Urban Exploration: Cold Storage Equipment Factory

May 20, 2012 · Posted in Adventure!, Urban Exploration

In the end of May I started hunkering for an another urban exploration trip, since I haven’t been that active in that front since the previous summer. A quick peek in the net revealed that there’s an abandoned industrial location a short train trip away. The place was apparently pretty thoroughly vandalized and there were rumours of it being still guarded, but it was a nice day for photographing, so I grabbed my camera and headed out.

The place had a couple of interesting twists: there had been a film shoot in there earlier, and I wasn’t sure if it was still going on, and the army apparently used the area for urban combat training, and in one case for tank training. Considering this running into rent-a-cops started feeling a little less of a problem.

In the end the place was a pretty typical industrial abandonment: a lot of empty and graffiti filled halls, smashed electric junctions, some underground crawl-ways that were too full of water to explore, and plenty of smashed equipment. There was an extra frisson of excitement provided by the possibility of guards and camera surveillance, and the fact that it was a windy day – abandoned and broken buildings make a whole lot of suspicious noises when the wind sets empty cans rolling or rattles broken window blinds…

Even blobby letter graffiti doesn’t always suck.

Artifacts of the army exercises. At least I hope so.

The end of the trip turned out to be a little bit exciting. In the end of the tour I had gone behind one of the buildings and noticed a door 1-1,5m high up on the wall, on which someone had spraypainted the words “escape route”. That was kind of amusing, but I ended up having to use that door. When I was inside the building, that was essentially a long empty hall with some dividing walls, I noticed two guys walking determinedly towards me on the other end of the hall. I took a second to think what to do, and decided to bolt, jumping through the door gracefully as a pregnant cow, ducking through some bushes and ending up in another building, where I found a really beautifully broken linoleum floor. I set out to photograph it, but after a couple of snaps I started hearing sounds of running and people shouting at each other in the distance, and decided to leg it through a hole in the fence. My dramatic escape culminated in me getting startled by a big ass hare that shot out of a bush, startled my less than stealthy movements. Most probably I was running away from some graffiti dudes or an another urban exploration team, but meh – better err on the side of saving in fines.

A fun trip, came up with some nice photos, and a little bit of exercise. Check out rest of the photos in Flickr.

Just plug them in, they’re probably fine…

Someone dropped his keys seven years ago.

Finds like these are always a tad big worrying. Not as much as stepping into a fully loaded and horribly weatherbeaten chemical storage closet in an abandoned paper factory, though…