsafe and demolished?

MSC Viceroy of the Carmet Tug Co heads towards the Stanlow refinery and dock on the Manchester Ship Canal. The tanker in the background is the Stolt Puffin.

Catching the morning empties heading for Sandaoling in the early light proved to be a chancy affair as in December sunrise clashed with the shift change. However, on this day the sun was still very low as a short-ish train gathers speed across the desert after a stop to raise pressure on the line between the interchange at Liushuguan and the yard at Nanzhan.

Twin block railway sleepers stacked at the Stanton Bonna concrete factory at Stanton by Dale. This company has supplied materials to the Channel Tunnel Rail Link from London to Folkestone, and for light rail systems at Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham.

Stanton Ironworks was founded in 1787 and had just been closed down by Saint Gobain when I took this photo in 2007. The high quality pipes were the speciality of this works but in spite of operating very efficiently, productuion has been transferred to Germany. This plant has now been demolished.