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Abandoned Engineering
S06E11 - Spike Island
Research into why and how large projects were built, the financial and social costs of their failure, and the consequences for the environment. Experts present plans to make something new from the ruins.
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The Abandoned Nazi Railway
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.
America's Jungle City
America's Jungle City
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?
Germany's Lost Warship
Germany's Lost Warship
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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Research into why and how large projects were built, the financial and social costs of their failure, and the consequences for the environment. Experts present plans to make something new from the ruins.