Mine Shaft 14, Dnepropetrovsk

Let’s move to Dnepropetrovsk and check out how its subway construction is going. Last year, they resumed driving increasing the length of underground working by 100 m. Considerening the amount of work done during the last 10 years, it is a lot. But it’s almost nothing in general (they have 4 km more to drive!). In 2011, they mostly worked on mine shaft 14 and that’s where we are going.

This is a construction site for mine shaft 14. In the foreground, you can see a machinery hall.

Mine shaft 14 is marked with a Nokia advertisement installed above the shaft. The mine shaft is 48 m deep. They are going to build Tsentralnaya Station there.

Piles of tubes.

Let’s go inside the machinery hall. There are two reels here, responsible for lowering and rising cages, and other hoisting devices.

A machine operator.

An electric locomotive.

These are bunkers for extracted ground which are used to load it onto dump trucks.

A dumper.

They turn over buckets with ground over the bunker to later load it onto a dump truck.

This is what warm and moist air coming up from the shaft forms there.

The right cage.

It’s foggy down here because it’s freezing outside while it’s +13C underground. Plus humidity is high too. Behind those buckets, you can see a cage winding.