Photo credits Creative Commons license the original photographer.
Imagine walking into an amusement park and discovering that the roller coaster isn't the strangest thing there.
Instead, you find real excavators waiting for riders.
There are dump trucks. Backhoes. Tractors. Giant construction machines that look as though someone accidentally opened the gates to a massive New Jersey job site — except this one has rides, admission tickets and families wandering around in hard hats.
Located in West Berlin, New Jersey, this wonderfully strange attraction was built around a simple question:
What if playing with construction equipment became an amusement park?
The answer is considerably more entertaining than you might expect.
Some machines actually let visitors operate their controls. Others have been transformed into rides. One enormous excavator was turned into a spinning attraction. Another became a bizarre mechanical carousel.
And then there's an attraction that raises passengers more than 34 feet into the air inside a demolition trailer.
But Diggerland's story gets even more unusual when you discover why someone decided to build a construction theme park in the first place — and how a family connected to the construction business transformed an ordinary patch of New Jersey into one of America's oddest playgrounds.
It sounds like something dreamed up after too much time on a construction site.
It wasn't.
And the machines aren't toys.
There is a surprisingly fascinating story behind the dirt, steel and spinning excavators — and it's stranger than the park itself.
