Much to admire in Germany's promotion of its industrial past

摘要

I am a founding member of the Industrial & Engineering Heritage Committee of Europa Nostra, a pan-European group committed to restoring and preserving our heritage throughout Europe. In early May, the committee met in the Ruhr district of Germany to consider how we could best promote the cause of our industrial past, including transport and, more particularly, railways. The Germans never do things by halves and possesses some huge plants, blast furnaces, dark satanic mills and other wonderful monuments to past manufacturing glories. We visited several, including an old-fashioned mill with belt-driven machinery still manufacturing, among other things, many railway tools, including an extensive variety of permanent-way equipment. In many cases, these were gauged to imperial measurements. Indeed, many traditional German and French manufacturers of goods to the UK resisted the attempted imposition of metric measurements by the European Commission for that very reason.