Overmod. I am new to your posts but found your comments fascinating. As a graduate Engineer, what I hear you saying is that you a a strong advocate for the KISS principle.
And secondly, Budd obviously designed sufficent strength in the RDC's to support the power units without sagging as they still operate in Canada. The Metroliners that morphed into cab cars had the strength to carry the rectifiers and control equipment and operate at 120mph. They are still serving as cab cars. But the SPV design flaws make me wonder whether one of those pointy haired bosses took over Budd's engineering dept.
And third, I had an experience with project creep. Back in the early 80's, I was in a telecom department and a division supervisor desired a system to allow a dispatcher to call crews when he was overwhelmed during a storm and too busy (and no one else was available) to call and go through the time to get them to come in. Found one and for about $40K, we could get it. But then he wanted it to be able to intefrate into the payroll system. Then since we had districts that were normally closed at night, he wanted it to be able to be remotely controled by three remote offices. The manufacturer finally told us to, well you can guess what he told us. If this supervisor had started small, demonstrated what he saved by using the simple version and then upgraded it to add the features, I think it would have been good but I wasted a lot of time and effort for naught. This was before all the "modern" telephony equipment of today. It used casette tapes.
But what happened to wizlish and RME?
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"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Firelock76 That's OK brother, leave it as is. I suspect you're a little rusty after the long absense.
That's OK brother, leave it as is. I suspect you're a little rusty after the long absense.
That Overmod cretainly had built up a" head of steam" during his ' hiatus' from being a poster around here....
So, I guess, a back is in order!
Firelock76Wow. Makin' up for lost time, ain't-cha?
For some reason I thought it was a private message. Would not have gone on at nearly that length if I'd realized it was an open post.
I'll edit it down when I have time.
Flin Flon to Churchill, man that sounds like a fun trip!
When you get to Churchill say hello to the polar bears for me, if they happen to be in town.
Firelock- Each morning I put a pod in the Tassimo, then go off to do my copying for my first class...upon completion the Tassimo has a nice cappuccino waiting for me. So the 2 go hand in hand and neither has given me a second of grief. I will make sure no one sees you're accounts of the problems you have encountered...don't want to give anyone any ideas.
The copier is also very polite...says please all the time and asks me to be patient while its calibrating, sometimes in the middle of copying.
I'm off to Flin Flon tomorrow for my annual week long geology field school with the freshman. It's my one a year chance to check out both the Hudson Bay Railway ( Flin Flon and The Pas to the Port of Churchill) and the Keewatin Railway ( native owned and run...The Pas to Lynn Lake..still running a mixed regularly scheduled). They also have a museum there with the big electrics that Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting ran for years and a lot of old railroad cars and equipment ( Flangers, Snow Plows, Snow "Brooms", huge side dumps, smelter cars ) and old mining equipment.
Miningman, that new copier will make you a cappuccino? That's great!
Just do your friendly local copier repair technician a favor and don't let anyone try to make a grilled cheese sandwich by trying to run the bread and cheese through the fusing unit. I've dealt with that situation. It wasn't pretty.
And don't let anyone try to heat up their morning doughnuts but putting them on the copy glass and running the scanning lamp. Dealt with that too.
You'd be amazed.
Overmod & Firelock- Our new copier, purchased last year, for the Mining Dept. at college here in Northern Saskatchewan, is worth every penny and then some. It is simple, easy and I swear it will make you a cappuccino if you're nice to it. Did a nice job publishing those RR merger maps from Kalmbach in color, but don't tell anyone. So someone is doing something incredibly right.
Outside of that I understood maybe half of what Overmod has stated and I'm a Mining Engineer and a P.Geo. Sheesh.
Wow. Makin' up for lost time, ain't-cha?
Now that I think about it, I believe that article I read was in "Playboy." Mind you I only used to buy that mag for the articles. :)
Funny you should mention the B-26. The Martin "Marauder" (not the Douglas A-26 "Invader" that was later re-classified as a B-26) disappeared pretty quickly after WW2. Tricky to fly, difficult and expensive to maintain, once the need for it was gone so was the B-26. The B-25 on the other hand, easy to fly and maintain and economical to operate lasted in Air Force use until the late 1950's, so there's a lot to be said for "keepin' it simple."
The A-26 lasted into the 1960's and saw some VietNam useage.
And to keep this railroad-related, remember that great Burt Lancaster film "The Train?" Those twin engine bombers that work over the railyards are A-26's.
Firelock76 that thing I said about engineers trying to impress each other, and mind you I'm not saying they're all guilty of this, I got from a magazine article years ago about VCRs, of all things, and just "WHY are they so damn complicated and WHY are they loaded with features I'll never use?"
AHA! You're out of the range of engineers here -- you're into product placement and design for marketing. And here there is a great range of the sort of thing you're describing ... and worse.
We all know about creeping featurism, usually without either a good sense of coherent design or proper understanding of either UI (the layout and action of the physical controls) and IxD (the experience you have as you use the controls to accomplish things or acquire touch familiarity - we call the expanded version of that 'haptic familiarity', and a good example of it in action is in one of the Government movies on 'how to fly bombers' for the B-26 Widowmaker -- I saw it on one of the old TV programs, probably Wings, but I'll bet it's now on Youtube.)
In product development, you probably have heard of planned product obsolescence ( a term I learned as a child from reading Vance Packard). You also probably know about things like design patents, 'look and feel', and the lovely Japanese practice of rolling out functionality in incompatible phases, stereo sound on VCRs being the canonical example I used to use.
"Engineers" are only the downtrodden handmaidens of these kinds of 'design' (just as they are for wacky modern 'architecture' of the Frank Gehry type). Combined with this is an increasing tendency toward ugly, flat, or trendy design from goofy people like Jonny Ive, and a general sloppiness (perhaps related to a lack of intellectual interest or rigor in common courtesy and communication evidenced in part by disregard for spelling or intelligent grammar and rhetoric) in how software, including help and instruction in its use, is implemented.
I've assumed that things haven't changed, times change, products change, people don't.
In some respects yes, in some respects no. Most interesting is how people's perceptions 'expand' when enabling technologies of the right kinds -- especially pervasive ones with acceptable cost structures -- are provided. A very good example of how the bitter mixes with the sweet, but both are important and notable as a form of human perceptual evolution, is cellular radio used for telephony. Once you have full on-demand telephone connectivity entirely separate from location, and both the device and the service are reduced in cost sufficiently, or made to seem low enough cost, very interesting things start to happen. One of these is the good and bad effects of 'distraction' in two respects: communicating by voice while doing other tasks, and having to manipulate the device or its controls while doing so. Now there have been cognitive-science studies done on the nature of consciousness expansion -- the basic neuroscience being roughly similar to why old married people tend to die soon after their spouses -- going back in fact to telephone use before the Hawthorne experiments. The problem is that many of the expanded traits are not either of a kind or realized telos that makes people or mesoscale social groups or societies as a whole "better".
And I as a card-carrying Connecticut Yankee on both sides of my family believe implicitly in the perfectibility of humanity, the importance of proper "American"-style values and manners/grace, and both the desirability and relative great worth of implementing changes for the dismal aspects of current 'society' and economic practice, ideally within no more than two generations.
I work on copiers, and those things are loaded with features that most people will never use. All they want to do is walk up, insert the original, and hit the start button.
Strange you should mention that, it's one of the areas I carry on about in IxDA probably more than I should. Let me give you an illustrative example of a similar "interface opportunity", and then come back to copiers (and word-processing systems) afterward.
I was one of the very early adopters of the idea of 'augmented reality', which is the use of synthesized "CGI" to add or modify attributes to the basic perception of the real world (as distinct from VR, which substitutes large amounts of synthetic vision or 'edits' visual data from the world). My old canonical example of how pervasive computing and AR converge in a practical application is the "personal thermostat". We all know that thermostats never set to the right temperature where you actually are, but we might assume it is relatively easy for a good HVAC system to track your identity and position, and start jiggering with vents, fans, and boosters to deliver proper airflow at a corresponding temperature, ambient noise, etc. to where you are in "3D space". How do you control that when you don't want to have to keep recursively talking to a voice interface?
We have a simple device worn on the hand, which responds to the accelerations that produce gesture and to the positions of parts of a hand in 3-dimensional space, and which has a couple of simple haptic devices (forerunners of what crApple tried to do with their Haptic Engine, and in fact representing what that device ought to consist of). You're also wearing a light display that can project what appears to be a 3-dimensional movable image at appropriate light levels and non-flickering frame rate where it takes up a 'stable position' in your view no matter how your body and head move.
You gesture and snap, and the thermostat controller appears where you want it; further gestures (by convention - part of the 15 minutes of nerd activity the old Apple Manhattan Project said new users would need to learn) let you resize it, change its position or distance from you, adjust brightness or colors or transparency, etc. What you see as default is very simple, looking a bit like the three-panel display for heater and AC control in an early-90s Taurus: there is a large temperature display that shows commanded temperature (and a smaller one showing actual temperature) and two fairly large buttons with a red 'up' arrow graphic and a blue 'down' one. As you reach to these, the haptic engine 'taps' and also gives force feedback so it feels like you're successfully pressing and holding these with good activation, and gives some sound feedback if desired; the number scrolls up and down, and for the range between about 68 and 74 degrees it provides smaller tenths of a degree.
If you want more controls, you gesture again, and a panel folds open that shows fan controls, and a certain amount of distribution control. Gesture again, and more controls appear for programming, crossloading configurations from your cell phone or your stored preferences, taking advantage of utility 'microbilling' offers by adding or shedding devices to make best use of power (in six-second increments) .. lots and lots of opportunities, any one or group of which you can mirror to another device or bring up with an interface better optimized to that device. So you can have simplicity, or a tailored group of just what you need or want to use, or the drink of water from a firehose, or indeed the whole powerplant control room for a smart home, depending only on what you want, and snap and it closes up and leaves you alone.
Back in the days of the old Salutation Protocol, it became possible to use the mastering conventions in such a way that a handheld user token or other personal identifier could be recognized by 'connected office equipment' and put in a default configuration -- including APIs or screens for controls. (In those days we didn't have color TV panels, so we had to use virtual desktops on plasma screens and the like, but it's surprising how good a bitmapped grayscale display can be when doing device control.). Inherent in this was the ability for one device to 'master' others for short periods of time, then switch to become 'driven' by another entirely dependent on context. So ... a user walks in, and the copier wakes up and displays the default screen the user wants to see. He puts documents on the ADF or under the glass and all the appropriate fine settings are adjusted based on sensor information and machine characteristics -- he can then scan on the copier, send a copy to the fax machine and have it sent at correct resolution to multiple recipients (and keep track of who was busy or who was out of paper or ink, etc.), have some of the pages printed on the dye-sub printer with correct rotation, scaling and color balance ... etc.
I was lucky to come into IxD right at the time Alan Kay and Alan Cooper were developing ideas in what was then called HMI ("human-machine interface") that involved the best ways to achieve user enthusiasm for complex technologies that would otherwise rapidly become confusing or frustrating. Now Cooper and I had a fundamental disagreement over whether you should say 'no' to a user (he said never, I said frequently but always to teach them to be better) and I notice he has now gotten to the dangerous point that he says 'don't let your users define their experiences' -- he means, of course, don't let them limit you to expectations, but we've seen dramatically how worthless it is when the wrong sort of system architect craps up the art of the possible without providing users the ability to Get What They Thought They Needed Until They Can Craft What They Do.
All copiers ought to have a default switch that pulls up basic functionality -- the catch is that the 'default' settings often involve assumptions that are not common or easily selected, and there is a fairly wide range of abend conditions that 'machine common sense' -- or customer common sense -- can't necessarily provide in advance. Showing those in a haptically-optimized form may involve considerable complexity in the display or controls, but that does not necessarily add to the foreground attention or IxD sequence that the user goes through.
So, in your example, the 'basic' display shows a couple of icons for basic paper select, the big green button for print, and the indication of where to load the original (it will change depending on how the user puts the original in, loads a memory stick, etc.) If he puts the original on the ADF 'wrong side up', there is no reason why the copier shouldn't just use the duplexing feature to reverse the pages and not print the blanks even if the scanner has to run them. If the image doesn't fill the whole of a given 8x11 page, or isn't rotated as presented, THEN is the time for the copier to ask -- page by page if necessary, and showing little before-and-after thumbnails -- what should be done with uncertain things, or to remember certain types of thing as persistent (until told otherwise). If there is a problem with the output quality, or low toner, then and only then does the interface bring up what needs to be addressed, or help a user find it without having to page through menus that change with each new release.I might also add that I'm sympathetic both to stick-in-the-muds and those who aren't early adopters: if you have a dot-addressable touch panel on a machine, there ought to be a way to make it emulate an older or different machine quickly and easily -- for example by downloading configuration from the Internet or the user's local environment, or pulling it out of ROM like the one inside a universal TV remote control -- including not only the default but augmented form of help system loaded with the UI conventions.
I was also gung-ho years ago for the idea that people would have little 'copier' applets on their computer or cell phone, and would build controls that did what they expected; you'd establish handshake with a copier in some securable way, perhaps inductive coupling or that IBM 'handshake' interface they developed for the Japanese to share electronic business cards, and then control the copier directly from your own device. There are now problems with security and malicious code that probably make that version unworkable in practice... but it was a fun idea.
By the way, NEVER hit the start button, you'll kill the micro-switch under it eventually.
Any halfwit engineer knows the importance of overtravel, compliance, and cushioning in keyboard design, and the practical use and tuning of dashpot functionality to control acceleration and damping of a moving device. I was lucky enough to see an example of a well-optimized typewriter keyboard (it was a machine for people learning touch-typing, and had such a delightful feel that you didn't want to stop typing on it!) which had all the different factors involved in 'expression playing' and it was not a far piece of work to get the different physical feedback and operation associated with various zones of key press, actuation, dwell, and release customizable.
This applies to the big green button quite simply: you dashpot it with something appropriately thixotropic, so the actuation speed through the engagement range of the microswitch is controlled to constant speed regardless of the force or impulse on the button then, and put progressive compliance in the 'deadband' between the switch closing and 'just before' the physical switch mechanism bottoms out. (The key return should be rapid back through the switch throw, then damped in rebound so the switch mechanism doesn't inertially overshoot and hit the upstop to cause damage) This is all done with a couple of pieces of tuned elastomer molded to the right shape and perhaps easily field-replaceable if it ages or gets torn...not a lot of expense, but you need to know something about physics, polymers, and haptics to get the button operation right from the switch's point of view and then the button operation sensible or optimized from the user's point of view...
At least Dilbert doesn't try to design products no layman can figure out.
But his pointy-haired boss actively does ... and his dog has made a quasi-religious crusade out of just that! More to the point, there are plenty of people who not only try to get you to accept 'it's not a bug, it's a feature', they'll get you to swallow things that are worse and believe they're tasty Fla-Vor-Aid. (Take Apple Pages 5, or any version release of Photos, as good examples. Apple in fact has the Grand Example of Sucky Pretense with respect to this: They made a popular nonlinear film-editing product called Final Cut Pro. Now film editing is not exactly a domain of idiots and cretins, or uncreative people who know the best ways to achieve what they want. There's a long evolution, like the one that gave us the steering wheel for guiding a road vehicle, that informs how professionals organize and then prepare a given 'cut' of a movie.
Apple came along with a major revision of this software that forced users to adopt the pathetic little timeline-based paste-video-clips-together interface in the iMovie consumer freeware product. When the professionals complained about being slammed into this wretched excuse, Apple started telling them that they didn't understand how to make modern, 'beautiful' productions, everything they thought they knew was wrong or at least inferior to Apple design, and that they should just suck up and learn to use the perfect software .. and forget all the tools and utilities that were no longer available...
Didn't go over too well at SMPTE. And still hasn't. If I have anything to say about it, it never will.
OK Overmod, whatever you say, but that thing I said about engineers trying to impress each other, and mind you I'm not saying they're all guilty of this, I got from a magazine article years ago about VCRs, of all things, and just "WHY are they so damn complicated and WHY are they loaded with features I'll never use?"
I've assumed that things haven't changed, times change, products change, people don't. I work on copiers, and those things are loaded with features that most people will never use. All they want to do is walk up, insert the original, and hit the start button. By the way, NEVER hit the start button, you'll kill the micro-switch under it eventually.
PS: Glad to have you back!
Let's try this, not that much of it still is fully coherent as started...
OK, I "get" the problem with a heat-activated elevator button where the elevator will get called to the floor with a fire on it. But the points in that paragraph are going "woosh" right over my head.
I’ve typed a reply so many times I don’t even remember my own point clearly. One point is that the engineers got so ‘attached’ to the idea of a zero-mechanical-movement solution that they produced a solution that – in addition to producing precisely the wrong effect in fires – required a great deal of expensive additional equipment and points of failure ‘behind the wall’, all implemented with the ‘60s equivalent of fancy relays and flat-packs and perhaps not easy for even skilled repair people to diagnose and repair without FRUs. Not to mention the things that are wrong with the user haptics, especially when the little light in the button burns out and it’s impossible for a user to tell the button has ‘worked’ (and may start banging harder and harder because ‘it isn’t pushing’…
Excessively complex, expensive, often fragile technology solving a problem nobody really said they had, in a way that is often worse than the alternative. Another example of this is the bypass hose on a Ford 460 motor, about an inch long between two almost-touching cast nipples, probably replacing a cast joint with gasket that might suffer differential expansion under repeated thermal cycling that might lead to weep leaks. Under typical conditions this hose would age just like the other underhood hoses, but I think saw relatively higher pressure, as it seemed to fail sooner than the others, and when it did it would either burst or separate longitudinally. When this happened all the engine coolant would blow out, including most of the water down in the block, in a matter of minutes – and there was no effective way to patch or clamp the hose – and to replace it you had to pull the water pump off after disconnecting the shrouds, fan, belts, etc. – this assuming you had the foresight to bring the necessary hose. If you did not shut the engine down promptly, all the aluminum castings on top of the engine, including the carburetor, would rapidly warp, stop working correctly, and become essentially irreparable. All this from a design detail that most sensibly-designed engines didn’t even have. (A very pointed demonstration of this kind of ‘design’ can be seen in details of the first-generation Mercedes-Benz R class, particularly in the air suspension, the ‘remote’ transmission selector, and the panorama sunroof.)
[quote]I don't know much of the context of the SPV-2000 apart from it being a revised RDC based on the Metroliner carbody that was unsuccessful in service, it being claimed that fine snow got into the "works" in its intended use in the Northeast for service supplementing the Northeast Corridor electric trains?
There was far, far more than that involved in the SPV design. (I actually put very little weight on the ‘snow’ story, which is not really more of a ‘design fault’ than the snow problems with GG1s in the late ‘50s were). I’ll get into more of the design issues in a bit, but one of the main causes was the perception that a railcar that used a long, intricate stainless-steel shell was going to cost MUCH more than something like an up-to-date version of the original RDC design envelope (and amenities). And to justify the cost, something more special needed to be done with the design…
The problem here started with the decision that a railcar based on a high-speed Metroliner/Amfleet car should be capable of high speed – 120mph speed, in fact. Now this is not ‘incrementally faster’ than, say, a 110mph design, as anyone designing either 125-mph or 150-mph passenger trains will quickly affirm to you. Something that became nearly immediate was that engines of much higher sustained output were going to be necessary, and this led to the (reasonable in principle) decision to optimize the main engines – there were two, of course, just as in the original RDC driving individual trucks via a torque-converter drive – only for traction, and concentrate all the other power requirements into a purpose-built APU. It also became very clear that two-axle drive, as on RDCs, would not work on a high-speed stainless-steel shell with comparatively luxurious and soundproofed interior, so the design was (with engineering sense) set to use all four axles. Keep this general design envelope in mind as we take up the following.
Was the problem that they didn't supply a second Diesel to supply the hotel power, where the hotel power went out if the main engine quit, or that they did supply such an "APU", which had a habit of breaking down? Both solutions, a separate hotel power unit as well as getting that power off the main engine, have found their way into railroad passenger service.
I didn’t have any complaint at all with the decision to put all the normal power requirements into a modular APU, nor did I find it inappropriate that the resulting ‘unit’ was four cylinders in size and ‘comparatively’ inefficient for reduced power demand – we might note from nothing more than recent discussions on the list of HEP that even when idle the ‘hotel power’ load in a car that size would require significant fuel burn. The problem started because the automotive engineers put ALL the electrical generation functions into the APU, and if that failed everything on the car did, including the MU. The APU was not provided with adequate cooling, and its detail design was such that it was not tolerant of overheating. My opinion – it has been a surprisingly long time now – was that cumulative overheating caused cumulative damage to the APUs and made them increasingly more prone to failure. (If I remember correctly, the APU shared its coolant loop with the main engines, so it could be used to preheat the coolant a bit like a Kim Hotstart. There was inadequate cooling for the engines under many operating conditions … and when there isn’t enough cooling for 16 cylinders, you can bet there will be problems with 20.
Now note that it is not rocket science to put a couple of simple alternators on the two main engines and use that as a source for power to the injection, throttle, compression and air brake systems, and so forth, at least to the point the car could be operated in trail or under its own power to a place where, if nothing else, the passengers could be let off safely or conveniently. That was not done. That reminds me of the fascinating system on the British Routemaster bus – when the engine stalls, the brakes immediately and totally stop working. (their design-engineer assumption clearly being that ‘properly maintained British engines do not stop working unexpectedly’) Some Rolls-Royces have the same design. One would think that making the APU modular and very easy to change out would be a design desideratum. Well…. ah… we…
As to gearing the two axles together, yes, the RDC (as I believe, the Colorado Railcars DMU, which was not so much unsuccessful as that it never found a market) drove only the inboard axle. Connecting both axles adds more mechanism to maintain, and it also requires maintaining the wheels on the two axles to within 1 mm in diameter, not an unusual condition in railroading judging by the long history of coupled-axle steam locomotives?
The problem with the geared axles was not in the concept – which made eminent sense for a heavy railcar expected to operate at 120mph. Yes, it would have been advisable to budget for an underfloor lathe and regular ‘truing’ trips to keep all the wheels common and properly deflated; I argued at one point that Ferguson clutches in the ‘intermediate’ shafts would allow reasonable diametral mismatch without the usual sorts of gear and universal damage ‘railroad’ use can cause in such a situation.
The problem was that the automotive engineers were either blissfully unaware, or negligent, that providing 120mph power and four driven axles would kick the design into a higher salary range with the BLE brotherhood. (Some people claim that a ‘fireman’ would also be necessary, although explicit working agreements with Metro-North eliminated that problem.) The extra amount required, for the service and acceleration that Metro-North actually required out of an SPV, did not justify putting the gearsets in, and they sat in boxes at Harmon rather than making the engine power and braking power properly available.
Meanwhile, bright automotive folks figured (perhaps cribbing a bit from the APT research) that a driveline brake of some sort would be nifty in reducing brake wear (which with both discs and shoes might start getting up there) and so they installed Jacobs compression brakes as a primary component. And then, apparently, didn’t bother to ensure that trainmen would understand where and how to use them. Or that there might be problems with a compression brake acting on steel wheels vs. tires … especially when there is only one axle doing the ‘resisting’ instead of two per engine brake. (Did I mention wheelslide as a problem?)
Also, with air throttles on the Detroits, fast throttle response (and fine control of torque vs. speed) was ghastly. This became an interesting problem when you tried to accelerate an SPV at any reasonable rate, and particularly if adhesion were compromised in some way – you’d have nasty oscillating overshoot as first one engine would surge and slip, and be cut back too far by the governor causing the other one to surge and slip and cut back. That was where I got involved, eventually figuring out that they needed the equivalent of a Torquemeter in the driveshaft and some predictive control over coarse and fine engine output and ‘spill’ of the torque converter. They did not want the cost to implement this with ‘80s technology; Amtrak had I think long since given up the idea of using SPVs effectively (as compared with other available trains, to Springfield or otherwise).
As to lightweight "aerospace" construction, are you still talking about the SPV-2000 -- that thing at least appeared to be based on the Metroliner carbody, which had a long successful history as Amfleet, the complaints of some railfans about them notwithstanding?
The Metroliner is not ‘lightweight’ construction, and the only real ‘complaint’ I have against the shell is that I thought the early production versions showed too much camber when built, leading to the worry that they might sag down and be swaybacked by the end of their service lives. (At the time I expected the SPVs to have the same kind of extended life that many RDCs have proven to have, thanks to the welded stainless construction). If I remember correctly this got to be an issue with some of the Metroliners, and the weight of the engines and transmissions carried comparatively inboard of the ‘quarter points’ at the truck centers and secondary springing might cause additional bending near the center of the tubular structure. I do not know if there has been a similar observation with Amfleet cars, but I think most of the concern I had then has not been borne out in practice; certainly the Metroliners and the Constitution Liners both had comparatively long lives as unpowered vehicles.
The ‘lightweight aerospace’ dig was primarily directed at BART, which not only compromised on a number of subsequently-critical details to keep the tare weight down (notably the composite wheels) but also cut very critical corners with the track structure by ‘optimizing’ it to work with lower weight vehicles. While I admire the Cripe Turbotrain design, no one can say that it held up or operated very well anywhere it was tried, let alone what would happen were the design allowed to age or experience deferred maintenance. The monocoque LRV locomotives seem to have been disastrous in practice (although the equally monocoque Genesis locomotives don’t seem to have much problem). I will let people have their own opinions about the Super Steel rebuilt Rohr Turboliners – I think this was one of the greatest failures of vision in Amtrak’s history… but then again, the whole idea of Turboliners might have proven a money pit that would get much greater with the ‘new and improved’ trains.
As to "aerospace" and "clean sheet of paper design", the Shotwelded Budd "Heritage Fleet" and Amfleet cars are both regarded as quality contributions to US passenger service. In the Heritage Fleet, the all-stainless steel Budds are regarded as the pick-of-the-litter and cream-of-the-crop.
Of course they are, but they are heavy and expensive and comparatively difficult (and expensive) to get rebuilds to modern amenity standards – much like older hotels. The fact that Heritage bags were not revised with better trucks and secondary suspension as an alternative to Viewliners will tell you something. Not, again, that I have anything at all against Budd, or their ingenuity over the years, or the build quality out of the Red Lion plant.
I read that Budd was an automotive company that was applying entirely non-standard and novel practices to passenger railroading.
But there is more to it than that – they were an innovative company that understood where technology would best be applied for good structure. (Keep in mind that they failed fairly abysmally at building stainless trimotor aircraft – as you might suspect they would – and they had an interesting learning curve with the Michelines, including the Silver Slipper, before figuring out good car design and fabrication. But I still think of the Metroliners, and more particularly Amfleet, as being well-built cars with a very long effective service life…
If they were still around, I think we wouldn't have had half the problems with Amtrak's Acela cars, the Viewliner II's, and the new bilevels that failed their strength test?
Don’t get me started – you’re preaching to the choir. The Acela in particular would likely have been neither as ugly or as failure-prone; what might have been particularly interesting (or dramatically disastrous!) would have been the introduction of the “original” Metroliner design with the inside-bearing low-mass Pioneer III/IV trucks optimized for 150mph service. That might have been an early source of true domestic HSR early enough to establish an American presence in practical high-speed design, coming through its teething troubles just in time to benefit from the work done with the British APT-E and the early TGV studies. I found myself looking at the “Izy” Thalys video in that thread here, and remarking over and over again how disappointing we never developed a FRA-compliant version of such a train…
I still don’t quite understand what made Budd fold up, close Red Lion, and sell out to Thyssen-Krupp except that the Canadians were subsidizing the competition, and the ‘rest of the world’ went to more properly developed aircraft-style design – that was not just ‘lightweight’ but strong and highly powered, and that could take advantage of enormous dedicated ‘national’ spending on LGV and its other foreign equivalents. Here we haven’t even yet progressed to distributed electrification, although it’s encouraging to see a couple of the private HSR schemes come closer to fruition, and it seems we can’t even get our “joint venture partners” from other lands to build what they design so it can pass the design tests.
I use Apache's OpenOffice. Seems to work good (and it's free).
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
Use Notepad - not Word.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
I almost always compose the post in WORD and copy/paste it in here, but that requires editing the post to reformat the spacing to normal between the paragraphs. When I first copy/paste into the forum composition box, the formatting is correct, but when I post, it widens out the spacing to four lines.
I give up. That's five times the Forum software has jittered and gone off the page without warning, eliminating everything I've typed in. I'll do it in word processing and paste it in. Once again, why doesn't Kalmbach return the simple little box that says 'do you want to navigate away from this page? Content may be lost'? that they still use in other places in their pages?
Overmod What a bright idea is was to put all the ancillary loads of the SPV-2000 on its own little four-cylinder APU, and leave all the main-engine power available for traction! What a great idea to overcome the problems of the original RDC by simply gearing the outboard axles in with the inboard ones! What a great idea to do a clean-sheet train design that uses "aircraft construction" or "aerospace materials" to get the tare weight down to where you can economize on track structure...
What a bright idea is was to put all the ancillary loads of the SPV-2000 on its own little four-cylinder APU, and leave all the main-engine power available for traction! What a great idea to overcome the problems of the original RDC by simply gearing the outboard axles in with the inboard ones! What a great idea to do a clean-sheet train design that uses "aircraft construction" or "aerospace materials" to get the tare weight down to where you can economize on track structure...
I don't know much of the context of the SPV-2000 apart from it being a revised RDC based on the Metroliner carbody that was unsuccessful in service, it being claimed that fine snow got into the "works" in its intended use in the Northeast for service supplementing the Northeast Corridor electric trains?
I read that Budd was an automotive company that was applying entirely non-standard and novel practices to passenger railroading. If they were still around, I think we wouldn't have had half the problems with Amtrak's Acela cars, the Viewliner II's, and the new bilevels that failed their strength test?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Firelock76The problem with engineers, not all mind you, but just enough to be an annoyance, is they tend to design things with an eye to impressing each other, not with an eye to practicality in the everyday world with everyday users.
I have to confess that I almost never see that motivation in actual engineering, and the real-world practicality problem may be better attributed to very different sources.
Part of the problem is the "first law of engineering" which I was first introduced to about a week into freshman year in college, and which I still remember with a sense of youthful righteous indignance: the idea that any engineering project has to be cost-effective (or cost-conscious, which is a somewhat different thing) before any actual work on it is undertaken, and that cost is the final determinant of any solution. Here is the root of a great deal of engineering evil, including (but not limited to) all those designs like the rod bolts in the T-head Mercer engine, or short watertight bulkheads on big Atlantic liners, or [insert your favorite GE locomotive canard here], where a little skimping to reduce perceived cost leads to great trouble. Another source of woe is the kind of tunnel vision that comes when you solve exactly the problems in an insufficiently-developed model -- or that are best addressed with your 'favorite' theory or the proprietary technology your company wants to flog or the approaches your education or your mentor may have saddled you with as 'technology moves on'.
The elevator touch buttons are an example of this. One can easily appreciate the various 'very-real-world' problems of any kind of mechanical switch with a lubricated travel, environmental sealing, and make-and-break contacts in elevator service. How logical -- to a '50s engineer -- it would be to provide a switch that has no moving parts at all! And there are problems with many of the ways to implement this -- capacitive switches won't work for people wearing gloves, membrane pressure switches might jam in various ways as they age ... I know, let's use heat as the trigger and avoid anything mechanical in the 'switch' at all. Now here is the tunnel vision: the design analysis begins and ends with the operational purpose of the switch: to call the elevator reliably when something actuates the switch. What, other than a person, would be pushing an elevator call? (And, as in those memorable insurance commercials from the '20s, all the while 'Fire looks on and laughs'...)
Oops. But a completely predictable oops. Remember that there is seldom an objective voice that says 'you're done designing' -- until the voice or the hand of G-d comes along to remind you 'not quite'. I'm sure many people here will remember the fun of solving math problems, and triumphantly getting to the end ... without checking, or substituting units back for the assumed quantities in subformulae, or even using consistent distance units when going to Mars.
Now, wowing the 'competition' is certainly something that happens, and there's probably a fair amount of both school- and professional-discipline-related arrogance involved in that. But I think that relatively seldom the intent is to 'impress one's peers' -- as opposed to impress, or stonewall, or snow, or whatever, folks like "the men who manage money who manage the men who manage men" or favorite politician types like Schanoes' "Schumenthal".
Certainly among the very worst of all engineering sins is expedience. One example being to rubber-stamp a certain launch made at 23 degrees when known design parameters dictated no launch below somewhere in the low forties. I'm sure we can dredge up many, many more. And CYA shouldn't be -- but is, in this real world -- a significant part of continuing to make a living doing engineering.
The problem with engineers, not all mind you, but just enough to be an annoyance, is they tend to design things with an eye to impressing each other, not with an eye to practicality in the everyday world with everyday users.
blue streak 1Now several times at night on this site my computer would do very strange things including starting apps or even going to sites not desired. As well unable to open PDF files. Have observed that very small flying bugs attracted to the touch screen causes where ever bug touched and activates that item.
This is highly interesting, because those bugs shouldn't have enough self-capacitance to get the screen controller to identify contact. What you've got may be engineers with more obsessivity than common sense.
One of the reasons modern phone screens 'work well' at all is that they have very sophisticated and very fast processors doing very complex calculations on multiple points with multiple pressures to determine where the 'center' of a touch of something big and blunt and ridged like a fingertip is. The sensors in some current iPhones are capable of resolving enough fingerprint detail to be used as biometrics. If you ever wondered how a phone can work with a cracked screen -- think about why the phone gets a little hot while it does; it's making what may be hundreds of thousands of calculations in realtime about where all the shifting crack stresses are, and separating them from the pattern of expected touches...
However, if you are a lazy engineer, you might be tempted to have your controller look for nice, clean, precise touches ... like those you might get from a thin stylus or point ... unassociated with permanent details; in fact, starting quickly and then sustaining at a reasonably fixed level from 'nothing', just what an engineer might think is an ideal touch signal for precise locating without all that deconvolution.
In my opinion, that screen is set up waaaaaaaaay more sensitive than it should be, and a good touchscreen driver configuration utility would drop at least some of the achievable lower 'differentiable pressure levels' precisely so things like June bug strikes and windblown debris don't cause false touches, as well as understand a bit about haptic touch by a user so that other forms of touch are preferentially screened out.
I would also try cleaning the screen (with a good screen cleaner and microfiber) as there might be a layer of schmutz that accentuates charge transfer to or from small bodies over what a clean surface might provide for.
This is not the same thing as those fire-sensitive elevator buttons -- designed, I think, by people from the same engineering school as the SPV2000 developers. Those were just dumb design when you look at them ... but an idiot engineer wouldn't think 'fiery fingertips' when designing a solid-state switch modality...
Not a computer expert by any means, but if your touch screen is sensitive to the point bugs landing on it can trigger apps or functions there's something wrong with that touch screen.
I've heard of and had personal experience with touch screens loosing sensitivity, but this is the first time I've heard of a hyper-sensitive one.
Could be Zeka..be careful.
BaltACD Norm48327 Download and run the free version of Malwarebytes. It may catch what's bothering your computer. I think he is trying to say the insect foot prints are sufficient to activate his touch screen icons.
Norm48327 Download and run the free version of Malwarebytes. It may catch what's bothering your computer.
Download and run the free version of Malwarebytes. It may catch what's bothering your computer.
I think he is trying to say the insect foot prints are sufficient to activate his touch screen icons.
Norm
First a look back into history. In the mid to later 1900s the elevator companies started installing touch call buttons that would light up and call the elevators to the floor. After several incidents of elevators taking passengers to a burning floor the touch buttons soon came into not being acceptable..
Now several times at night on this site my computer would do very strange things including starting apps or even going to sites not desired. As well unable to open PDF files. Have observed that very small flying bugs attracted to the touch screen causes where ever bug touched and activates that item. Comes to mind the old saw that with enough monkeys one could write a Shakespear play.
Has anyone else ever had this happen ? Am going to have to the computer doctor.
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