Little tree, second attempt

Bonsai at the Zulauf garden center (from yesterday's post).

Reposted because something strange was going on with the image display.

20080928

Emma, the little steam locomotive

The Schinznacher Baumschulbahn - tree nursery railway - is a 60 cm (2 ft) gauge steam railway that is incorporated into the Zulauf garden center in the town of Schinznach about 13 km (8 miles) away from Villigen. They celebrated their 30th anniversary this past weekend. Pictured here is Emma, built in 1925 in Munich. It was used in the construction of part of the Brugg train station among other things. Link to the website of the Baumschulbahn.

The garden center Zulauf is the most impressive nursery I've seen. Four million plants make up their nursery of fruit trees, conifers, etc. They also have an extensive bonsai collection I like to gawk at whenever I visit. Link to the Zulauf website.

20080928

Tool

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Pears

20080916

Potato harvest

Couple of little ones helping out.

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Targets

The open house wasn't just about cement. No, there were bands playing music, little bistros set up for refreshments and games! At this particular station, people were testing their archery/dart skills.

20080920

Parts in the production of cement

I can't give details on what all the bits here are, but I'd like to mention the fuel that runs this plant. Half of the energy needs of the furnace is met by coal and the other half is made up of a whole mishmash of stuff such as old tires, used solvents, plastics, dried sewage sludge from water treatment plants (remember the ARA post - link - from some time ago?) and, um, animal meal. According to Holcim, the plant uses state of the art technology to scrub the flue gases. One of the components of the filtering system is activated charcoal, which is then itself used as fuel.

20080920

Flavors of cement

The limestone and chunks of clay that are extracted from the quarry seen in the previous two posts are transported to the cement factory in Würenlingen via a 3.8 km (2.4 mile) long conveyor belt (part of which can be seen in this old post) that crosses over Villigen and the river Aare.

There, they are ground into a fine powder and together with some additives such as iron pyrite and bauxite the powder is shoved into a rotary furnace (1450 °C) where it is converted to cement clinker (Wiki). The first time I heard that word it was spoken by an Australian and I will forever carry that sound in my head.

The clinker is cooled in a heat exchanger (and the energy is actually used to heat the plant and about 100 households in the neighborhood) and then ground together with gypsum to form cement.

About 90% of the output of this plant is transported to building sites in cement trucks such as the one seen in the silo tower in the photo. The names on the labels, Normo, Fluvio and Fortico are that of different mixes of cement that Holcim produces.

20080920

Muldenkipperfahrten!

At the quarry from yesterday's post. I suspect this was the main attraction for most of the children: a ride to the pit area on the dump truck. There were a lot of people in the queue and only one truck could be accomodated so the trips were necessarily short. Even so, we had to wait through four loadings before we got our chance on the Muldenkipper. Sadly, I wasn't able to fight my way to a 'window' seat so my view and photographic opportunities were severly restricted.

Holcim has permission to exploit this quarry until 2045. As they complete the extraction from one region of the quarry and move to another area, they reforest the former. There are also a couple of biotopes (rudimentary Wiki entry here) that they've created, to support the amphibians in the area.

20080920

The rock quarry in Gabenchopf

Regular readers will know about the local Holcim cement plant and its rock conveyor belt that crosses Villigen. Yesterday they had an Open House (Tag der offenen Tür) with tours through the factory (Zementfabrik) and to their quarry (Steinbruch) in the hills of Villigen. Limestone and clay, a couple of components of cement, have been extracted from the quarry since 1954.

Explosives are used to break away the stone and there are no more than two controlled explosions per week. They're careful about making sure the vibrations from these don't cause any damage to the houses in the vicinity and they publish weekly reports on their measurements. Link for the curious, in German. The allowed maximum is 6 mm/s for historical buildings while Holcim imposes a stronger restriction of 3 mm/s. According to them, they've never come close to this value. It seems they even have a portable detector available to residents who want to measure the vibrations in their homes.

Here's an aerial view via Google maps (the big splotch on the left half)
Villigen and the Steinbruch

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North south east west

20080629

Lace curtains and motorcycle

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Umbrella for tomatoes

A veritable riot of plants in this garden directly on Hauptstrasse.

20080916

Black cat and dahlias

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Track maintenance

Track maintenance crew at work at the Brugg train station earlier this month. What aspect of the tracks they were measuring, I don't know.

20080904

Several houses

Near one of the edges of the village. The house with the anti-gambrel (can someone tell me what this style is called?) is the same one as in this earlier post:
Two houses

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The porter

20080629

Bicycle in the grass

Seen across from the post office.

20080613

Our hill from a different location

This is the hill that rises up behind Villigen, seen from a north-east location. I've loaded a larger-than-usual photo today (click on the image) so you can have a better look. The speck in the grass to the left right is a cat.

20080818

Proximity

While not a great photo, this illustrates how things are very compact over here. The road goes through the crop fields, the fields merge into the slopes and the farm houses are more or less right next to the regular houses.

20080902

Bee illustration

A bee house on wheels? I don't know what this is actually, but the graphic captured my interest.

An aside: The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, located near Geneva on the Swiss-French border, is being powered up today. Here's a link to a funny/silly rap on the project by Katherine McAlpine (that last name seems too much of a coincidence!), a science communicator at CERN. Direct link to the YouTube video. Enjoy!

20080820

Snail on stalk

Alternate title: Up the creek without a paddle.

20080701

A couple of months ago

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Grüezi

Grüezi = hello. The greeting used in a large part of German-speaking Switzerland. Wiktionary entry in German. Largely unpronouncable for most of us not born into the language.

Bit of trivia: Here's a 17 second interview clip of Tina Turner, a Zürich resident, making an attempt.

20080629

Framed

One of the trees from yesterday's photo is visible in the background. And that's corn/maize growing on just to the right of the path in the foreground.

20080902

In green

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Odd-eyed white

A completely different situation compared to yesterday's horses. This cat showed no inclination to move from the sun-warmed stones. Notice the eyes are different colors, hence odd-eyed (Wiki).

20080902

Movement

It is not often I catch the horses racing about their paddock. I wish I had been able to avoid the barrier in the foreground.

20080902

An air of disrepair

Very much in use though it might look otherwise.

20080820

City daily photo theme day: Sister cities

The first of the month again and it's theme day for the daily city photo blogging community. Sister cities is on the menu today.

The closest town to Villigen is Brugg and Rottweil (Wiki) in Germany is its Partnerstadt. I didn't make it over there, nor did I succeed in photographing a Rottweiler dog (Wiki.) So we must make do with this seal of Rottweil pounded into the wall of the Schwarzer Turm (see photo in this old post here) in Brugg in 1988 to commemorate 75 years of partnership.

Click here to view thumbnails for all theme day participants.

Update: See more of the seal here.

20080805 Nikon Coolpix 950