The mysterious workings of JCIS

For various reasons in late 2009 various projects that JCIS had worked on but had stalled came to life and so we are busy writing reports. We finalised one last week and so this week we have been getting ready for the next one.

The problem is finding all the items that allow a report to be written. There are images and videos on my computer, PDF’s of previous reports. Paper files and reports from the depths of the filing cabinet. Plans and excavation notes along with the artefacts were last seen (by common recollection) in the garage. However they were not obviously there.

Two days later I can report that – the garage is clean and reorganised. A car load of material (and a small brown dog) has gone to the recycling depot and we have come back with nothing new! My office is cleaner and more organised. My model trains have been catalogued and joy of joys the plans and field notes have been discovered on top of a considerable pile of material on Japanese Industrial History.

They were placed there as I recall just before everything went down to the Yass project. Phew!.

What is this?

The following are photos of some machinery located beside a railway track (between two inspection pits) at the former Clyde Wagon Workshops.

One one side is this object which seems to be operated by some sort of air cylinder (it looks quite a bit like the air brakes under a wagon).

On the other side (i.e. opposite) is this item

I thought that they might be some sort of retarders except they are on the wrong side of the track!

This area was used to do heavy repair of four wheel wagons so I am assuming it relates to this work.

All ideas welcome.

B-64 in Teacup Scheme

To add to my collection of B class photos I am posting these two black and white photos of B 64 on a train of GH wagons. My notes don't say where but I think possibly north-west Victoria I am thinking in the Summer c1984? But possibly this is earlier due to the lack of radio stickers on the nose.

While I am never going to be a Peter Vincent or Rob O’Regan I thought the images show something of the beast.

My new cassettes don't play music

Here is a little video of my new rolling stock cassettes (courtesy of Phil Collins) and my new NPPF limestone hoppers recently released by On Track Models

They roll quite freely as you can see.

My Bees have arrived!

After a few years wait, my HO scale models of the B class diesel-electric locomotives of the Victorian Railways have arrived courtesy of Auscision Models. I ended up with three in classic VR colour schemes.

Curiously when I searched my photos I couldn't find any good shots of the B class in this scheme. Lots of Blue and Gold S class but no B’s. I wonder why?

This is the best I could come up with, B80 in “tea cup” scheme at Kyneton (Vic) on the third Sunday in November 1982.

The more I look the more I think I should buy a B in “tea cup’

The Fall of the Wall meant the end of many things

In the last two days there has been a great deal of interest in the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin and the consequent reunification of Germany months later (typically reported as the reunification of Berlin!). We have been very interested in all this as Jane and I were in Germany in August-September.

I keep thinking of Chemnitz where they have 30,000 empty houses (symbolic of the population migration and decline)and apartments and a large head of Marx.

I think of the Bio Towers of Lauchammer. These are the few remnants of a truly remarkable endeavour the production of coke from brown coal

In 1952 with supplies of quality coking coal from the Ruhr region (in West Germany) the former GDR needed another source of coke for its industry (coke is critical in iron production). The world’s first large-scale lignite (Brown coal) coking plant came into service at Lauchhammer. This technological breakthrough enabled the GDR to replace imported coke with it own supplies.

The process involved briquetting the coal to achieve an even grain size and a reduction of moisture content to about 1%. The briquettes are then coked.

Lauchhammer laid the foundations for the expansion of the East German metallurgy industry. Briquetting plants and power stations started springing up in the industrial haze surrounding the town.

The bio-tower are called tower-type trickling filters they were trickling installation for the biological purification of coking plant wastewater containing harmful substances from the coke works

But of this break-through plant nothing much remains except for the bio-towers. The post-reunification era demolition fever did more than flatten factories: it damaged the identity of Lauchhammer and its people by basically throwing them out of work and devaluing their achievements.

We visited the bio-towers and were greeted by members of the Traditional Brown Coal Association who were keen to show use around. One of their publications Die BraunKohlenengrosskokerei Lauchhammer. Lauchhammer: Traditionsverein Braunkohle (written by an editors cooperative) proudly details the works and the hours and awards its staff were given.

All this is not to say that the GDR was a happy place, clearly it was a most totalitarian and repressive regime and its replacement is a huge step forward for the people of East Germany but and there is always a but, there was a human cost to the people at Lauchhammer that the restoration of the bio-towers can only go some way to heal.

Another Archaeological Blog

Visit australian archaeology blog

Yes it is a new archaeology blog although so far Gary Vines and I are the only ones actually blogging although there are 69 members.

Odd isn’t it?