So I decided I needed to do some excercise to work off the ridiculous amount of crap I've eaten recently, and since I finally got a new CF card in the mail (insert happy dance here) it was time to go take some photos.
I still don't know Welland terribly well - I mean the whole place is a depressing dump, so I had a glance at the locationDB to see what's been found in town.
Atlas Metals - 20 minute walk from my house, no interior shots posted, looked huge, and was definitely industrial. Does it get any better? (Yes, but I digress).
So I put my camera, and bottle of water in my backpack, headlight, flashlight, pen, and cellphone in the top pocket. Tied my tripod to the whole bundle, and left the house... ignoring my landlady's curious glance as I went past. Nice enough lady, but definitely would not approve of what we do.
Twenty minutes later I'm standing in front of Atlas. Or part of Atlas. I think there's more on the other side of the road. I'm gonna check that out later.
My first thought was 'Wow, that's a big building...' :0) How wrong I was.
The building that abuts the street has chainlink with barbed wire completely surrounding it. Following the fence, around a corner, I passed some houses, and a wheelchair accessible 'Atlas Retirees' building, which was active, but I didn't see anyone.
This part of the property is L shaped, and at the inside of the corner, I could look through a padlocked, and barbed wired, chainlink fence at a wide open garage door. 40 feet behind me, another gate in the chainlink is raised high enough off the ground to easily permit passage beneath - if it weren't currently raining out, there wouldn't even be a puddle underneath!
So I continued to follow the fence around until sometime later I came to a vehicle entrance, with security building attached. There's another gate you can crawl under here, but again with the puddle at the bottom, and I don't think it goes anywhere. Though you may be able to climb onto the security building from here.
A few cars went past, and I took the time to eat two caramels, and 3 things of rockets, as it was lunchtime, and I hadn't eaten anything yet. (This was stupid, and six hours later, I would very much regret it.) I decided that there was too much traffic from the adjacent businesses, and walked back the way I came, until I could follow the railroad tracks beside Atlas.
It was a good 15 minutes of walking, in which time I passed a rail vehicle that looked like it was designed to drive along and pound on the rails, with a steel bar on 3 pistons, before I got to a gate that could be very easily climbed.
Once on the other side I had 2 choices - open door, or open wall... I chose wall :0) immediately inside it was so dark that I had to stop and let my eyes adjust. This building is indescribeably massive. Yeah, Hearn is bigger. But Hearn doesn't have 4 other buildings this size. It's monstrous! And it goes forever! And there are tunnels and crawlways underneath, and offices, and offices, and offices, and different levels, and rail, a lot of rail. And if my camera hadn't crapped out (cold? it wasn't that cold) I would've had pics of monstrous containers on little rail carts, and all manner of other industrial steel making stuff. I was telling a friend of mine about it last night, and she couldn't believe that they'd just leave all that equipment. I mean I could understand the difficulty in transporting multi-ton steel containers... but what about the portable arc welders? Those things are reasonably expensive (couple thou each?) and there are NINE of the scattered about one area, of this one building. There are cranes, and piles of materials, and pallets of foil wrapped calcium blocks, and 400kg bags of industrial waste (they're labelled :0)
It was simply amazing. I was really tempted to change this to a 'drop everything - must see' in the locationDB, but frankly I don't think I'd want a million people digging through this place before I've had a chance to see everything. :0) Me, greedy? Noooooo...
One thing that did occur to me is that, the problem of getting a large group of people in aside, we could hold a meet here - and be entertained for days without leaving the property! And I think I might try to organize it anyway, sometime next summer probably. This is just too cool!
Anyway, after my camera crapped out, I wandered for about three hours, until I walked into one open building, and saw at the other end... trucks. Two reasonably new pickup trucks, with "ATLAS" on the side. Call me stupid, I looked around a bit. Outside this building looks like a convergence of parking lots, with a security building, two or three smaller buildings and the office building... and 5 more vehicles.
I'd like to think that it's just a security guard and some cleaners in the office building, and security building. But it suddenly occured to me that a lot of banging noise, that I'd been putting down to the wind, could easily have been people at work in some of the buildings. Hell they could've been in the same building I'd entered, and I'd never have know until I ran into them. The place is HUGE. I can't stress that enough :0)
In any event this latest discovery combined with my sore feet and aching stomach, told me it was time to call it a day. So I did. And I went home. And after I got my boots off, and sat down, I realized I didn't want to move ever again. That passed after some time, and after regaining my strength for a few hours, I celebrated by ordering pizza... because there was no way I was walking anywhere for food that night :0)
It was fun.
I don't know that I did anything in particular, but my left ankle is sore. Yay for exploration!
~ Dagr
http://www.uer.ca/locations/show.asp?locid=21074
[edited once for smileys and spelling, once for url, because many of you are as lazy as I am!]
[last edit 10/17/2004 10:01 PM by dagr - edited 3 times]
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