Take a ride on the Nasa Train

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LowBoy

TAKE A LITTLE TIME KICKBACK AND WATCH SOME OF MY DETECTING VIDEO'S BELOW ON YouTube

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If you don’t dig it, then how are you going to know what you’re missing!
How can you have your pudding if you don’t eat your meat!

Home, sweet home! I've never viewed this video before. . . and enjoyed it very much.

Okay, I'm an ex-infantry man and I only know of two definitions of the word "hump" when used as a verb. One of them involves covering great distances via LPCs usually while bearing a load on your back, the other involves........well that's a post for a different type of forum.

I can't for the life of me figure out why a train car loaded with explosives/solid rocket propellant would have the phrase "DO NOT HUMP" painted on the front and sides. Anyone care to enlighten me?

It refers to a common method used to sort freight cars known as "humping," which involves the use of a man-made hill, or hump. A track heads up the hill and branches into numerous parallel tracks on its way down the other side. To make up new trains, a switch engine pushes a string of cars to the top of the hump, where the cars are uncoupled one at a time. Having determined the car's destination, a worker in a nearby tower pushes buttons or throws levers or whatever to get the track switches (you know, those things where one track divides into two) lined up properly. The car is then given a nudge, causing it to roll down the hump and onto the right track.

The advantage of humping is that it's a lot faster than having switch engines shuttle back and forth all day making up trains. The disadvantage is that it's sometimes a little rough on the freight cars and their contents. Occasionally a car derails going down the hill, meaning the crew has to stop working and try to get the wheels back on the rails, which is not much fun, particularly in the middle of winter. What's worse is the possibility that the car may roll down the hill too fast and crash into the car in front of it, jostling or damaging both the cars and what's inside them. Special gimmicks on the rails called "retarders" are supposed to slow things down and prevent this, but they have been known to fail. Accordingly, cars with especially delicate contents are marked DO NOT HUMP, which tells the yard crew to set the car aside for special handling. This applies particularly to the tank cars used to haul hazardous chemicals, many of which have DO NOT HUMP stenciled permanently on their sides.

I borrowed the explanation from the Internet - Terra



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/29/2011 01:44AM by TerraDigger.

Yeah...imagine that, a half a BILLION pounds of explosives de-railing!....: (

Thanks for the video Lawrezo!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/29/2011 01:52AM by Aaron.

Thanks for the info Terra. Considering the fact that I chastise my wife and kids for not looking for an answer themselves before asking me to find it for them, you'd think I would do the same. I was preoccupied reading up on my new CZ.

The CZ reason gets ya off the hook.......and I was really interested in the question's answer.

One more point to make.......moving any propellant or hazardous commodity is risky business by any transportation means. So ...the easiest way to reduce risk in transportation (accidents, sabotage etc.) is by minimizing the distance between the manufacturing site and point of use. How many rockets are launched from Utah using SRBs manufactured by ATK (previously Thiokol, Morton Thiokol)? Answer = NONE. Why doesn't ATK make solid rocket propellant in Florida near KSC since that is the only customer for SRBs? Because of politics...OH NO...not that word again! Many many years ago I was at a meeting at NASA HQ in DC. I remember stopping in the lobby of HQ prior to going through security and there was a large....I mean full wall size map of the United States. Each state had a little red light bulb on it.....and guess what? Almost every, and I mean every light was lit (less than a handful were dark). What did the light mean? It meant that the state which had its light lit was receiving funding to build and support the massive International Space Station Program via contractors in the state. Why is this significant? Just try and kill a government program that has virtually every state in the nation receiving funding by the mere existence of the Program! IT WILL NEVER die. Despite the fact the ISS became a perfect example of multiple order of magnitude cost overruns it could NOT be killed. Every Congressman and Senator supported the fact that they had a piece of the action and boy that action was lucrative! Vote to kill ISS on the Hill? NEVER! So what did we get? A true engineering marvel....and not much more. Quick...name 3 things that you can attribute to the ISS (no, we didn't find the cure to cancer, we didn't grow commercial crystals for pharmaceutical companies etc ...although we were told we would). And now for the best part? The "international" space station means our international partners share in equal cost right? WRONG! We foot the majority of the bill...they don't. We pay for the operation and maintenance..they don't. We pay Russia to carry the astronauts on Soyuz...we don't get paid for flying astronauts on the Orbiter. We look stupid..they look smart. It is so bad that current planning is that the ISS will be around until about 2017 (and 2 more Shuttle flights are planned for needed parts supplies etc.) That's when US funding runs out (remember that little budget problem we have?) and one of 3 things will happen. 1) The US piece will be sold to a commercial private investor for pennies on the dollar, 2) the international partners will find the $ operate it (never going to happen) or 3) it will be de-orbited into a controlled fireball to avoid the risk of it coming down at a later date and impacting somewhere we don't want it to. The Pacific is BIG and always the bullseye of choice.......

And so my fellow friends...... why don't we manufacture solid rocket propellant in Florida?

FB

I could not have said it better........that's why my other posting on the thread "NASA is taking a beating!"..... stated........."damnable lobbyists"......they are as bad for this country as is the government's approach to illegal aliens. Anyone foolish enough to blindly support a politician (frontman) deserves what they get in the long-run. Folks..........look past the talk and the flag-waving...........what is your local/state politician doing for the overall welfare of this nation?