Trafford Park: Westinghouse 2 Traditional Cache
Trafford Park: Westinghouse 2
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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Bringing you to the area where Westinghouse founded his UK factory which became one of the largest engineering sites in the country.
This is another cache in what is increasingly becoming a series of caches around Trafford Park. It may be a large industrial estate, but that's no reason for it to be boring! Westinghouse's factory was so large and important in the area that I figured it needed two caches to do it justice.
This cache is placed on the site of the main entrance way to, and on the perimeter of, what used to be the largest single employer in Trafford Park, Westinghouse - which went on to become Metropolitan Vickers, GEC, GEC Alsthom and then Alsthom. It was one of the most important and largest engineering factories in Britain for much of the last century. "At one time this 130 acre site employed 23,000."
The photo below was taken of a fence near the cache - I thought it was a nice echo of the GEC past.
The site spread from the Bridgewater canal on the east over to Mosley Road (now the massive Adidas warehouse complex) on the west - and it went beyond that when they made Manchester and Lancaster bombers for the war.
There are lots of resources on the net about the history of Trafford Park if you look for it. Of particular relevance to this cache is http://www.wybunburynews.co.uk/tl-traffordpark and this PDF (http://www.mae.uk.com/Trafford%20Park.PDF) of a talk is quite comprehensive about the history of the Westinghouse Factory; all the quotes above come from this document. Other references are at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Manchester and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan-Vickers.
You're looking for a small micro. I parked on Main Avenue when hiding the cache, but that might not be practical during the day - avoid the parking restrictions.
EDIT: Congrats to phspid and MrBishi for the FTF!
Addendum August 2023... regrettably the lovely GEC fence has been removed as the site has been renovated for a new tenant - and the bushes have been hacked back so there's nowhere to hide the cache in the same exact location. I've hidden a new one only a few metres away - a micro (bigger than the original that used to hang by the road sign) - that should be a doddle to find. Happy hunting!
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
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Treasures
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