noise."Chapter Notes: Spokane (Destination Unknown) · 2:48am Jan 14th, 2022
If she picks her trains right, Sweetsong’s in the last state before she reaches the Pacific. For now, she needs to spend some times making more money, and figuring out which route she needs to take to go west, rather than down to Oregon. Although if she does go to Oregon, that’s not the end of the world . . . if she wanted an easy trip, she’d have taken Amtrak.
Special thanks to AlwaysDressesInStyle for pre-reading!
While we could get in a discussion of the hobo code of symbols (which may or may not have been in use by hobos), we’re instead going to talk about the hobo ethical code, created in 1889. It includes items like 1: “Decide your own life, don’t let another person run or rule you.” and 5: “When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.”
Many of them are good rules for living your life . . . or for a pony living her life. Remind me to tell you about rule number four and how it still applies; that’s a good subject for a mechanic blog.
Most importantly, and the one that Sweetsong got reminded of by the older hobo, is 10: “Try to stay clean, and boil up whenever possible.” [in this context, ‘boil up’ means to do your laundry and/or get yourself as clean as possible.”
The older man is Shoestring, who has both mentioned the cleanliness clause of the hobo ethical code, as well as rule number eight: pick up your litter.
The park Sweetsong found herself at is Riverfront Park, sited on a peninsula in the Spokane River adjacent to the Spokane Falls, and site of the 1974 World’s Fair. It’s got a skybridge, a carousel, a skyride over the falls; it’s got the Great Northern Clocktower which was part of the Great Northern Railroad’s depot there . . . did I mention that the park is built on a former rail yard? Despite a call for it, the rest of the railroad depot was not saved.
The park has a lot of bridges to it, honestly an unnecessary amount. By my count (based on Google Maps) there are nine, four for cars and six not for cars. (The park is about 2,000 feet [610 meters] long and 800 feet [244 meters] wide.) Naturally, that reminded me of the The Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem. Euler solved this problem; at a guess (I’m not great at math), you can walk all the bridges of Riverfront Park without duplicating a bridge . . . if you add in the skyride, I don’t know what happens then.
Back in Ye Olde Days, rails were as long as the cars that carried them. Well, a little bit shorter, since they had to fit in the cars that carried them. If you do the math, you’ll find out that a 40 foot gondola (how they were often transported) can fit a rail just less than forty feet long. If memory serves, rail was traditionally provided in 39 foot sections (13 yards, or about 12 meters). Each joint would be bolted ideally with four bolts, sandwiched on each side with what are called joint bars. Those joints would usually be staggered, because it was jarring for an axle to hit both joints simultaneously. Also, since rails were usually unloaded and placed by hand back then, having something a reasonable number of men could carry and set in place was important.
While the sound of wheels crossing a joint is a pleasing sound, it causes wear; every joint is a weak spot in the rail. Now that technology has improved, mainline rail is usually delivered in insanely long sections; basically, a specialty train carries quarter-mile long rail sections (about 1/2 km) and then special machines lay them; usually instead of bolting the sections together, they’re welded.
Sometimes older rail is also welded rather than be replaced (why replace it if it doesn’t need to be?); in that case, you’ll see a set of holes every 39 feet where the joint bars used to be.
Since we’re talking about tracklaying, we should talk about track spikes. In traditional, wooden crossties (sleepers), they’re nailed through tie plates/fishplates and hold the track in place. Ideally, they all stay where they should be, and ideally when trackwork is done all the old ones get picked up; in reality, neither of these things happen and railroad spikes can be found here and there along the right-of-way. For a hobo, they’re a handy tool to wedge the door of a box car open . . . while I don’t know the exact method, I suspect that they’ll fit in the lower door track, between the track and railcar body, and keep the door from closing all the way.
Which would be bad if you were riding in the car.
Box cars, I should mention, often have basically barn-style doors (or minivan doors, if you prefer), a large sliding door that opens up. to allow easy access into the car without swinging open into the cargo area or loading dock. They’re not the greatest for sealing tightly, though, so some cars have other types of doors. Plug doors are common, I think that they slide along the car but also have some kind of mechanism to pull them tight into the opening, and there are surely other types of specialty doors for certain box cars.
Usually, there’s just one door on either side of the box car, centered on its length. Some longer cars had two doors on each side, and there were even what were called ‘all door’ box cars. I’ve never seen a picture of one with all its doors open, so I don’t know exactly how that worked.* AFAIK they’re not used any more, but were used to haul lumber. There were also end-door box cars that were used to haul automobiles back in the day; rather than be on the sides, the doors were on the ends. Modern covered auto carriers are conceptually similar.
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*I did some googling, and it looks like on the Thrall cars (that’s who made them) you could open half of one side at a time. Here’s a link to a forum thread about them (real and model).
A ‘meet’ is when two trains on a single-track mainline pass—traditionally, there were two ways that was done. Either one of them waited at the station for the other one to arrive before it continued on, or else one of them got put on a siding track somewhere and sat there until the other train (or trains) had passed on the mainline, and then it could continue.
How it’s done—how the train crew knows they’re supposed to meet another train—has varied over the years, from the commonplace timetables or train orders, the more modern signals, or even the exchanging of a token. Many short lines just operate with the idea that if a train has gone down a single track branch, no other trains can go on that branch until the first one comes back.
If it’s not done right, though, you get what was traditionally called a corn field meet, more commonly known as a head-on collision. It was best to avoid those.
For this week’s song, we’re going to do something different . . . something perhaps even unexpected.
Stephenson’s Rocket was a very early locomotive (although not the first) which brought together several other ideas to produce ‘the most advanced locomotive of its time’ and which ‘became the template for most steam engines in the following 150 years.’ (Wikipedia)
The locomotive was considered worthy of preservation back in the 1850s(!), and was donated to the Patent Office Museum; it now resides at the National Railway Museum in York.
It’s worth mention that one thing Stephenson did not put on the locomotive was brakes.
Stephenson’s Rocket reminded me of another song I like which wouldn’t really fit the theme of these blogs: The Train from Bloemfontein. It’s from a TV show called Monster Moves; in that episode they brought the locomotive back from Bloemfontein to Glasgow.
Incidentally, J.R.R. Tolkien was also from Bloemfontein.
Tom Scott did a video about Stephenson’s Rocket, which covers the lack of brakes.
From the I5 corridor mainline, you can still hop a Puget Sound and Pacific freight in Centralia, WA and ride all the way to Aberdeen and Hoquiam and their salt water ports on Grays Harbor Bay.
As late as 2005, you could hop aboard a former BCRail RDC car and take a Lewis and Clark Expedition themed historic museum ride from Portland OR all the way down the river to Astoria. That line has been out of service past Wauna for a Loooong time, though. But the tracks are still there.
As much as the rail talk is interesting, the Flutters mathematical image brought back a memory and made me smile. Back in the dim, dark past a good friend and I used a similar equation in Year 10 pure maths class to boggle a segment of the rest of the class on a dare. We banked on the division elimination which later became an assumed zero to fool a group who had been insinuating that Lizzy should not have been in the pure maths/science stream as ‘girls are not suited and should focus on proper subjects like home economics to prepare them for their real role in life’ (actual diatribe from a fellow student).
It still makes me smile as even though Lizzy recently passed (far too soon), she had a great career with the CSIRO for just on 30 years.
Now to follow the links to a fast loco which had no brakes...
Can't believe that picture would use Fluttershy instead of Twilight Sparkle to divide by zero.
Because I'm pretty sure Twilight Sparkle dividing by zero is what opened up the portal to the human world in the first place.
I was in Manchester with Mum just at the time they were exhibiting Rocket, after exhuming it and prepping it for transfer to York.
It was a wreck. There was only the boiler shell, missing one end, and the cylinders were in the wrong position. It had been sold off to be used as a stationary winding engine so didnt need wheels.
Because of the steam blast increasing firebox airflow, it had maximum power when stationary as none was being lost in turning the wheels. Its opponant in the trials was supercharged, and so had far less power when starting.
I cant remember if it had reversing gear, but given brakes tended to be simple blocks pressed against the rim, maybe he thought they would only be any good when it was stationary, and thats what chocks were for?
"Remind me to tell you about rule number four and how it still applies; that’s a good subject for a mechanic blog."
Huh. Sounds interesting.
Whew! And all sorts of delays came up for me between finishing the chapter and finishing this blog post (and first comment), but made it!
Thank you, as usual, for writing. :)
It's wild to watch those insane lengths of rail just bend through the curve. I mean, I know that the rail beneath has the same curve, but somehow it feels different to watch a whole stack of rails do it dynamically.
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That would be a way for a pony to get to the Pacific, wouldn’t it? You’ll never guess what railroad she takes to the Pacific. Okay, you already guessed.
That sounds fun! There’s a company in Pennsylvania also running RDCs, and I’m going to try and get on one next time I’m out that way. We’ve got a couple of tourist-y railroads and semi-regular excursions in Michigan, I’ve been on a couple of those.
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Somewhere I’ve got a math book that has a number of false proofs in it, which you’re supposed to figure out. Of course, I’ve got no chance at it, I’m just not that good at math.
I’m sorry <hugs>
Not fast by today’s standards, but for the time. . .
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I assume ‘cause it’s an exploitable meme. Besides, everybody knows that it’s the pegasi who invented advanced math.
Possibly, yeah. Although Pinkie Pie could have done it, too.
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Cool! That would have been some years ago, yes? I didn’t get a full history of the thing
According to the video it does have a reversing gear of sorts, you just inject the steam into the other end of the piston. Which I think is how they normally worked on steam locomotives, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, brakes at that time were simple affairs, and probably not very effective. Most horse-drawn wagons of the time probably wouldn’t have had them at all, either. I can’t remember the term off the top of my head, but what they used back then when a wagon needed to sit without a horse attached was sort of like a wheel chock, and of course when you were moving, the horse’s butt did all the braking.
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It is, and it applies to a number of workers we’ve had and Destin (from the YouTube channel ‘Smarter Every Day’) also mentioned that idea in a video.
I’m sorry . . . hopefully everything that needed to get resolved got resolved.
You’re welcome!
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It’s absolutely nuts. Probably the camera’s got a telephoto lens on it which makes it look bendier than it is, but still . . .
And it’s not just that it can bend like that, but just nailing it to some wood crossties means a train can go on it and stay on it, which is also crazy to think of. Rail’s big, bigger than it looks in pictures and videos, but it’s completely dwarfed by the trains that run across it.
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Well, I suppose we'll see if it does make it more into a mechanic blog at some point. :)
It's been long enough I don't remember by now what the delays were, but I don't recall any of it being significant problems. And, in any case, I think it worked out fin. But thanks. :)
:)
Sweetsong, after arriving at the Pacific: "Well, enough of trains. Let's see if there are any boats I can sneak into."
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As long as she packs enough food and water . . . or can rely on the crew wanting a pegasus mascot for an ocean journey.
Fluttershy does the old "Do not divide dy 0" trick. Basically, it works like this:
1/0=2/0
¡1=2!
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That’s one of the reasons you’re not allowed to divide by zero. It breaks a lot of other things in math.
Numberphile has done at least one video on the subject.
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In cases where division by 0 is unavoidable, if one never considers the results undefined or infinity, but instead, just leave it as (1/0) and (2/0), then one does not get the false equality of ∞=∞ or undefined equals undefined, but the inequality of (1/0)≠(2/0). At any rate, if at all possible, avoid dividing by 0.
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Yeah, that’s why it’s considered ‘undefined.’ If you give it a value, you break math, and it can be easily proved it doesn’t equal whatever you think it does (i.e., the process you’d use to ‘prove’ it’s infinity would also prove it’s negative infinity).
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One has trouble defining simple likes like whether it is countable or uncountable. Many tricks have been tried over the years to keep unequal things from equaling each other. One is leaving then an something over 0. Another is transfinite numbers:
A transfinitie number is defined as larger than any counting number but less than countable infinity. 1/0 and 2/0 equate to different transfinite numbers; so now, 1 does not equal 2.
If possible, do not divide by 0.