These are some of the most spectacular examples of abandoned engineering the world has ever known. The series explores how and why they were built, consider the financial and social costs of their failure and examine the environmental and ecological impacts. The series also explores how experts came up with plans to make something beautiful or useful from the ruins.
The best episode of "Abandoned Engineering" is "Stalin's Subway", rated 8.4/10 from 8 user votes. It was directed by N/A and written by N/A. "Stalin's Subway" aired on 1/20/2021 and is rated 0.1 point(s) higher than the second highest rated, "America's Jungle City".
In North Wales a secret facility which once manufactured mustard gas and enriched uranium lies in ruins. In Malta is a luxurious quarantine facility, that hides a dark secret.
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This week, find out why Fordlandia Rubber Town, a symbol of the American dream first established by Henry Ford in the 1920s, is now left rotting in the Amazonian rainforest. Also, what secrets do the enormous monoliths scattered across a secret forest complex in Eastern Poland hold? And what secrets does a fortified corridor of death with a Cold war past stretching for miles across Hötensleben, Germany hold? And a bizarre structure in South Western France built to speed trade was once at the forefront of design, now lies disused and abandoned, but why?
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Bizarrely-shaped huts in India, once home to global superstars, are now eerily quiet and neglected, and a shattered compound in Colombia linked to a criminal mastermind.
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Exploring a ghost town in Colorado, the remnants of an industrial enterprise in Puerto Rico, and a remote village on Cyprus.
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The Canfranc Railway Station is an elaborate abandoned Nazi railway station built near a town of only 500 people in the Pyrenees in Spain. But why was it built there and what secrets does it hold? Also examined in this episode is the Salton Sea Navy Base in California - a military post in the middle of the desert in the American west, the Kola Superdeep borehole - a wrecked record-holding Arctic facility in Russia that goes deep, deep underground, and a huge tower looming over an industrial area in Belgium. All of these extraordinary places and objects were at the cutting edge of design and construction, but now they stand disused, sometimes contaminated and sometimes dangerous.
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A dark past explains why the Pölitz Synthetic Fuel Plant in Northern Poland is now a derelict industrial site littered with tunnels, bunkers and huge crumbling concrete structures lost in dense forest. The site was built in 1937 as part of Nazi Germany's drive to become self-sufficient on fuel, but it was no ordinary refinery. It used the latest technology at the time, at great expense, to turn coal into oil. In 1945 an Allied air raid pulverised the plant, severely wounding the German war machine and leaving the site in ruins. Other structures examined in the first episode include the incredible vertical Phoenix Shot Tower in Baltimore, which was built to provide America's own ammunition, the former American spy instillation called Teufelsberg (or "Devil's Mountain") in Berlin which waged the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and the now derelict Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse which was built on Europe's second-fastest moving sand dune in Denmark.
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Exploring a bloody battleground on the Pacific Island of Peleliu and an ominous military stronghold in Russia.
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The Georg Thiele was a technological masterpiece, but it is a shipwreck, lost to the sea in a Norwegian Fjord after running aground during a naval battle in WWII. Also in this episode, a mysterious concrete giant which echoes the Communist era atop a mountain peak in Bulgaria, a fantastical structure built in the middle of an American river, and one of the world's first and finest Artic feats of engineering, The Miles Glacier Bridge in Alaska, which, when it was first built in the early 1900s, was known as the Million Dollar Bridge.
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A juggernaut of Soviet engineering which was crucial to the international space race. Deserted Scottish coastal defences and a complex that's crucial to American history.
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Ruins of a vast industrial ghost town in the United States, a windswept Scottish island and the remains of a resort in Japan that watched a city burn.
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A fairy-tale castle that staged one of the strangest stories of the Second World War and a haunting complex on an old American Frontier.
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This episode travels to Chile, the Maltese capital Valleta, Havana and Germany, to reveal: honeymoon home of a young princess that offered her a glimpse of freedom; grand monuments designed by the most notorious dictator of the twentieth century; a sprawling industrial complex?the site of a ruthless disappearance; and?the artistic dream of?a revolutionary now in?ruins.
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A strange-looking deserted town with an almost supernatural atmosphere on a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean was in fact an ambitious Soviet mining outpost with a tragic history. Also, a collection of imposing buildings on the southern tip of Australia, the remains of curious-looking basins emerging from the waves in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge and the ruins of a monumental construction project in southern Germany that was a ruthless regime's deadly prototype.
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A vast snowcovered monster in the icy wilderness of southern Alaska, a ruined super structure that overshadows everything around it in and a landscape of confusing and surprising structures that once represented a bold statement of Spain's plans for the future. Plus, a long, winding formation that was once supposed to help defend Hitler's Third Reich. And in Budapest, Hungary, the stripped skeleton of an industrial relic lies rusting away.
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What happened to an infamous pirate city in Jamaica? Also, a grim gulag in Croatia and a Louisiana plantation caught up in the aftermath of the American Civil War.
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A volcanic island just off Taiwan containing chilling ruins from its darkest era, and a miniature railway that lies forgotten in the woods of Arkansas.
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Exploring a dystopian powerhouse in Pennsylvania, USA, a fairy-tale castle in Poland and AngloSaxon religious ruins across vast plains of Scotland.
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A sprawling Wild West ghost town sits peaceful and abandoned in Montana, USA, but is still haunted by tales of murder, corruption and buried treasure. Also, a cold, dark, underground mountain network that cost the lives of thousands... the crumbling ruins of an English industry that turned poison into profit... a peaceful village that was shattered by the terrors of war.
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Legendary film sets with surprising pasts and real locations that inspired Hollywood. Within these decaying structures are the echoes of history.
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An engineering masterpiece carved into the cliff-face, and a long-range beacon that transmitted one of the most infamous messages in American history.
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An American desert canyon where fortunes were made and lives were lost, and an island fortress in Scotland with an Achilles heel.
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An iron monster lost in the Alaskan tundra, a Crusader fort thrown into a modern conflict, and a prison built to house a mafia kingpin.
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A real-life concrete jungle in America's 'Rust Belt', and an industrial facility that brought energy to a remote corner of the world.
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A strange group of rusting structures off the coast of England, a dilapidated mediaeval-style castle in the heart of urban America and one of the biggest machines ever built lying forgotten in a German field. Once these extraordinary places and objects were at the cutting edge of design and construction, but now they stand disused, sometimes contaminated and sometimes dangerous. But who was it that built these mysterious structures? What incredible stories surround them? What secrets do they hold? And why were they abandoned? Seven huge steel boxes rise 80-feet out of the water off the coast of England at the mouth of the River Thames. Now rusting and derelict, The Red Sands Sea Fort was originally built as a first line of defence to deter the Nazi threat to London. Successfully helping the Allies to victory in 1945, the project is one of the most extraordinary engineering successes of World War II. Also in this episode, a sinister-looking deserted Cold War concrete pyramid in North Dakota; a vast empty complex located in the heart of a Philadelphia; and a 4,000-tonne corroding mass of steel, left to rot in a field in Eastern Germany.
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A village ruin, pitted and scarred, a ghostly fleet of ships, a bridge to nowhere hidden in a forest and strange metal structures in a wood.
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