Saarbrücken; Saturday, 17 October, 2020

Breakfast this morning had to be ordered in advance and was delivered to me in the restaurant on a tray – with the bread rolls concealed in a brown paper bag, in the same way a hobo hides their liquor in American movies. After the slightly weird breakfast I headed out of the hotel and over to the Hauptbahnhof to catch the train a couple of stops up the line to the industrial town of Völklingen. The town has been heavily industrialised for nearly two centuries, with that tradition still continuing with the steel mill located close to the station. Slightly closer, and the first cause of industrialisation in the early 19th century are the old Ironworks.

The works themselves have a long history with just a slight blip in 1986 when the blast furnaces were switched off and the site was shut down permanently. The local authorities, as well as the German government, realised that this was an important part of the history of the area and they looked for ways to preserve as much of the site as possible. Eventually the Ironworks reopened as a visitors attraction, which by 1994 had made it onto Unesco’s World Heritage list – up there with the Cologne Cathedral and the Taj Mahal. Today there are parts of the site that have been allowed to be consumed by nature – if only to show how quickly the environment does start to heal itself where once even some of the worst pollution in the region was generated. However, much of the site has been kept as it would have been just after the fires were switched off for the last time (for obvious reasons you don’t want tourists wandering around a site that’s working with 2000C temperatures and volatile gases!)

You can explore most of the site, and that’s what I intended to do today – though with Covid precautions there are some spaces where you can’t currently get to. The tour starts in the sintering plant, where the residue from the previous smelting’s was pounded down into small parts and reused for the next batch. Along with the machinery the buildings now also house an audio visual exhibition on the plant. From the sintering plant you walk out onto the Ore Shed, where the plants former connection to the railway network is still visible and you can see how the train loads of raw ingredients would have been brough onto the site.

Next along was the Burden shed – this is the space where all the raw ingredients would have been stored, in separate siloes, waiting to be used. Today the silos have been opened up and turned into a massive exhibition space. To give some idea of how massive the site was by the time I’d gotten to the end of the Burden shed it was already 12:30, and I’d arrived on site quite a bit before 11am. Thankfully, next to the Burden Shed is a small picnic area with some vending machines, so I was able to grab a bite to eat and to prepare myself for the next part of the visit.

The fourth stop on the tour is the Blast Furnace itself, though rather than wandering through the tubes and pipework at ground level the tour instead heads up to the very top of the furnaces, some 25m or so off the ground and accessed only by metal industrial steps that cling to the outside of the structure. To add to the slight feeling of uneasiness is the requirement to wear a hard hat whilst walking round this area, which when coupled with a face mask (for Covid precautions) and glasses meant I had to make the decision – slightly out of focus, or totally fogged up. I decided on soft focus so put my glasses in my bag and started the climb.

At the top level you get to see the incline lift and wagons that would have brought all the raw ingredients up from the Burden shed to then be poured into the top of the blast furnaces. It’s only when you’re up inside the space your realise quite how enormous everything is, and quite how difficult a job this must have been as it’s all exposed to both the elements and the fires of the furnaces. Of course, this top level isn’t quite the top as there was another set of stairs to climb up to an observation platform wrapped around the top of one of the bits of plant that provided spectacular views over the site and the wider countryside.

After descending back down to ground level I continued the walk around the site, past the coking plant – where coal was turned into coke for the furnaces and along the many railways and pathways that lead back to the area underneath the Burden shed. This is now a museum called Ferrodrom which is an exhibition on iron and steel, as well as showing how the raw ingredients would be released from the silos directly above into the wagons and then head over to the incline lift to head up to the top. The final stop on the tour was the blower hall, this is a massive space where a number of enormous machines are housed. These machines, powered by the gasses coming out of the blast furnaces, would create the compressed air that was then used to keep the blast furnaces burning

By the time I finally finished the tour and left the site it was gone 4pm, over 5 hours looking round something that I thought I’d probably knock off in two. Though my feet were certainly telling me that I’d been pretty much continuously walking for those full five hours as I headed back to the station to catch the train back to Saarbrücken.

From the station I headed back to the hotel and had a bit of a rest there, before heading back out into town in hunt of something slightly more filling for dinner than snacks from a vending machine. After dinner I had a little bit of a wander around town, but I was really starting to feel tired from the day of walking round the ironworks, so I headed back to my hotel for a well earned sleep.