Welp, I spent hours making my year in review thread with great stories and detailed captions for all the photos and I just lost it all. As I was previewing the post I noticed Santa and his reindeer getting laggier and laggier on my screen until all of a sudden the webpage locked up completely. No problem I thought, I had the foresight to copy the entire post to my clipboard before previewing it. I went to open a text document to copy paste it in and that's when I realized... my entire computer was locked up. Anyway, here I go again, this time with greatly slimmed down captions because I ain't got time for that again. 1 photo per location. Not all are abandoned.
2020 was the first year I really did a lot of solo exploring, and I quite enjoyed the ambience of having these places completely to myself. It was the year of getting obsessive over old industrial sites. And it was the year of just going crazy and trying to cross as much as I could off of my domestic bucket list. Overall I'd say it was pretty successful.
Relatively unchanged since our first visit 5 years ago, probably thanks to the vigilant security and their security peacock.
A semi-abandoned power plant. Steam turbines are my favorite machines to photograph.
Steam turbine in a fully abandoned version of the previous plant. Going between these two plants was as close as you'll get to having a time machine.
Not abandoned. We were treated to a private pipe organ concert here, t'was awesome.
Swaggy sewage plant.
This turbine has already been dismantled.
Office chair in front of the security cameras was still warm.
Managed to see this plant right before the vandalism started picking up. I've been told demolition is starting here but I haven't confirmed it for myself yet.
Hudson Generating Station, all gone now.
Stairwell in an ancient railroad powerhouse.
I assumed this plant was abandoned, and as I walked up to it it seemed like I was right... until I peeked in the turbine hall and saw a worker checking gauges.
I knew this place was going to be hard, but not "pinned down by a sheriff on top of a hill with binoculars while inmates work on the grounds just a few feet away from you" hard.
Wanted to memorialize this car in this thread since it's how we got around to literally all these locations. Bryan and I went 50/50 on this car around a year ago and it's done 40k miles without a hiccup. Just a couple of weeks ago it got rear ended by a distracted driver and now it's totaled. Was a super rare manual transmission in a wagon, will be super hard to find a replacement. RIP.
Revisited this one to get some better photos than I did the first time around. Fortunately not much has changed here.
Steel mill powerhouse that was undergoing demolition, it's probably all gone by now.
This control room was a nice surprise to walk into, especially when the rest of the plant was already gutted. This is likely gone by now too though.
Control room of disappointment. Damn digitization strikes again.
This place was probably not worth the effort. I mean, it was a cool plant and all, but damn accessing it was rough.
Paid this plant a return visit.
As well as this one.
This plant is mostly gone now. I enjoyed it a lot even though it was relatively modern.
So close yet so far.
Took way too long to get to this one. At least I was able to get a clean shot in this room.
Rest in pieces.
Camped out at this classic. Didn't feel it was safe to attempt entry or exit in daylight so we went in after dark, slept the night, woke up, explored all day, and left after sunset. Pretty great way to experience an abandoned place.
Shout out to the farmer who caught us looking mad sus on his land on the way out of here and was totally cool about it.
This one was a personal holy grail of holy grails. Not going to be showing anything too crazy from here, but this was interesting- a turbo-generator crammed in the basement below the regular turbine deck.
A huge but empty abandoned hospital.
Another revisit to get better photos. My shots here before weren't terrible but this plant deserved better. Glad to see it hasn't changed a bit.
Got busted by a swarm of cops here. When we asked them how they knew we were inside they said they were just doing a random sweep of the building. Just our luck. Fortunately they were pretty cool and let us go. It's always the rinky-dink places where you run into the most trouble...
Nice steam turbine, not so nice graffiti.
Another revisit.
And another revisit.
Here's to a 2021 with just as much exploring and a little less global pandemic. Gotta make some progress on that Europe bucket list!