Points Of English Industrial Interest
So looking at the picture below, ignoring the feet, tell me what the hell you think this is and when it was built, because it most certainly isn't a natural formation:
While you think about it here's another shot of it extending into the distance with Hay Tor in the background.
Hay Tor, and the accompanying Hound Tor, are part of the inspirational landscape of the Dartmoor that help inspire Arthur Conan Doyle's "Hound of the Baskervilles". It is also a remarkably vertical hike, that this picture doesn't do justice to, getting to Hay Tor. England may not have much in the way of high elevation, but it makes up for it in topographical relief.
Anyway, give up? This is a railway sculpted from granite in the 1820 (back when railroads were the Next Big Thing) to transport granite from the nearby quarry to the coast by, and I quote, "gravity powered cars, and drawn back to the top by ponies". That's right, they'd load a car full of granite and then let it go. Presumably the coasting speed wasn't all that high. Of particular interest to me was the fact they actually had switches to divert cars. It would be a very brave man to try to hit the switch on an granite loaded car. Now, when they went to build this there was, and still is, a distinct lack of iron for rails and trees for ties to build a railway. But they do have a lot of granite...I'm surprised Vermont and New Hampshire didn't try to pull this trick too.
Next, we visit the Hay Inclined Plane in Coalbrookdale. This picture does not do justice to the grade that this track goes up which looked like 1:1.5 to me. It was intended to haul canal boats up on rail trollies from the canal at the bottom to the River Severn at the top. Why would they do this crazy feat?
Because it was slightly less crazy than the original plan to make a canal tunnel through the hill and then hoist the canal boats up with an crane/elevator and then plunk them in the Severn. Of course, just because Plan B is less crazy doesn't mean that they didn't try Plan A first. They didn't even abandon Plan A because it was a bad idea (because stout British Quaker engineering can overcome Nature at every turn). No, they abandoned it because they were having a hard time with all the tar that was seeping into the tunnel. It got to the point that they realized that this tar was worth far more than any profit to be made on the canal boats and just decided to mine for tar instead. The Incline happened because they still needed to move the boats.
Of course most people don't go to the Tar Tunnel or the Hay Incline Plane when they visit Coalbrookdale. The whole place is a UN World Heritage Site as it is considered the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. What most people go to see is the Ironbridge (I believe that I mentioned in a previous post that Quakers didn't have the most imaginative naming scheme):
It is the first cast iron bridge in the world and was used as proof of the quality and strength of Shropshire iron (this shouldn't have been a big question since that was the reason the Romans thought going this far north was worth it). Of course, while the bridge was great, the banks have been collapsing since it wad built so a few patch jobs have been necessary to keep the bridge from tearing apart. They seem to have held nicely for 200 years:
It has been commented that I can't take normal tourist vacations. I can't help it that I find these things awesome.
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