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Gold/Mining/Energy : Big Dog's Boom Boom Room -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (146279)	3/5/2011 3:56:09 PM
From: ChanceIs	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 206195

I go to New York from Washington about four times a year. I NEVER even think about taking anything other than AMTRAK. There are puddle jumper airplanes from BWI airport, but by the time you get done getting to the airport in Baltimore and getting out of the one in New York, you might save 30 minutes. High speed rail in the NE corridor makes sense. Whether we have the means to do it is another issue altogether. When the Accela was put in, the American intellectual decline since Thomas Edison became apparent. From what I understand, the track banking on the existing turns was insufficient to handle the contemplated speed - the passengers would get thrown against the side windows. It seemed that it cost too much to rework the tracks, so they decided to make a carriage which would tilt on the "bogies." (See photo.) This was going fine until somebody figured that if a tilted car passed by a vertical one, there would be a horrible crash at the top corner. So they simply decided not to tilt as much and go slower. Then they found ex post facto that the "centrifugal force" (true engineers would refer to it as the inertial force of the centripetal acceleration) which would otherwise be provided by the bottom of the wheels bearing on the (sufficiently banked tracks) was instead arising from the wheel flanges bearing against the sides of the tracks. The result was that the wheels and tracks wore very quickly and the bogies developed unanticipated loads and cracked. IOW - it was a clusterf&k. Now tearing up all of those tracks and doing it right might be expensive, but ..... 11% of the country is on food stamps, so why not some good manual labor? Its American. (Hey!!! We could probably use Rearden metal. Anybody have any? I read the book 20 years ago. The movie is coming out April 15th. I won't be going. I think that Alan Greenspan will - and probably get busted for pulling a Pee Wee Herman in the darkened balcony section. Anybody tell I am bored this PM?) "I've been working on the railroad, all the live long day. I've been working on the railroad just to pass the time away.*