This mountaintop observatory looks like a supervillain's lair

The Swiss have a way with construction.

I got a behind the scenes on a job I did here:

I could go on about it for a while, because I am still at awe.

They build a cable car for the construction work to get their equipment up.

I personally saw a fully loaded 40 ton cement mixer going up that cable car. The picture above was on an information board to show how they work.

I also was told how they trained and selected their welders, under which conditions they worked and at what tolerances they had to weld. Welding the tubes transporting the water to the turbines, inside the mountain. Hanging in a harness, in a fire suit, environment heated to 80 to 120°C so the steel would be a bit expanded, welding to a tolerance of 0.5 millimetres.

Oh, and they finished the whole project ahead of schedule.

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Same here. Every gravestone I can remember seeing uses that system and up until now I had assumed it was universal across the (western) world! Huh…

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WOW!! Amazing!! Thanks for sharing that! :heart_eyes:

My family is Swiss as it happens, but I’ve never been there. Time to move that up the bucket list. I need to find an “infrastructure tour” of some sort. :smile:

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Looks pretty Wolfensteiny tho. I’m sure me and BJ have blown up several buildings that look like that.

I guess no one makes a cement mixer on a spider excavator chassis? :grinning:

(I bet it takes a lot of work to be a good operator of those. One wrong move on a steep slope…)

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No need to ask, he’s a smooth operator.

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I bet you need someone from the Berner Oberland to operate these. Everyone else would be movin’ to fast.

SCNR.

Anyway, this is seriously cool to keep your cool in such a thing on such a slope. And the thing itself looks like it would not be misplaced on the USS Sulaco. I dig it.

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