Abandoned Industrial Places

by David Ross

Published 14 May 2020
The decaying remnants of obselete industries and defunct commerce - whether coal mines, shipyards, factories, shopping centres, power plants, warehouses or mills - lie scattered in desolate locations throughout the world. These left-over structures still hold memories of the life that was once there. Transience was built in from the start. When a mine was worked out, it was abandoned; sometimes its machinery was removed to another mine, but often it was easier to equip the new place with more up-to-date equipment.
Abandoned Industrial Places explores the discarded detritus of our modern mechanized age. Discover the grand Ore Dock in Marquette, USA, squatting isolated in the waters of Lake Superior; or the abandoned Caspian Sea oil rigs and drilling gear in Azerbaijan; or the enormous, gaping pit of the 1200m (3900ft) wide Mirny diamond mine in Sakha Republic, Russia; or the 700m (765yd) high wall of latticed steel towers of the Duga radar in Chernobyl, Ukraine; or the Domino Sugar Refinery, Brooklyn, New York - formerly the world's largest sugar refinery when built in 1882; or the still contaminated Fisher Body Plant 21 in Detroit, USA, a place where General Motors created some of their great marques for almost a hundred years.
Filled with more than 200 memorable photographs from every part of the planet, Abandoned Industrial Places provides a strange and often spooky insight into the life and workings of industries long since ceased.

Abandoned Train Stations

by David Ross

Published 14 August 2022
Mysterious ghost stations forgotten beneath the cities of Paris and London; desolate grand rail hubs in the Pyrenean mountains; metro stations in China that terminate in a wasteland; Abandoned Train Stations looks at some of the thousands of disused station buildings, platforms, lines, tunnels, and rail yards left behind by modernity.
Organised by continent, this book takes the reader to every corner of the globe. Explore Canfranc International Railway Station, once a busy mountain hub of international travel between France and Spain; see the eerily empty platform at Kings Cross Thameslink, London, today a service tunnel following the station’s closure in the early 2000s; examine the grandiose Michigan Central Train Station in Detroit, an historic Amtrak rail depot, and once the tallest rail station in the world; marvel at the dusty, overgrown shell of Abkhazia’s once beautiful railway station in Psyrtskha, a physical legacy of the former Soviet era in the Caucasus; see the disused Tiwanaku train station, situated almost 4,000 metres above sea level in the Bolivian Andes; or learn about the fascinating Istvántelek Train Yard, in the Hungarian capital of Budapest, better known as the ‘Red Star train graveyard’ because of its many Soviet-era engine wrecks.
Illustrated with more than 200 photographs, Abandoned Train Stations provides a fascinating pictorial journey through the little-known remnants of rail transport infrastructure from every part of the world.