Zollverein coal mine, shaft XII by Nemorino
Designed and built in the 1920s, this shaft and processing plant went into operation on February 1, 1932. At that time it was considered the largest, most efficient, most modern and also most beautiful coal mining facility in Europe.The Zollverein was founded in 1847 by an industrialist named Franz Haniel (1799-1868). He gave his mine the name Zollverein in honor of the German Customs Union of 1844, which made it possible to do business in Germany without having to pay tolls every few miles at the borders of the many tiny German states.
By 1920 the Zollverein had four shafts producing 8000 tons of coal per day, but at that point they decided there was no way to modernize those old shafts and increase the daily output, so the solution was to build a new shaft for the sole purpose of bringing up 12000 tons per day in a huge multi-storey elevator.
Surrounding the new shaft they built a processing plant which by the standards of the times (recall that they had nothing resembling the computer technology we have today!) was highly automated. They were so obsessed with automation that the buildings originally didn't have any toilets, but they quickly had to add some when they realized that they still needed hundreds of workers to run the new machines, although not as many as before.
The managers proudly announced that they had eliminated 500 jobs, which then as now was a dubious achievement, since unemployment was one of the many factors that enabled the Nazis to seize power in 1933.
Second photo: Looking up at the elevator tower.
Third photo: Beneath the plants there were railroad tracks so that after the coal had been sorted and processed it could be dumped directly into coal cars and transported to the end users, like the nearby steel mills.
Fourth photo: Under one of the old conveyor belts that moved coal all around the plant they have recently built a pair of escalators to bring people up to the new visitors' center on the second floor. (Third floor to you.)
