Watched over by machines of loving grace

'Glück Auf': 'Good luck.'

Or: A beautiful Soviet folly

A few weeks ago, as part of my occasional series 'Shit to look at in Berlin'*, I recently visited the abandoned Besucherbergwerk F60 mine in Lausitz, and spent a productive few hours on a lengthy tour in, on and up the 3000 tonne, 780-wheeled, 27MW powered, 700m long and 70m high overburdened conveyor bridge, the "Liegender Eiffelturm der Lausitz", or, literally, the 'Fallen Eiffel Tower of Lausitz.

The huge craney thing in that there picture there underneath.

We travelled there from the mainline station on a specially-commissioned Schienenbus, a grand old light-diesel railcar from the 1950's and 60's, with an admirable lack of any discernible suspension and a jolly driver straight out of a Thomas the Tank Engine episode. Although it would be impossible not to be happy if your job was driving a little toytown railcar up and down a rusting track through a beautiful forest all day.

The Leigender, a just enormous behemoth, looms up over the surrounding countryside like a crashed intergalactic space-cruiser, an alien metal monster resting in rural Germany, about 130km south of Berlin, in the kind of spectacular woodlands that would have Wordsworth jumping out of his grave to scribble a few verses about trees and hills and that.

'18..19...20...coming ready or - you're behind the bush.'

The name Liegender Eiffelturm der Lausitz comes from the 'celebrated' fact that if this Soviet beastie was sat up on its end, it would be considerably taller than the Eiffel Tour.

Here's the process, I think: one end of Birtha here scoops up millions of tons of top soil/rock using enormous diggers, exposing the brown coal seams underneath ready to be mined.

The topsoil is lifted up into the machine, then transported on a huge industrial conveyor belt to the other end, where it is spat out to form long ridges of dirt on the opposite bank from where the coal is (on the righthand side, on the picture below).

It doesn't actually do any of the mining itself – that is for other men and other machines. This monstrous workhorse merely exposes the brown coal.

The Soviet energy structure, certainly in East Germany at least, was based around the burning of brown coal, a horrid inefficient pollutant that, never-the-less, made cheap fuel. So, the Soviets ploughed substantial money into this project. It took 2 solid years, thousands of men, and goodness knows how much to build.

And here's the wonderful part:

Liegender Eiffelturm der Lausitz finally began working in 1991. Then the Wall came down, and the Soviet Union crumbled. Capitalist West took over East Germany, and the arse fell out of the brown coal market. Liegender Eiffelturm der Lausitz ceased operations in 1992. It was used for a little over a year. It's never been switched on since.

The mine and the conveyor bridge is now used just as we used it last month: as a tourist destination for nerdy people with a unabashed love for human ingenuity and insurmountable folly.

* It wasn't in Berlin. It is 130km outside of Berlin. That's not in Berlin.