We biked to Saugerties for the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival and spotted this monster looming in the morning mist during the ride home:
The end view shows it’s not an optical illusion:
Some Google Maps fiddling reveals the plant, with the excavator atop the first car on the siding, down in the lower-left corner of the image:
A zoomed view, rotated a quarter-turn CCW so it’s not quite so vertiginous:
My search-fu isn’t strong enough to uncover the plant’s name. They’ve obviously been doing something involving gravel and either asphalt or concrete for many years, so it’s not a prank…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
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4 responses to “Monster in the Mist”
A quick Google search of “kings highway tissal road” brings up this story: http://www.hvpress.net/news/119/ARTICLE/7585/2009-08-14.html
Which names the plant as: “Northeast Solite plant”
Searching that brings me to: http://www.nesolite.com/index.html
The web design of that site mixed with the results of doing a whois lookup on the domain, causes some questions to be raised in my head.
(Also, the employee portal link on their site is broken.)
Well done! I landed at an asphalt paving company up the road a bit, so I bow before your search-fu.
A bit more fiddling with Street View shows the excavator perched on the same gondola car with nothing else around, so that must be its permanent home.
Looks better in the mist, methinks…
I just saw that last week! I wonder if they got it up there like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zplpf9Ytkvg
And they get it down thusly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRfBJIzNrYw