I’ve got a baffling question to throw out to you all, and it has nothing to do with speakers or sound decoders.
My wife and I were driving on the highway this evening, headin’ home from a softball game around 9:45 PM or so. Suddenly we glanced over and saw a peculiar sight that neither of us had ever seen before. Over on the tracks that ran parallel to the highway, there appeared to be a long, slow moving, multi-carred “behemoth” - with sparks absolutely lighting up the tracks underneath. Since it was already dark, and the glow of the sparks so intense, I really couldn’t make out any detailing of the “behemoth” to describe to you.
Was this some sort of mobile surface grinder to help smooth the surface of the rails to make them more frictionless? Or, was this the diabolical plan of some insideous extra-terrestial, bound and determined to undermine the very framework and infastructure of the transportion system we all know and love - ONE TRACK SECTION AT A TIME?!? I was going to accuse MTH of being behind all this but I didn’t want to open a can of worms.
Please, help solve this baffling mystery for me, before it’s too la…[doooooooooo]
That’s the UFO!!! Wow! Thanks, Nathanial!!! The lights, the sparks, the smell of heated steel in the air…there’s no mistaking it! It must have been one of these we saw.
That brings up a question then. I thought the rail tops on busy sections stayed relatively shiny because of the daily traffic. How much material are they removing at a time with one of the “Klingon battlecruisers”? Nathanial, thanks for the link to the older thread on the Lorham rail grinders. That was helpful, too. [:)]
Tom
P.S. BTW, N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L? I am not progammed to respond in that area. Please explain…
What they are doing is reshaping the tops of the rails to proper specifications. Steel wheels, with many tons on top of them, with all sorts of flat spots and such, slowly beat the railheads out of shape.
It’s good to see that CSX is fixing the rails in this area. It seems that csx isi so backlogged that regular matience is on the backburner. Last month they added ballast to the line through Akron. Maybe the UFO will be visiting me soon.
Andrew
That is a show I would like to see. George do you ever make it over to the Norfolk Southern line in Kent they have been replacing ties and ballast all over the place on the old Conrail line.
Tom, good to see your still out there I have been following your work on the RR looks really good. I have not made up you way in some time to do any rail fanning where was that Rail Grinder at when you spotted it?
Someone should make a rail grinder then they can pass it around from RR to RR some we can operate it on differnt lines like the real thing.
tstage-
-You’re welcome regarding the information I provided. Like you asked, the equation N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L is known as the Drake equation. Dr. Frank Drake, who worked for the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project developed the mathematical equation to give an estimate to how many developed alien civilizations might be out there. There is a whole article on wikipedia about the drake equation which gives much more in depth info than I do here; it also gives the meanings of the variables of the equation itself, it’s pretty thought provoking, check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
I just thought it would make a good geeky inside joke since you were referring to aliens.
Live long and prosper
-Nat
