BuddyTheElf wrote:I spent 4 weeks doing a work placement at Winsford Salt Mine here in the UK. It's basically just a big ass mine, 600m below the surface that mines rock salt for spreading on roads. The mine is so big that you actually use vehicles to travel around it which is quite rare when it comes to mining. It's hard to comprehend just how big the tunnels are especially when you go down there for the first time, it almost feels like a warehouse.
One of the days I was there this guy took me to an old abondoned part of the mine in a Kawasaki mule. It's actually pretty scary down there because it's pitch black and there is no radio reception if you break down or get lost and it's a 3 mile walk back to the shaft, providing you can find which tunnel leads back to the shaft. If your lights failed down there you would be royally fucked! We parked up for a few minutes and switched the lights and head torches off and then just listened, it's the only time I have ever experienced complete silence.
You cant drive into the mine so all the machines have to be dismantled and then taken down the shaft and then put together at the bottom so when machines reach the end of their working life they're just left in the old part of the mine to die. It's pretty weird just driving round looking at all the old machines that have just been dumped there, there are hundreds of them.
The pictures dont do it justice but the place is absolutely huge. It's amazing to think that thousands of people live above the mine without even knowing about it. Definitely the coolest place I've been to.
It's kind of cool how some of the big underground mines have to have pretty much everything underground since they run such huge equipment down there.
Mines in general are pretty cool. I actually spent a year at Missouri S&T planning to be a Mining and Explosives Engineer. I wasn't used to actually having to study and stuff though so I my grades in gen ed classes sucked bad enough that I almost got kicked out. Mining classes were interesting enough that I actually did the homework for them though, just because I wanted to learn more about mining. It's a really cool industry, but really dangerous, obviously, with the risk of roof falls and all that. A student who was on an internship actually watched a guy who was standing right where he had been about ten seconds earlier die in a roof fall in a coal mine.
So much stuff in mining is unbelievably huge. The numbers they were throwing at us in Intro to Mining absolutely boggled my mind, especially how much rock the Morenci mine moves daily. Something like 830,000 tons. It produces about 370,000 tons of copper per year plus the silver, gold, and molybdenum byproducts. More info here.
http://www.infomine.com/minesite/minesi ... te=morenci
Anyway, sorry for off topic...I've not really been anywhere particularly cool although getting personal tours of all of the facilities (except for the high security nuclear facility) at Rolls-Royce Derby a few years back was pretty nice. Everywhere you went there were bins full of virgin titanium. Millions of pounds worth of swarf. Got to get up close and personal with the very first (and only at the time) Trent XWB engine if anybody's familiar with it.
The fire alarm went off one day too so everyone had to go to one of the three safe zones in the mine, it turned out to be a false alarm though.
