I believe Overmod has some even bigger toys like this one :
Space, money and the time I wanted to invest were some of the reasons why I picked HO scale. I used to be collecting scale models from the EU and the UK (OO gauge 1:76) *only which also included trucks, coaches, buses, trams, and cars or any vehicle that I found it interesting. Another reason is that I prefer to have a full-length train set instead of the scaled down one ( number of cars consisted and the passenger car itself). Anyway, many of my favorite engines are resting in the display case right now or stored in different countries. .
The N scale is too small for me, but for the folks who love the EU and Japan train, there are a lot of choices for them. T gauge is very cute and I can see that many modelers from Japan enjoy making T gauge layout.
Jones 3D Modeling Club https://www.youtube.com/Jones3DModelingClub
Flintlock76I was never a fan of HO either.
The great advantage -- theoretical for most people -- is that HO is in the range of scale where you can get reasonable fidelity to prototype, and good weathering effects, but still model real railroading without needing to own enormous property.
I never cared for most Model Railroading-style 'layouts' that have to have selective compression or locomotive designs with secret articulation to negotiate 24" 'mainline' radii. In my old house in Englewood I experimented with making very long runs of outside-capable track using a glorified roller stamp to press ties, ballast, plates, etc. into weatherproof cement mix with 'top-down' profile guides on either side, then laying rail with a little elastomer in wells underneath -- you can easily get prototypical horizontal and vertical spiraling and superelevation for the price of a little adjustment of your boards -- and I had a more-or-less full size version of the Hell Gate Bridge built up of members glued to large sheets of transparent plastic. You could do the same sort of thing in O gauge (and I did, in Eads, to a lesser extent) or adopt some of the 'garden railway' stuff to larger dimensions, but the bill (and the amount of leveling, foundation, and construction work) rapidly exceeds what most people care to engage in.
I did tinker with N scale to a small extent, but it really isn't small enough to justify trying to overcome the operational problems with making finescale standards work 'outdoors'... or to actually permit true scale mainline configuration in most indoor circumstances. It will be interesting to see how T scale pans out in American prototypes, but I no longer have access to the, ahem, suite of precision manufacturing equipment that would almost surely be needed to build the requisite amount of equipment at T scale and have it run reliably.
Miningman That reminds me of days past when I had the cherry tree layout in my backyard in Burlington, Ontario. My only foray into HO, ( not a fan) they were modules ( got for cheap from a defunct club) that went around a big old cherry tree, scenery, buildings and all. Nature and weather slowly destroyed it, but fun times.
That reminds me of days past when I had the cherry tree layout in my backyard in Burlington, Ontario. My only foray into HO, ( not a fan) they were modules ( got for cheap from a defunct club) that went around a big old cherry tree, scenery, buildings and all. Nature and weather slowly destroyed it, but fun times.
An "abandoned railroad" layout weathered by nature, this is unintentionally creative!
I was never a fan of HO either. I had friends with HO sets while I had Lionel O gauge trains. Their trains seemed to derail all the time, mine ran pefectly. Theirs didn't smoke, mine did.
In all fairness, they were probably cheap HO sets, but it left a bad impression that never went away.
It would have looked better on a lawn, above it of course, and in a closed loop.
However... on your own lawn, not mine, permission could be had maybe.
MiningmanWell they should have cleaned the bottom of the pool before filming. Why all the shots directly into the sun? Also the thing didn't seem to work to well, and, I was waiting for it to fall off the end of the track to its final demise shattering into a thousand pieces.
And ... HEY! YOU KIDS!! GET THAT MONORAIL OFF MY LAWN!!!
Bah! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?
Yeah, and the deck needs resurfacing too.
I suppose the back-lighting was for dramatic effect.
It did look kinda cool, and I would have liked to have seen less "art shots" and more running.
I liked the music, though! It had kind of a Hawaiian "vibe," if you know what I mean.
Well they should have cleaned the bottom of the pool before filming. Why all the shots directly into the sun? Also the thing didn't seem to work to well, and, I was waiting for it to fall off the end of the track to its final demise shattering into a thousand pieces.
There's also a Disney monorail:
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
That was absolutely charming Mr. Jones!
And the music, like a cross between Christmas and "Harry Potter!"
Unfortunately, I don't think I have the patience to assemble something like those models anymore.
Still, they were fascinating to watch!
Let's build this together (2:20):
This is fun, but man, have we gotten off-topic, from surviving Mutually Assured Destruction to preventing World War Two, in Europe anyway.
The Pacific? That's a different war.
Anyway, time to "Down brakes!" and change direction.
If I built a steam locomotive it would look like this...
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alcomike/6904273733/in/photostream/
Yes, the elegant, late, lost, and lamented Erie K1. From the pre-WW1 era to the post-WW2 era, she did her job and did it well, then passed into history, without a trace except in photographs and memories.
She probably even inspired a Joyce Kilmer poem, "The Twelve-Forty-Five..."
https://poets.org/poem/twelve-forty-five
An Erie K1 just deserves to be recreated! Then, if we could only talk New Jersey Transit into adopting a pet steam locomotive...
Nah, not much chance of that right now. Maybe after the incompetants governing the state now finally run it into bankruptcy, Detroit on a grand scale as it were, and an outside commission has to be brought in to pick up the pieces. Who knows? There might be a steam freak in there somewhere.
And then, I'd have to find a heavy Pacific somewhere and have it done over into a Jersey Central "Blue Comet" locomotive!
Flintlock76And interestingly, Winston Churchill in his history of World War Two did say that Neville Chamberlain did have a "hard core" to him, but by the time Hitler had ground him down to the hard core, it was too late.
Chamberlain gets insufficient credit for his character - the official 'pravda' being that he was an umbrella-wielding fop who wimped out when it mattered.
I suspect, after repeated readings of Churchill's memoirs, that the situation was that Chamberlain implicitly overrated the power and authority of the British and their government in the eyes of the European community, and the Nazi-oriented factions in particular. Underlying that British gentility is the underlying implied 'hard core' -- not of Chamberlain himself, which as Churchill notes was considerable, but of the combination of Empire strengths and world banking pre-eminence that the English tacitly assumed assured their pre-eminent position in world affairs. In many cases and places (notably in 18th-to19th-Century India) this kind of arrogance worked and paid off. But in post-Depression Europe, this was of more and more lacking significance. By sometime between 1936 and 1938 Britain, like the famous frog in the pot, had the basis for its diplomatic arrogance basically eroded away, but did not change its methods of doing things accordingly. In part, some of the 'riddle' of contemporary Soviet foreign policy in that same period is more explicable considered in light of actual British attitude toward them.
Good history Father, thank you!
I can understand why Czechoslovakia split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, more than likely there was "bad blood" between the two going way back, and people do have long memories.
And interestingly, Winston Churchill in his history of World War Two did say that Neville Chamberlain did have a "hard core" to him, but by the time Hitler had ground him down to the hard core, it was too late.
As much as Winston critisized him at the time, in the end he did feel sorry for the man.
Indeed. After Hitler had grabbed Bohemia and Moravia, he contacted Fr. Jozef Tiso, head of the Slovak Hlinka Party. Hitler more or less told Fr. Tiso,"Either you proclaim Slovak indepedence, or I will led Hungary retake your land." Hungary did get parts of Slovakia along her borders.
Poland also got a chunk of Moravia along her border. This region is signifigant in that it contained the only major railroad linking the Czech-Moravian region with Slovakia to the East. I confess not knowing that much about Eastern European railroads. Perhaps, someone else here does.....
Flintlock76It's too bad the Czech leaders didn't have a crystal ball to see what was in store for them after the Munich sell-out.
They needed no ball; it was crystal-clear. The only thing that wasn't obvious was the Slovak 'secession movement' that actually resulted in the collapse of the remaining part of 'Czechoslovakia' without intervention by the Western powers ... or coherent resistance by the post-secession 'Czech' government to a Reich protectorate or whatever the excuse was. Certainly Britain and France made it clear that their treaty obligations were with 'Czechoslovakia' and not with any internally-changed successor governments...
The time for the Czechs to assert themselves was in the immediate run-up to the whole Sudetenland/Henlein separation in the first place, most particularly in the specific time Churchill mentions when full rights for the German-identifying minority were proposed. You are mainly correct, I think, in noting that everything 'Hitler really wanted' was in the Sudetenland nominally controlled by Henlein's Nazi sympathetic group, but even losing those assets I think an organized stand could have been made (under League of Nations auspices, if there was common sense left by then) against further 'assimilation' of the remaining part of the country. And yes, I have little doubt that the mealymouthed excuses given for not doing so contributed greatly to Hitler subsequently going into miserably-governed Poland thinking the same effects would prevail. To an extent we're lucky Chamberlain found his (not-inconsiderable, BTW) backbone then, as the thought of where European history would have gone had the Nazi-Soviet Pact continued even a short time longer with Poland effectively partitioned between them and 'no declaration of war' is not a particularly pleasant one. Particularly if we assume Barbarossa delayed a year or two while full militarization preparations continued as anticipated... and further careful efforts made along the lines of the 1937 purges to make the USSR suffer further 'autoimmune reactions' in its professional military capability.
It's too bad the Czech leaders didn't have a crystal ball to see what was in store for them after the Munich sell-out.
They'd have damned Chamberlain and Daladier as cowards, and told Adolf to "Bring it on, punk!"
Sometimes it's better to go down fighting. After giving up the Sudentenland they had nothing to fight with, they lost the border forts and the arms industries like Brno and the Skoda works, which is what I suspect Hitler really wanted.
Ah, what do I know, I wasn't in their shoes and talk is cheap after all. But still...
Since we've managed to bring WWII into the conversation, I feel compelled to add my two cents worth.
I won't go into WWI, nor the sad events which brought about the first Communist state in the world, the number of whose victims may never be known.
I will say this, had Churchill been at Munich in 1938, instead of Chamberlain, Hitler might have been stopped then and there. I have also read that some German generals were prepared to take Hitler out had he involved the country in a reckless war. Munich allowed Hitler another full year to strengthen his forces.
Another figure little known in the West, was the Czechoslovak Army General Sergej Vojcechovsky. Vojcechovsky had been an officer in the Russian Imperial Army. In the Russian Civil War, he fought with the White forces against the Bolsheviks. At that point, he made contact with the Czechoslovak Legion. This was a group of Czechs and Slovaks who were recruited from Austrian POW'S. When it became clear that the White cause was lost, he evacuated Russia, and continued his military career in the newly formed Czechoslovak state.
In 1938 , he had risen to the rank of Lieutenant General in the Czechoslovak Army. In 1938, he wanted to take on Hitler, feeling that the Army was prepared and able. We know that Munich prevented this.
He lived in the Czech region during the Nazi occupation. He aided the underground, but was never caught. He was, however, taken by the Soviets after the war and taken to Siberia where he died.
Most of the information about General Vojcechovsky is written in Russian or Czech. It might be interesting for students of WWII to dig deeper into his history.
Mike did some digging and found this:
Thanks for that Vince!
What a shame we're losing the WW2 vets, in a way, we still need them.
Excellent response Overmod. Instead of 'If I built a steam locomotive Klaus Fuchs gave us ' If I built an atomic bomb' and then handed it to the Stalin and the Communists. Well he recieved a bunch of no prizes from the communists ( Order of Stalin and all that rot) and got to live and die in beautiful colourful liberty loving East Berlin, fabulous resorts and beaches , exciting nightlife and all. That's after his mother drank a bottle of Hydochloric Acid and his sister threw herself from a train, both acts of suicide.
Its truly amazing how really really smart people are so dumb that they blindly followed a perverse and murderous regime and philosophy. I guess people want to be 'looked after' rather than cherish freedom.
Well in any case it still goes on despite Camus exploring, and philosophizing, and warning on the true roots of evil.
Despite all the right/left stuff on our side, as a Canuck, I'm sure glad it was the Americans that did and got it correct and hopefully will continue to do so.
(Wish we had kept our passenger trains and all the competing entities though on both sides of our border.) Yeah, I know , I know.
For Memorial Day in the USA I present this ... 96 year old WWII vet performs the National Anthem to huge crown at a stadium. Amazing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWzwoczr5GE
Penny TrainsI'm referring to the promise Truman floated in 1945 to not build any more bombs if all countries would promise not to develop their own.
It does have to be said that he exerted considerable force on Britain not to take up any of the technical 'fruits' of the wartime Tube Alloys collaboration, when Churchill for instance was certain the Empire was going to share in having 'the power' going forward. It is, in my opinion, far less certain he had much, if any, effect on the USSR (Stalin very famously referred to him as 'that noisy little shopkeeper') and we know the attempts to find and copy both the information we freely produced and the 'secrets' regarding the physics, metallurgy, etc. were being assiduously picked up by hook or by crook during the years culminating in the Rosenberg trial. There is little question (no question, in my opinion) that the Soviet government under Stalin would have abided by any promise made to Truman or the subsequently-formed United Nations, and the work under Beria would have continued just as it did, if not more quickly, had we "shared" the secrets of device fabrication with other powers.
It was popular to dismiss bullies like that awful McCarthy as demagogues, but the 'other side' in the Forties and Fifties is far from blameless in handing serious technical weapons details to perhaps the last government in the postwar world either entitled or morally suited to possessing them. That is also not to say that people like Kapitsa or Sakharov were not capable of designing things on their own (Truman didn't believe that; he was convinced there had to be spying and skulduggery because the Russians weren't advanced enough as a people to comprehend the physics and technology - I don't remember whether he termed them 'asiatics' or 'orientals' as an insult, but it was one or the other.)
Of course the 'typical' Russian performance in the United Nations in the latter part of the Forties led both to the perceived need for forces that could assure Kennan's "containment" at low achievable postwar military costs and to the increasing understanding that people like Jimmy Byrnes would be hopelessly buffaloed into tolerating puppet governments (1) anywhere the Soviet Union whined it wanted 'buffer states' for its 'security', or (2) anywhere in the world the Soviet Union could foment fear, uncertainty and doubt that might increase the likelihood of establishing puppet governments there. Meanwhile the USSR had no particular trouble maintaining a very large standing army in Europe to help enforce its "Mutual Assistance Pacts" (as Churchill termed them) and so forth.
Now, I'll grant you that the world might have been better had Roosevelt survived (Stalin at least respected him enough to listen) and the United States Government been resolute enough in the immediate postwar years to set up precisely the sort of 'international atomic energy agency' that could administer nuclear technology fairly while putting the kibosh on, let's say, Pakistan-style nuclear acquisition strategies. However, having seen what the United Nations very quickly devolved into, I'd suspect that any sufficiently determined but morally deficient government would have done with atomic weapons precisely what Hitler did with conventional munitions -- with about the same 'overripe melons crushed together' response from European "democracies" as seen in the previous decade.
[quote]Thus, eliminating a lot of pain and suffering that the world went through in the intervening 74 years.[//quote]
The problem that looms the largest involves what I think is the better argument: what if Truman, for all the complex reasons he considered, had not proceeded with development of the Super in 1950 (which, remember, is before Ulam's breakthrough in thinking that made high-prompt-yield thermonuclear devices possible). That alone produced the paradoxical effect of subjecting society to the true insecurity involved with large numbers of deliverable weapons of mass destruction -- atomic bombs don't really count as more than slightly enlarged terrorist weapons of dubious strategic utility unless you use them in financially impossible numbers -- while undeniably delivering the longest period of peace between major wars I think has been seen in Western civilization. The United States in fact had to invent a whole science of how to define and fight limited conflicts (or cozen its way into avoiding them, for example in Guatemala or Allende's Chile or Nicaragua) and most of its attempts to re-introduce nuclear technology in tactical warfare were either ridiculed or became the subject of highly organized and well-crafted propaganda.
However, we know several things now that Truman didn't: a number of Russian physicists were working on fusion in enriched lithium deuteride capable of substantial yield using a design different from Teller-Ulam; they were certainly not limited in any way in designing for as high a yield as they could get for more and more effective straitjackets for the aforementioned noisy little shopkeeper; the infrastructure for high-volume production of lithium-6 was well underway in Russia years before the United States took it up; and I think there is little doubt that had the Soviets achieved even a low-megaton-yield weapon together with an effective delivery system in the absence of a practical deterrent we would not have liked the foreign policy taken up sometime in the early Fifties as soon as we did yet another thing their government did not like enough.
Louis Strauss (pronounced "straws" according to him) ...
He was Southern - that last part of 'straws' was very soft.
... pushed fear into the minds of lawmakers which allowed evil to endure and flourish.
I like him even less than you do, perhaps amusingly because I don't view him as enabling evil so much as the precise kind of expediency that Camus so hated. All the wrong sorts of 'bourgeois' trait that make people dislike Truman were institutionalized in Strauss and his developing influence over the AEC and nuclear policy; as you note, they aren't a basis for unilateral actions that are responsible use of great power (which is how an increasing amount of what passed for 'diplomacy' after 1947 began to seem).
I will say this about Strauss, though: here is his justification for recommending to Truman that we proceed with the 'Super':
Obviously the current atomic bomb as well as the proposed thermonuclear weapon are horrible to contemplate. All war is horrible. Until, however, some means is found of eliminating war, I cannot agree with those of my colleagues who feel that an announcement should be made by the President to the effect that the development of the thermonuclear weapon will not be undertaken by the United States at this time. This is because: (a) I do not think the statement will be credited in the Kremlin; (b) that when and if it should be decided subsequent to such a statement to proceed with the production of the thermonuclear bomb, it might in a delicate situation, be regarded as an affirmative statement of hostile intent; and (c) because primarily until disarmament is universal, our arsenal must not be less well equipped than with the most potent weapons that our technology can devise.
Meanwhile, Judge Kaufman was one of my father's patients, and it was notable that he never wavered in his opinion that the Rosenberg death sentence was justified (a position that I don't share). Part of that was the perception that 'leaking' of the precise bomb construction data accelerated the Russian knowledge of practical initiator design for fusion devices by what might have been a dramatically long time, or allowed a high assurance of success. However, it might be argued that an almost equally significant "enabler" was the great diplomatic-bag patent shuffle that was run inside Roosevelt's government "to aid our loyal ally Russia" -- most of the necessary industrial techniques and trade secrets, etc. to make the equipment for, say, practical exchange from quadrivalent to hexavalent uranium were given to them free, at a time when it was already becoming clear that the postwar world was not going to be sweetness, light, and neo-League-of-Nations rationality... not because of us.
It is also interesting to speculate on the actual contribution of Klaus Fuchs to the Soviet strategic design capability. It is a little-known fact, but there are only two names on the (secret) patent for the hydrogen bomb, and one of them is his.
Ye gods, how far we've gotten from designing Little Rascals locomotives of statistically-significant large rapid unscheduled disassembly potentiation upon improperly-executed thermodynamic system enablement ...
I'm not talking about physics.
I'm referring to the promise Truman floated in 1945 to not build any more bombs if all countries would promise not to develop their own.
Thus, eliminating a lot of pain and suffering that the world went through in the interviening 74 years.
Louis Strauss (pronounced "straws" according to him) pushed fear into the minds of lawmakers which allowed evil to endure and flourish.
Penny TrainsI just thought of something. If I built a steam locomotive, it would probably look like this:
This just in: I found a reference to what Penny would do with one of Porta's locomotive designs and posted it in the "Schmidt superheater alternative" thread on the Trains Magazine 'Locomotives' thread. A couple of interesting pictures there for people following this discussion...
(Fired up on a barge, so there is no scenic crater ... don't blame me, blame the Government...)
Penny TrainsI blame that one on Teller and Louis Strauss.
That's not fair, although I have to admit that anything you could say about that latter miserable shoe salesman wouldn't be enough.
There was no reason in that era to suspect the (n,2n) reaction in natural lithium, for the comparatively simple reason that it only appeared to a physically-significant degree with the kind of neutron flux produced by, say, a fusion-device core. Were it more observable, it would have showed up in some of the earlier Alarm Clock testing, or perhaps the Greenhouse shot that tested an approach to 'boosting' using the same general principle with a small capsule of LiD (but I suspect the lithium that was tested there would have been mainly enriched lithium-6, and the observations biased toward those reaction products because it was 'common knowledge' that Li7 wouldn't fuse...)
In other words, it was observed the first time an adequate volume of lithium-7 was exposed to a proper neutron flux ... in Shrimp and then the Runts ... as magnified by the result of the remainder of those unexpected 2x neutrons in the uranium tamper. Easy for folks in hindsight to complain 'those eggheads should have figured this out before blowing up half the world', but I think you'd be more sympathetic to them if you knew more of the physics involved.
If you are interested in spreading blame around, much of it ought to go to Truman for first prioritizing and then pushing work on the 'Super' from 1950 on, after the shock of the first confirmed Russian atomic test was added to things like 'losing' Eastern Europe and China in that couple of prior years that 'containment' was visibly failing to thrive. There are other potential culprits or contributors, which I'll get to in a moment.
There is a story about this that I can no longer find in references -- perhaps Mike will read this and provide a link -- that has Teller talking to Oppie about the exciting promise of a fusion Super (something he had become something of a bore about from 1945 up to the time Ulam and he actually figured out how to make the thing work). Teller went on about the prospective yield net of losses, until Oppenheimer thought about it a bit and asked (paraphrased) 'how big would the primary fireball from such a device be'? Teller thought a bit, and said 'about three miles', at which point Oppenheimer started laughing. Teller, a bit discomfited at this response, asked what was so funny about that, to which Oppie replied 'I was just trying to think of a military target that size'.
Of course, that wasn't precisely the answer by that point in history. Notably we had a decidedly unsavory train of evolution from Douhet by way of Trenchard and Harris, which made it 'legal' to throw fire on civilians because they were 'complicit' in their government's actions. Then we have that ineffable Yalie William Liscum Borden, who had a dramatic vision of the future seeing a V2 flight while returning on a bomb run and rather intelligently extrapolated this to what would be possible with atomic weapons ... and who just happened to have the ear of Louis Johnson at that critical time in defense planning.
You could also blame people in the Eisenhower administration for at least the implementation, if not the whole of the planning, for the whole 'more bang for the buck' mutual-assured-deterrence planning in the Fifties going forward, which greatly reduced any need for expensive conventional forces for 'deterrence of communist aggression' and whatnot by attempting to make any real strategic war "unthinkable". At least we didn't get into major production of ABM and then MARVs, just as the Russians didn't actually get FOBS working or actually finish their manned orbital facilities!
With a bit of 20/20 hindsight that most critics of the American program often ignore the timing and priority of, we also have to face Sakharov's insights into designing a weaponizable thermonuclear device, and Bartini's protege Korolev's practical design of a delivery system for it. Both of which came later, and made the earlier work done on dry thermonuclears look extremely farsighted ... but that's a whole other argument.
Erik_Mag(no repeat of the Castle Bravo FUBAB (beyond all belief))
I blame that one on Teller and Louis Strauss. It shows how the fear of a thing that could happen can pollute your thinking enough to push something you don't understand (Teller's "Super") into development faster than you're capable of.
Anyhoo. I blame my knowledge of fubar on PBS.
Penny Trains Yes, that's called an "unintended atmospheric release" crater. I think it comes somewhere between snafu and fubar on the goof scale.
Yes, that's called an "unintended atmospheric release" crater. I think it comes somewhere between snafu and fubar on the goof scale.
That's the crater from Project Sedan. This was a test shot to develop techniques for nuclear excavation, with one proposed application was lowering the grade for Route 66/I-40 and the AT&SF line west of Needles.
The "device" had a 100kT yield and was designed to get most of the yield out of fusion to reduce the long half-life fallout, though there would be a fair amont of very short half life fallout from the fusion neutrons (no repeat of the Castle Bravo FUBAB (beyond all belief)). IIRC, the physics behind nuclear excavation of trenches requires some release of the vaporized rock - note that trenching is done by setting off several devices simultaneously.
Popular Mechanics had a nice article on nuclear excavation in either a late 1963 or 1964 issue, with a diagram of what happened with the Sedan test.
Out in my area, they made a movie called FUBAR not so long ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUBAR_(film)
If you haven't seen this already you must, it's an instant redneck classic.
But I guess you have to be an Albertan to understand that it is closer to reality than fiction.
Give'r!!!
Greetings from Alberta
-an Articulate Malcontent
When I was 9, and my youngest brother was 10, our 23 year old brother came out of the Air Corps, and one of our 19 year olf brothers came out of the Navy, they told us that the "F" stood for "Fouled." In later years, I learned what the more common word was. Our other 19 year old brother did not comment on it after he came out of the Navy.
Johnny
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