Silent Diesel

In the last year or so I have discovered a few of these relics in the weeds around where I live. They're getting harder to find as they get cut up for scrap, or the blackberry vines envelop them.

Occasionally they turn up though, in old fields or glimpsed at the side of the road. I try to keep a camera handy to capture them when I'm out exploring.

They fascinate me, I wish they could tell their stories, but I can just take their pictures, and try not to let them disappear completely.

I nearly got bit by a large dog while taking pictures of this one, I confess, sometimes when I see these things I forget about the concept of "Private Property" This is an old Caterpillar D7 from the 40s or 50s It's all cable and gear driven, no hydraulics at all. There's something much more elegant about cable machinery. It required a great deal more finesse and artistry to operate than hydraulic.

This is an American 30 ton mobile crane, it sits in an abandoned heavy equipment yard in Maple Ridge B.C. I was driving East on Lougheed Highway one day and happened to glance over and just barely glimpse it half hidden on top of a hill. I pulled in and took a hike up the slope, there before me was one of the most incredible things I have ever yet discovered. This yard has eight or ten pieces of heavy equipment scattered around among pieces of many more. It hasn't been touched for at least twenty years by the look of the undergrowth. Needless to say I've been back there a couple of times and have gone through a lot of film.

The truck crane sits there like a sentinel. Everything else in the yard is slowly being overgrown by blackberries and scrub Alder. It's glass is long smashed out, even the shards have been buried by years of grass.

Sometimes shapes just leap out at me. These are track beds from a D9 Caterpillar.

This is the blade arm from a late 1950s Allis Chalmers bulldozer

Images on this page are copyright and cannot be reproduced without the express
permission of the author.