Not what I was hoping for, but not a bad book nevertheless. What I want are books that relate stuff you dig up in the field while putting in a fiber optics line (say) to some past industrial process. For example, what is this strange-looking subsurface timber structure that we cut into with a trackhoe (it turned out to be - I think, this is my best guess - a vat for using waste manufactured gas tar residue to make roofing shingles, which had some interesting implications for what we could do with the dirt we dug out of it).


As I said, that's what I was hoping for. What I got instead was a series of artsy black and white pictures with a moderate amount of accompanying text on various old industrial or quasi-industrial buildings - blast furnaces, gold dredges, manufacturing plants, bridges, etc. It's still pretty interesting, and there's some useful explanation on how some of this stuff worked. However, my best resource is still going to local libraries that haven't modernized their collections in a long time and checking out 1918 books on rubber tire manufacture or 1923 books on gas works. ( )

A good introduction to a large cross section of abandoned infrastructure designed to get you to look at your local industrial buildings in a new way. One or two pages of pictures and description are all you get for each site. However, some of the pictures are schematics of the mechanisms and the descriptions are good at fitting the building into its industrial complex. So you get a real sense of how the industrial site worked. Industrial infrastructure is becoming a passion of mine and this book helped me along. I recommend it for anyone who doesn't already know a lot about the topic ( )