Not an official Lionel car, but still worth looking for. I added the drums and drips of glowing waste by the way.
Trains, trains, wonderful trains. The more you get, the more you toot!
Hilarious!
Al least there's no-one glowing in the dark in that area of Pennsylvania!
Forty years? Wow, where does the time go?
I also carry hot stuff in standard gauge gondolas:
After all, they were "Radium happy" in those days!
"Radium happy" indeed! My God, if they only knew...
Ever hear about the "Radium Girls?" Not pleasant reading.
Anyhow, when I was in the Marines in the '70s they were still using radium on compass dials, although the compass cases had radiation hazard warnings. It wasn't enough to kill you, but the warnings were there to make sure the compasses were treated as hazardous waste if they had to be disposed of.
Guess I can offer a "glowing" recommendation?
Regards, Roy
Flintlock76Ever hear about the "Radium Girls?" Not pleasant reading.
Ooooohhhh yes. The watch dial painters that "sharpened" their brush tips with their lips after dipping them in the radium paint. Horrifying tumors.
BTW I found a deck of radium coated playing cards in our attic. Due to their age I doubt they're "hot" any more. My uranium glass earrings are probably more active.
wrmcclellanGuess I can offer a "glowing" recommendation? Whistling
OY!
The playing cards are probably OK. I'd leave one or two out in the sunlight for several hours and see if they glow afterward. If not, they're fine. If they do, it's still probably not worth worrying about as long as you don't handle them all the time.
I wouldn't worry about the uranium glass earrings at all. People have been collecting uranium glass for years with no ill-effects.
We were literally just telling our daughter about TMI the other day - not realizing it was the anniversary!
From the TCA Wastern Division website: "In 1979 after the infamous leak at the 3-mile Island nuclear power plant in PA, Newbraugh Brothers issued their 3-mile Island Box cars in N, HO, O gauge and Standard gauge. The Standard gauge 3-mile Island box car was a redecorated Red Forney box car. The artwork was designed and printed by Seymour N. Knight and the cars were distributed by Newbraugh Brothers Toys (NBT). The 'O' gauge source was a repainted Lionel Trains Inc. 9400 series box car with a 9700 series end plate. These cars were custom made for the TCA Atlantic Division for their November 1979 quarterly meeting held at Westover Country Club. NBT used Pleasant Valley Process to do the screen printing. NBT in partnership with Pleasant Valley Printing produced a boxed 3-Mile Island 'O' gauge train set of its own containing a locomotive, box car, tank cars, searchlight car and caboose using redecorated Lionel stock. NBT/PVP produced 20 different toy train cars carrying TMI logos. Except for the 'O' gauge boxcar, quantities of each were one hundred or less. Another NBT/PVP TMI product was a coal hopper marked with the legend, Mother Nature's Fuel - Coal and a circular seal containing the words, Atomic Energy Poison encircling the cartoon face of Mr. Yuk."
http://www.tcawestern.org/nbt.htm
Don't you just love gallows humor?
The event was a bit of a tragic farce in and of itself. The movie, "The China Syndrome" had just hit theaters and contained the lines "The number of people killed would depend on which way the wind was blowing. Render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable." Newspaper editors and radio and tv station managers initially sent reporters who had seen the movie to Harrisburg. And the screenwriter of The China Syndrome was on site as a consultant for the press.
The accident was a standard case of technology being developed with one fatal flaw: the designers hadn't considered what would happen if plant personnel interviened and turned off systems the computer was controlling. If they hadn't, the system would have functioned as designed (defense in depth failsafe systems) and the plant would have reached cold shutdown with no damage.
Babcock and Wilcox, the boilermakers and plant designers, couldn't even get through on the phone to tell them to get water moving through the core until after 50% of the reactor had already melted down.
But look on the bright side. TMI was cleaned up a ALOT faster than Chernobyl, which is still a mess.
Flintlock76 "Radium happy" indeed! My God, if they only knew... Ever hear about the "Radium Girls?" Not pleasant reading. Anyhow, when I was in the Marines in the '70s they were still using radium on compass dials, although the compass cases had radiation hazard warnings. It wasn't enough to kill you, but the warnings were there to make sure the compasses were treated as hazardous waste if they had to be disposed of.
All these horrific man-made disasters should be remembered! Imagine how many of these "Radium Girls" were just trying to make a living for their family, probably from the grassroots; and their hard work was paid off with a vicious, mortal lie, asserted permanent injury or even some of the worst ways to die! I always agree with a friend from Classic Trains who told me that he thinks our world is probably run by the devil.
Becky's boxcar for the 3 mile island incident inspired me to do something on this topic!
Jones 3D Modeling Club https://www.youtube.com/Jones3DModelingClub
You want scary Mr Jones? Research a place called "Mayak".
This one is upwind of me and should be shut down.
A boric acid leak corroded the lid of the pressure vessel (2500psi) at Davis Besse NPS (east of Toledo) down to 3/8" before being discovered.
Penny Trains You want scary Mr Jones? Research a place called "Mayak". This one is upwind of me and should be shut down. A boric acid leak corroded the lid of the pressure vessel (2500psi) at Davis Besse NPS (east of Toledo) down to 3/8" before being discovered.
Cheers, Becky. I removed tons of files from my HD a few days ago, there were many photos of radiation poisoning in Russia and Eastern Europe which I saved from my old computer of 2004; many of those were children who suffering from radiation sickness. These were some material I used for a website once hosted on Geocities about various topics but mainly focus on man-made disasters. I didn't relocate my website after Geocities was shut down, because I was fed up with the unchangeable fact that Homo sapiens is renowned for its excellent capability of recommitting the same error and ignoring warnings. (The most horrific thing for me is that I am one of them).Ironically, my computer is indirectly powered by 4 pairs of nuclear reactor located 40km away from a tier one global city, even closer than the Indian Point Energy Center to New York City. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011 reminds me of a rather short segment "Mount Fuji in Red" in the movie "Dreams", written and directed by Akira Kurosawa in 1990......Let's see how Santa Claus deal with the next inevitable disaster.
Aaaah Geocities. "Your page is yours forever!"
Penny Trains Aaaah Geocities. "Your page is yours forever!"
"You page is yours forever (offline, or in your hard disk)"
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