RWE EL 2000 509Neurath North Rhine-Westphalia Neurath

Southwest of the Ruhr area, between Dusseldorf, Cologne and The Netherlands, RWE mines and burns tons of lignite (brown daily) every single day. These mines and energy plants pollute more than any other company in Germany. Therefor the are almost weekly protests near this area, especially as every few years villages disappear in the pits of the giant open mines. Photographing their plants and private railways from the public roads isn't forbidden. In fact, RWE even ecourages it on social media! However the local RWE guys are not happy with it. More than once they tried preventing me from taking photo's by blocking me or by threatening to arrest me (they aren't allowed to, but they used all sorts of tricks and lies). On november 8th it was a nice sunny autumn day and the warmer areas near their power plans still gave the trees and bushes nice typical autumn colours. I was ready for everything, have my camera ready as I approached, 2 small body cams recording. As they both could only record for 1 hour (they aren't those modern things yet) I had only less than an hour to get there, make my photo's and get away again. I was nothing wrong, but I had to protect myself from the nasty security officers of RWE. Luckily I was able to get no less than 3 trains on photo during those 60 minutes, and record at least double that number of security officers droning towards me.

Good job!