Retired from the tracks, many old trains find themselves in glorious graveyards, filled with car upon rusted car. Photos of these scrapyards let us witness the magnificent decay of these mighty vehicles.
The last stop before the scrapyard, a railway ferry harbour built in the 1980s, somewhere in Germany
(via Eike Ramba)
Uyuni Train Cemetery, Bolivia
The trains have been rotting there since the late 1940s, when the local mining industry collapsed partly due to mineral depletion.
(via Ronan Crowley, Jimmy Harris 1- 2 - 3, Lisa Weichel, Graham Styles and Nathan Nelson)
A Graveyard in Belgium
(via Andre Joosse/Urbex.nl)
Istvántelki Főműhely, an abandoned railway vehicle repair shop, Budapest, Hungary
(via Tibor Smid and Blackdog.photo)
Two locomotives lost in the 1850s found underwater in Long Branch, New Jersey
(via The 'Pioneer': Light Passenger Locomotive of 1851, by John H. White, from the Project Gutenberg)
A Steam Train Graveyard in Central Havana, Cuba
(via Mania's Done)
Steam Locomotive Graveyards somewhere in the former DDR, now in Germany
Vic Berry's Scrapyard with the iconic stacks of trains, Leicester, England (1973-1996)
(via Vic Berry's Scrapyard at Leicester)
A Steam Graveyard in Brandenburg, Germany
A fanatic collector found this place in the mid-2000s, put a fence around the place and started to restore one of the machines.
(via Eike Ramba)
Yanov Train Station in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine
(via ZerO81 and MrEdPhoto/F4)
The Healey Mills Marshalling Depot, Yorkshire, England
(via Urban Outlaw)
Bonus: The Rozelle Tram Depot, Sydney, Australia
(via Wikimedia Commons/Adam J. W. C)
DISCUSSION
This reminds me of why I find the Steampunk aesthetic appealing. The old-timey steam engines manage to look both functional and whimsical at the same time... On the one hand, they look like giant boilers with wheels strapped on, because that's largely what they are. But on the other hand, they also look like they rolled straight out of some fairy tale — there's a certain elegance to the raw brutality of their design, a certain whimsy to those differently-sized wheels, exposed spinny-movey-lever-ey bits, giant box-shaped headlights, and all that.
The more modern (relatively speaking) engines all lack that whimsy. And they look functional only in the sense that they're all simple metal boxes. Unlike the case of the steam locomotives, the modern engines' looks reveal nothing of their actual function, or how they work. That poetic balance between beauty and raw functionality is lost, as they don't really posess either.
... Or maybe I'm just over-thinking this. :P Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to cranking this analytical engine so I can load the next page...