A final end to a local landmark

It's gone, torn down and level with the ground. Jeziorki's level-crossing keeper's hut. The last pictures of it I took a week ago. As of today, a local landmark, built around 60 years ago, is no longer.

I managed to sneak inside to get some photos, a few days after the crew from PKP PLK came to take away everything of use, and to switch off all the systems. Below: note the beer bottle sticker on the door - Królewskie Jasne Pełne - looks like it's from the early 1990s

Left: the fuse box, controlling the platform lighting, and in days gone by, the points to the rampa na kruszywa.

Below: the crossing keeper's room; the control desk was on the wall facing the tracks; it had already been removed. [Pics here, taken through the windows.] I don't know what was in the padlocked green metal cabinet, presumably nothing of great value. The staff have been redeployed to cover shifts on other level crossings in and around Warsaw.



This morning I got an SMS from Dr Marcin saying the hut's been demolished. Soon after, he emailed me some photos, full of destructive violence, as the wrecking crew comes in to tear the hut down.

Great photos here from Dr Marcin conveying the drama of this act of destruction; clouds of dust as the walls come down.

Ripping through bricks, concrete, metal and glass like a rampaging beast, the digger reduces this redundant piece of infrastructure to a pile of rubble

Below: by the time I got there, the digger was posing triumphant on the rubble, like a WW2 tank atop a conquered bunker.

Later this afternoon, I snapped this scene from the new platform of W-wa Jeziorki station. The rubble was being removed in a convoy of eight-wheel dump trucks.

It's gone. In its place will stand a viaduct, paid for out of EU structural funds; ul. Karczunkowska will go over the tracks, road traffic won't have to stop to wait several times an hour while a train passes through the level crossing; rail and road will have been separated. The construction of the viaduct will take a long time (no way will be ready by the end of this year). I predict early 2019.

[How wrong I was. November 2019, actually. Over three years between the closure of the old level crossing and the opening of the new viaduct to traffic.]

The character - the spirit of place - of W-wa Jeziorki has changed. A road bridge over the railway line will be so different to what's been here since the Warsaw to Radom line was built in 1934.

This time five years ago:
Independence Day

This time six years:
Out and about in Jeziorki

This time seven years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz

This time eight years ago:
Puławska by night