This has “hollywood train movie” written all over it.
Hijackers uncouple the car and cut the air hose so the train wouldnt have breaks. The kindly old engineer tries the dynamics and yells “the main flux capacator bus bars melted, were gonna hit deadmans curve at 200mph” then a goofy hero saves the good lookin girl , but screws the train and any town that is distroyed along with it. In the end, steven segal busts some heads and shoots all the terrorists.
There are two diamond shaped plackards on the car, one orange and one white.I’m not sure what orange means,but white usually means corrosive.There is something really nasty in that car[:0].
The orange placard denotes a hazardous explosive (Trident rocket booster segment full of fuel). The white placard # denotes that it’s a class A explosive…just imagine a smaller version of Hiroshima without the radiation. And yours truly was dumb enough to stand 40’ away watching it go by!
Now I am really curious. Why would you ship the rocket with fuel in it? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot safer to ship it empty and fuel it at its destination? (You can tell I know zip about rockets!)
Some rockets (and I’d have to look up the Tridents to be sure about them) have solid fuel - hard to install at the launch site. One example is the boosters on the Space Shuttle. Essentially, they take the rocket body and fill it up with the fuel, much the same way as you’d pour wax into a candle mold. They operate very much the same as the model rockets you can get at your local hobby shop.
Liquid fueled rockets are filled at the launch site. Some of the components are very nasty.
All Tridents, being submarine missiles, are of course solid fuel (the term SRBs for these boosters is common). There were some experiments with liquid-fueled sub missiles, but they are NOT a good idea, particularly those with hypergolic propellants…
The “Class A explosive” on these is generally ammonium perchlorate, which is mixed with aluminum powder and a rubber-like binder and then molded accordingly. This is not ‘nasty’ stuff in the usual sense of the word, probably far less dangerous (in ordinary transport) than alternatives including LOX, red fuming nitric acid (or other acids of required concentration), hydrazines, etc. Even some of the logical accelerators for fast-burn SRB boosters (which may be ‘back in play’ for BMD) involve comparatively stable materials.
Now, I have seen film of a detonation at a perchlorate plant in the Las Vegas area which caught fire, but that only occurred after prolonged cookoff and possibly other temperature-related compression effects. I would not expect any sort of spontaneous ignition, even if the HVAC system were to go out, and the system of shock webbing that supports the segments inside the car is specially intended to avoid any sharp impacts. I’d be no more nervous around that car than around many other chemical carriers, some of which look surprisingly benign but in accidents can cause problems (consider the ‘accelerant’ in the Flixborough explosion!)
In case of severe wreck, yes, I might want to be elsewhere – but even prompt detonation of the entire booster motor, which is highly unlikely compared to progressive ‘deflagration’ (meaning that it goes off acting as a rocket motor), is far from a Hiroshima-type blast. As far as ‘truth in labeling’, I’d want the car placarded as dangerous because that’s fair to fire and rescue personnel … but I also wouldn’t go running in terror to get outside a quarter-mile imaginary blast radius either.
I am usually somewhat skeptical of the danger claims made by ‘green’ webs