More photos coming soon...

Sorry for the lack of photos lately. I haven't been able to take any pictures the last few days. More photos coming soon....

Bridge refurbish

I think that I mentioned that the city centre bridge was going to be refurbished this year. Well, now they have started and one side of the bridge is now under reconstruction. Here is a shot so you can compare when they are finished.

End of a series - Walking the ladder

I have told you about the different elevators that they used in the mines, and also mentioned that they had to climb ladders in the beginning. This shot shows how the ladders were placed in the mines. All ladders went down to a kind of platform where they could get to the next ladder. You can imagne that doing this for a couple of hundred meters or more is quite hard.

Working in the mine 2

This shot is taken from a part of an exhibition inside the mines that shows the visitors different work situations. It wasn't explained exactly what these to guys were doing, but they might be working with drills to get further into the mountain, or they could be repairing and fixing the tools used to drill. Sorry for the "spots" on the photography but it was taken through a plexi glass window that made some reflections.

New elevator

This is the second generation of lifts in the mine. This one at least start to look like what we think of as an elevator today. They stuffed four to five people inside this elevator, and on the way down one or two people were riding along on top of it as well. At least they could relax a bit more in this elevator compared to the one in the previous post.

The first elevator

This is the first type of motorized elevator that they had in the mines. Before this one the workers had to claim ladders up and down which caused quite a few accidents.

As you can see there are two solid beams with a platform on each. The beams are much longer than you can see on this shot, and they have platforms every ten meters or so. When one beam goes up the other one goes down. So if a worker wanted to go down in the mine he stepped on to a platform on the beam going down. Just before the beam started to go up again he switched over to the platform of the other beam that now was about to go down. Working his way from one beam to the other he could than go down into the mine.

This kind of elevator was called the "Fahrkunst". It is a german word and would translate into something like "The art of travelling", which is a good description since it's not the easiest kind of elevator to use.

Ready to explore

I just had to post this picture of my daughter (to the left) and her cousin. They were really exited to explore the inside of the mines. They even enjoyed the bright yellow helmets :o)