Volkerode
In the East German industrial heartlands brown coal (peat) was open-mined to power Vockerode, a giant pre-war power station near Dessau. The landscape was eaten away by giant 20-storey high machines that slowly crawled and cut into the land at a place called Ferropolis. If a coal face started to collapse, all the engines could be thrown into reverse and directed to the caterpillar wheels affording an escape speed of 18 metres an hour. Each scoop of these monster land rigs was the size of a car and the peat was transported in a perpetual convoy directly to the 1930s Vockerode power station. When German reunification came the East German industrial economy all but collapsed. In the former power station there were clocks absolutely everywhere. Today every clock reads two minutes to three, recording the precise moment at which the switch was flicked, back in 1994. The open mine is slowly filling to become a lake and Vockerode is slowly corroding.