Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Monday, December 30, 2024
Colorado officials reached an agreement announced this week allowing Union Pacific Railroad to continue to lease the Moffat Tunnel, the highest railroad tunnel in the United States.
“This is a big step forward in making Mountain Rail from Denver to Craig a reality,” Polis said in a statement. “Passenger Rail on this corridor will relieve traffic to one of Colorado’s iconic mountain communities and provide safe, reliable, affordable transportation options for tourists and skiers as well as workers traveling along the corridor. This historic agreement is an important step to protect continuous freight operations and finally deliver on the promise of passenger rail to Coloradans and I thank Union Pacific for its partnership.”
Sky-Hi News reported that Colorado can use Union Pacific’s tracks for up to three round trips per day in addition to existing routes run by federal passenger rail operator Amtrak. The Granby outlet said Union Pacific will allow the state to run passenger rail on its tracks between Denver and Craig in exchange for the lease on the tunnel.
John Putnam, a senior adviser for the Colorado Department of Transportation who led negotiations on the Moffat Tunnel, said the agreement allows the state to connect people and freight on the Western Slope and Front Range, which is what the state built the tunnel for 100 years ago.
geomagnetic super storms affected GPS signals all around the world, and affected the GPS signals that tractors rely on to automatically steer in straight lines,
Back in May, Earth was hit by five consecutive coronal mass ejections (CMEs) within a matter of two days.
While the geomagnetic super storms that these CMEs triggered gave us quite a light show—plastering beautiful auroras in the night sky—they also caught farmers off guard.
these reports show just how much solar weather can impact farmers.
a lot of people question the value of art, especially public art. But, I instead put the issue down to a case by case basis, some public art is obviously a waste of money, and paint. Also OBVIOUSLY, there is a LOT of good public art, but mostly it's low dollar amateur stuff that is the best, NOT the ego driven "artists"
Sunday, December 29, 2024
unusual railroad fact, it greatly assisted in the British overthrow and oppression of India
the East India Company destroyed what existed, it oppressed, tortured, imprisoned, enslaved, deported and proscribed a people for 200 years and the British used coercion and cruelty to get their way.
The construction of the Indian Railways is often pointed to by apologists for empire as one of the ways in which British colonialism benefited the subcontinent, ignoring the obvious fact that many countries also built railways without having to go to the trouble and expense of being colonized to do so. But the facts are even more damning.
The railways were first conceived of by the East India Company, like everything else in that firm’s calculations, for its own benefit. Governor General Lord Hardinge argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”. In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam. British shareholders made absurd amounts of money by investing in the railways, where the government guaranteed returns double those of government stocks, paid entirely from Indian, and not British, taxes. It was a splendid racket for Britons, at the expense of the Indian taxpayer.
The railways were intended principally to transport extracted resources – coal, iron ore, cotton and so on – to ports for the British to ship home to use in their factories. The movement of people was incidental, except when it served colonial interests; and the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time.
Nor were Indians employed in the railways. The prevailing view was that the railways would have to be staffed almost exclusively by Europeans to “protect investments”. This was especially true of signalmen, and those who operated and repaired the steam trains, but the policy was extended to the absurd level that even in the early 20th century all the key employees, from directors of the Railway Board to ticket-collectors, were white men – whose salaries and benefits were also paid at European, not Indian, levels and largely repatriated back to England.
Racism combined with British economic interests to undermine efficiency. The railway workshops in Jamalpur in Bengal and Ajmer in Rajputana were established in 1862 to maintain the trains, but their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives. Their success increasingly alarmed the British, since the Indian locomotives were just as good, and a great deal cheaper, than the British-made ones. In 1912, therefore, the British passed an act of parliament explicitly making it impossible for Indian workshops to design and manufacture locomotives. Between 1854 and 1947, India imported around 14,400 locomotives from England, and another 3,000 from Canada, the US and Germany, but made none in India after 1912. After independence, 35 years later, the old technical knowledge was so completely lost to India that the Indian Railways had to go cap-in-hand to the British to guide them on setting up a locomotive factory in India again. There was, however, a fitting postscript to this saga. The principal technology consultants for Britain’s railways, the London-based Rendel, today rely extensively on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by Rites, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.
The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonized, their identities and their self-respect. In 1600, when the East India Company was established, Britain was producing just 1.8% of the world’s GDP, while India was generating some 23% (27% by 1700). By 1940, after nearly two centuries of the Raj, Britain accounted for nearly 10% of world GDP, while India had been reduced to a poor “third-world” country, destitute and starving, a global poster child of poverty and famine. The British left a society with 16% literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90% living below what today we would call the poverty line.
The story of India, at different phases of its several-thousand-year-old civilizational history, is replete with great educational institutions, magnificent cities ahead of any conurbations of their time anywhere in the world, pioneering inventions, world-class manufacturing and industry, and abundant prosperity – in short, all the markers of successful modernity today – and there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British
One particularly damning fact: while the British claimed that building railroads in India would allow them to move grain surpluses quickly to famine-stricken areas, the opposite proved true—the British colonial administrators took grain reserves away from starving people, and those in areas connected to imperial infrastructure were thus more likely to die of famine than those without a local railway connection.
By the way while reading about this I learned new to me word, conurbations - a region comprising a number of metropolises, cities, large towns, and other urban areas which, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban or industrially developed area.
the fundamental of building a road with a specific grade/angle, is really simple, and can be done with a bubble level, and a simple wedge that is cut to the angle/degree you want your road to be, and Marty demonstrates!
I get a kick out of simple engineering, as, in my opinion, REAL engineering can be accomplished using the original simple fundamentals of levels, wedges levers, etc.
Plus, I love the surveying stuff
I'd forgotten about this, but about 4 dozen people still run Model Ts on a rally across Montana every June, the Montana 500 (I posted about it in 2013)
To see the post from 2013: https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2013/06/i-just-recently-learned-that-there-is.html
It's been an annual event since 1961 https://www.hagerty.com/media/great-reads/montana-500-model-ts-doing-the-impossible-since-1961
The average speed of the best prepped and tuned Ts, is 54 mph
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