"Have you seen TheMachine?"

[beauregaardhooligan]

My friend asked me this as I was helping him store some stuff at an old warehouse/train depot where he rented some space.
These are pix of a cotton bailing machine, and they don't really convey how massive this thing is.
The 2nd pic shows some railroad tracks still there at the bottom of it where a flatbed cart was rolled under it and the cotton compressed onto the cart. The carts weren't regular gauge, but it was still impressive. I'm guessing a single cart would have carried close to a ton of cotton.
From what we could figger it was run by steam.
I took these pix a few years later, after my friend had moved out, and had to sneak onto the property to get them.
There is a plaque toward the top that says it was made in Birmingham, Alabama.