New trains will use the Prius Principle

[KaBar2]

http://www.economist.com/node/17791989?story_id=17791989

[dumdoodoo]

there tryin to give us those siver fast gayass trains like they got in europe fuck that shit son this is america!!!!!!!! boxcars and autoracks over here cutty!!!!!!!

[Murphy.]

I like the idea of this, as long as they sit still long enough to get painted.

[SheenOne]

America~!!! FUCK YEAH. AMerica FUCK YEAH!

 

 

shit is so cash... lets keep the origanal trains

[KaBar2]

Not much chance of anything remaining the way it is now. When I was a little kid (like 1954), they were still running steam locomotives (oil-fired, not coal). But up north in Washington State, they burned coal all through WWII. My father-in-law stoked coal fired engines during the War because all the grown men were off in the Army. The Northern Pacific sent agents to the high schools along their tracks and asked for volunteers to work three nights a week. They replaced one adult fireman with two strong, athletic teenagers, and brought engineers out of retirement to operate trains on the slower branch lines.

 

Th boys stoked engines headed one way through a Division, and then got off and switched trains to one headed back home, and fired that one back to their home yard, kind of like a relay. The trains would stop at each Division point, drop off two kids and pick up two different ones going through the next Division. They were paid at half the rate of a grown man's wages, because there were two of them sharing one fireman position.

 

I can't imagine the unions permitting anybody to do anything like that now.

 

To hop trains in the future people are going to have to get really clever. I'm thinking they will probably use stuff sort of like climbing gear for sheer rock faces---hammocks, slings, etc.