Saturday 20th February 2010

I have decided that I need to lose the beer gut that I have been developing over that last couple of years (despite having stopped drinking beer !!), but I don't want to go on a diet, so the only other option is to exercise .... hence I bid on and won an auction on eBay for a brand new aluminium 21-speed touring bicycle (OK, I don't want to overdo the exercise thing, it is VERY hilly around here !!) yesterday evening, and drove to Dorsten to collect and pay for it this morning.
I wanted to get a photograph in Dorsten of a large barge travelling down the canal as it passed underneath a colourful pedestrian bridge over the canal .... but after standing for almost half an hour in the cold damp weather, I gave up and walked back to the car park. As I left the town via the road bridge, I saw a barge travelling underneath the pedestrain bridge - exactly the photograph that I wanted, but I couldn't abandon the car in the middle of the main road, so missed it !!
Instead of which, here is a picture of the most interesting thing that I could find whilst walking around Dorsten .... outside the Zollern gear manufacturing factory is this drop stamp press (type B2), built in 1904 and weighing in at 12 tons. It could produce 1350 bricks per hour and was in service until 1965; there were 1512 such presses sold worldwide.

(Nikon D5000 : Nikkor VR 18-55mm f3.5-5.6 : f5.6 : 1/125" : 44mm : ISO 200: 20.02.2010 12:42:37)