Kurobe Dam - Day 2

...That night there was another bug... this time it was one I actually recognised... a nice yellow centipede. Which was pretty damned fast, and really wanted to go to my bedroom (BAD!). We spent a while trying to bat it to go downstairs and hopefully outside, but it managed to squirrel itself into the stairs and refused to go outdoors.... Anyhow, it was better than being in my room....

Mr. Centipede

We were reasonably free in the morning, so we had a little wonder around looking at more engineering stuff (or if you were Greg...the pretty scenery, while laughing at the engineers taking photos of very dull looking things)

A heavily engineered river bank...

A waterfall, also highly engineered; ie. it was so constrained the river was in a pipe....

A steel-arch type bridge thingy....

Then we grabbed a quick lunch in town and met up with the rest of our group at the train station to make our way up to the main dam...We took a special little train up the valley, it was tiny and powered by a orange diesel engine at the front.

A cunningly disguised water control tower...looking suspiciously like a western castle...

Our little train making it's way up the single track...

The final stop ended up in a tunnel, and then a big metal door and no more train tracks....We got off the train and the train headed back to the main station back at the bottom of the valley. The big doors turned out to be some huge industrial lift...which took us up a good few hurndred meters. Getting out of the lift there was a second train waiting...we could fit about 6 of us in a carriage and we sat in it for a good while no seeing anything out of the windows but concrete...

inside the lift

Just outside of the lift....and Yamada-san 山田さん (assistant technician) looking particularly unimpressed...

Inside the tunnel train...taking us further up the valley...

the train eventually emerged from the tunnels onto a chunky looking steel bridge, to the right was a small concrete dam...but it was mainly nice to see the sun again....We definitely weren't taking the normal tourist route...it was the workers entrance.


We then got into a shoddy looking counter-weight cable car...which went up some vicious gradient...

View up the shaft which the counter-weight cable car was trying to get us up...

We had a bit of a walk through some tunnels before we reached a gated entrance to the control center of the dam. We were eventually let in and led to a huge board room with a scale model of the Kurobe Valley and the dam catchment area. It was an awesome model with also opened out to show you a cross-section of the dam too :D

We were also taken down to the turbine rooms, which was noisy (much the same as the dam I saw in Greece), but still cool, have a video of it somewhere....

The Turbine hall...the turbines with lights on are working....obviously, the number of turbines they operate depends on consumer demand...

sexy photo of the turbine blades...

At some point we must have emerged into daylight again....after wandering around in dark and cool tunnels for a while, and we ended up at the top of the dam. And it was drizzling...

mmmmmm.....concrete....

I have to say that Greg has more photos of the trip than I do....but I think you've seen enough concrete for now...