The big mystery
Let's try to explore the story of this old KrAZ. There are only a couple of facts to be presented in this post, as the sources for the rest are very scarce and uncertain.
Facts:
We see a КрАЗ-257Ш truck with a lift device for oil/water wells of the type Azinmash A-50 on the base of a drilling company, located at the outskirts of Krynica Zdrój - a spa town in southern Poland. This KrAZ truck series was the second one from Кременчук’s factory and its production went on from 1965 to 1995.
Guesses:
Let's start by trying to name the company, which the local base belongs to. Everything points to the fact that it is Karpackie Przedsiębiorstwo Wiertnicze Sp z o.o. - translating simply to Carpathian Drilling Company (most likely named Karpackie Przedsiębiorstwo Wiertniczo-Geologiczne earlier). I highly recommend checking out the photo gallery on their page - karpackiepw.pl/galeria/
The company offers a broad range of services, from drilling wells, to securing them and removing old ones. Their customers include some very well known Polish companies, such as the bottled water comapnies Muszynianka, Piwniczanka and Kinga Pienińska, or the spa resorts Krynica-Żegiestów and Wysowa. The company also partnered with the historical salt mines in Wieliczka and Bochnia.
And now the cooler part - the truck itself. The licence plates starting with PP denominate the truck to originate somewhere from the city of Piła, located around 500km NNW from Krynica. There is an interesting story related to that place - namely the local company, Exalo. It specialises in drilling oil wells for the relatively (on the scale of the country) oil-rich region of North-Western Poland, around where West Pomeranian and Greater Poland voivodeships have a border. The company is known among many truck fans for the use of Peterbilt lorries, as the only company in the entire country to do so.
From what I managed to find out, Exalo sold all of their trucks equipped with Azinmash devices failry recently. It is fairly possible that KPW bought out this particular KrAZ without re-registrating it. That is the only link, which I could find, as it is very hard to spot pictures of Exalo trucks on the internet.
Now the last part - what is AzINMASh? From what I gathered, it is the Azerbaijani state Insitute of Oil and Mechanical Engineering located in Baku. There is no Wikipedia page about it and yet the drilling devices and service cranes they designed are extremely common in Poland. They don't have a web page of their own either and I could only find some adresses, without any history of the institute. Wikipedia only seems to drop one mention of it on the page of a scientist - Əsgər Ələkbər oğlu Abdullayev, who was head of the Automatics and telemechanics lab at the institute from 1954 onwards.
I hope you had as much fun reading this short story as I did finding all this out :)
Photo by Piotrek/Toprus
The big mystery
Let's try to explore the story of this old KrAZ. There are only a couple of facts to be presented in this post, as the sources for the rest are very scarce and uncertain.
Facts:
We see a КрАЗ-257Ш truck with a lift device for oil/water wells of the type Azinmash A-50 on the base of a drilling company, located at the outskirts of Krynica Zdrój - a spa town in southern Poland. This KrAZ truck series was the second one from Кременчук’s factory and its production went on from 1965 to 1995.
Guesses:
Let's start by trying to name the company, which the local base belongs to. Everything points to the fact that it is Karpackie Przedsiębiorstwo Wiertnicze Sp z o.o. - translating simply to Carpathian Drilling Company (most likely named Karpackie Przedsiębiorstwo Wiertniczo-Geologiczne earlier). I highly recommend checking out the photo gallery on their page - karpackiepw.pl/galeria/
The company offers a broad range of services, from drilling wells, to securing them and removing old ones. Their customers include some very well known Polish companies, such as the bottled water comapnies Muszynianka, Piwniczanka and Kinga Pienińska, or the spa resorts Krynica-Żegiestów and Wysowa. The company also partnered with the historical salt mines in Wieliczka and Bochnia.
And now the cooler part - the truck itself. The licence plates starting with PP denominate the truck to originate somewhere from the city of Piła, located around 500km NNW from Krynica. There is an interesting story related to that place - namely the local company, Exalo. It specialises in drilling oil wells for the relatively (on the scale of the country) oil-rich region of North-Western Poland, around where West Pomeranian and Greater Poland voivodeships have a border. The company is known among many truck fans for the use of Peterbilt lorries, as the only company in the entire country to do so.
From what I managed to find out, Exalo sold all of their trucks equipped with Azinmash devices failry recently. It is fairly possible that KPW bought out this particular KrAZ without re-registrating it. That is the only link, which I could find, as it is very hard to spot pictures of Exalo trucks on the internet.
Now the last part - what is AzINMASh? From what I gathered, it is the Azerbaijani state Insitute of Oil and Mechanical Engineering located in Baku. There is no Wikipedia page about it and yet the drilling devices and service cranes they designed are extremely common in Poland. They don't have a web page of their own either and I could only find some adresses, without any history of the institute. Wikipedia only seems to drop one mention of it on the page of a scientist - Əsgər Ələkbər oğlu Abdullayev, who was head of the Automatics and telemechanics lab at the institute from 1954 onwards.
I hope you had as much fun reading this short story as I did finding all this out :)
Photo by Piotrek/Toprus