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FACILITY: Headgear and skip extraction system, shaft 1
Site: Fürst Leopold colliery, Dorsten, Germany
Status: Coal extraction closed down, few remaining activities
Photo taken: December 2004

While many consider older headgear designs and lorry extraction systems more beautiful, I like modern layouts like the one shown here very much. Their beauty lies in their simplicity. The headgear with the four cornered shaft as the main constructional element is aesthetically pleasing and efficient in material use at the same time: the distribution of forces is obvious to the bare eye, and high flexural strength is reached with a very limited number of parts. Skip extraction is of similar beauty to the engineer's eyes: instead of cumbersomely handling single lorries that have to be uncoupled in the underground, lifted individually to the surface, recoupled, emptied, uncoupled, taken back into the underground individually and recoupled again, self extracting skips just require belt conveyors to fill and empty them.