Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Douglass
Joe-
If you just hit #3985 on YouTube (which I just did), you'll be AWASH in videos. I'm a sailor and ocean guy all the way----but I remember hiding in the shrubs alongside the tracks in midcoast Florida and having these beasts rip past at over 75 mph. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, quite like it!
My dad told me that these things weigh in the neighborhood of 500 tons! (Million pounds!?). He was born in 1899(!) and knew his stuff, so I'm guessing that is a true stat!
Chow,
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Freddie, that must have been an awesome, earth shaking event for sure! The closest experience I can reference to even begin to relate to that is clinging to the gabion basket seawall at the back end of the airstrip as everything from smoke belchin' DC3's to 727's hurled gravel, smoke and blasts of hot air as they took off and landed over our heads. Used to make us feel what we figured a typical day at the orifice was like for old Saint George!
Of course, the real excitement began when one of the crew would report us, and a bunch of pissed off men armed with a Very pistol would come charging in a little red jeep, sirens blaring. Head for the hills!
The microchip age of modern science brings us some truly amazing stuff, but nothing will ever trump the staggering sights, sounds, smells and feel of the monster machines spawned in the heyday of the industrial age. No microchip driven, virtual 3D, holographic simulation will ever let a kid experience the bellowing might of that locomotive or the menace of an up close view of the turrets on an Iowa-class battleship.
Not so sadly, I suppose, we still have the museums and people like yerself to spin the yarns. When all the yarn spinners do the asses to asses, dust to dust thing, people will be left to stand and wonder just what it must have been like when those magnificent, mighty behemoths ruled the earth.