From Excelsior Needle Co. to Timken: The Rise and Fall of Torrington's Standard Plant

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The Standard Plant and a Century of Making Things It was a hot May week in 2023, and J and I were already sweating through our shirts before we even made it to the entrance. We turned into the driveway off North Elm Street and passed a large Caterpillar backhoe holding up the red, white, and blue at the top of the arm. Patriotic machinery. Only in Connecticut. We moved toward the back of the complex with our eyes open, scanning for any sign of people or activity. We found cameras instead. A few of them, well-positioned across one of the buildings and up on an electrical pole, covering angles that made our original entry plan useless. We backed off, found a Plan B, and stepped into a dark room washed in tinted green light, then took the stairs down to ground level. The former Standard Plant sits along North Elm Street at a sunken grade, one story, with another building rising over the roadway to the far right when you're standing in front of it from North Street. It's the kind o...
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2019 Year in Review




The withering dying days of another year and a new decade.

I explored as much as possible this year but did not break 100 or 50 spots. So much going on in one year that time seems to melt away and before you know it it's the end of the year. Work, bills, and bouts of depression mixed in. It was an upside-topsy-turvy year.

The biggest loss of the year was losing my DJI Phantom 4 drone. Just as I was getting into using it more, with new projects in mind and learning to manually maneuver without getting into the automatic settings, I lost it on a cold windswept park shoreline near the water. In hindsight, I should have packed it up and drove home. Instead, I took it up again pushed it hard toward the water, and turned. Pushing it again, I came back to shore low and fast. Before you knew it, it came in too close to a tree and reacted to the near object detection. Pulled up before I could throttle back hard it went up, clipped its rotors, and fell into the water. I had lost my three old drone due to cold fingers and numb hands. A total loss. I walked back to my car with my lower half soaking wet defeated and quite (m)angry.







The biggest win of the year would be shifting my career into something different. Hopefully, by the start of spring this year, I will pass my licensing test and start a job that will move me out of my long-time home and into a new apartment. It has been for years now that I have felt stuck, going nowhere, nothing working in my favor. But yet I have tried to move forward when events have kept pulling me down. Friends and family seemingly attaining goals people my age should be now starting or planning to have. Whilst, I am here just listing away attaining nothing but my passion and hobby.

Overall the biggest explore to date was a revisit to an old facility that to this day still stands and stays quite open to explorers. I explored more of it on the second go but with fading winter light, I still had not explored two more buildings on site. It is quite a behemoth. More than likely I will revisit a third time hoping to finally complete its endless acreage.

In addition, smaller places offer as much contrast to large facilities than most people realize in this hobby. You find little quirks and personal mementos in offices and sometimes machinery or barrels of hazardous chemicals. It is not until you get inside you find things can be hit or miss depending on the location.

Here is to a new decade, a new year, and more adventures and memories! Signing out from this decade.

K




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