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Originally Posted by PDUB
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Originally Posted by Wes Tausend
God, I'm glad you've asked. As you can tell, I'm bursting to tell you all.
Of course, I am full of sh!t as usual.
Here's the prelude:
All need be done, is to create a large circular track... where... it is all down hill from the mines... so, the coal will deliver itself. Actually the process will run away, if not restricted. The idea is to load coal at the mines, and the weight of the loaded coal plus cars hauls the empty cars back up the hill to the mine in a continuous loop process.
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Won't work...
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Originally Posted by Wes Tausend
Sure, there is probably some obstacles to this working. The inherent B.S. factor which I seem unable to escape.
Wes
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Yup, perpetual motion is a figment of your imagination !
Nice day-dream, though...
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Well, actually it would work if that was the only limiting consideration. I'll explain.
Being full of sh!t gives me a fertile mind, if you get the sorry pun of my drift.
Here's how to see it. Imagine a mill paddle-wheel turning to grind flour or generate electricity. The water falls into "buckets" on the wheel and the weight of the water, on the downside, makes the wheels turn because the water empties out of the buckets at the bottom, before the upside. The buckets with the water are always heavier than the empty buckets going back up and around. The wheel turns because of gravity. As so it goes with continuous coal cars that are loaded on the way down, but empty on the way back up. Really, it's in effect, the circle-railroad is like a giant water wheel. We could put anything we want in the coal cars at the top as long as it is heavy ...water, dirt etc... and emptied at the bottom.
Like I said, it might get going too fast, free running, unless we subtract some energy from it to slow it down. As an example, we could make the cars turn a giant wheel instead of generating electricity back into a third rail.
Besides the B.S. factor, an unrelated main problem is that a long heavy train going down an intermediate hill would be pulling a long heavy train up the other side. The knuckles wouldn't take the strain. They are at the limit now. Our best are only rated for 395,000 pounds of tension and we have traction meters to carefully watch this. Better knuckles would then wreck the drawbars, and no longer be sacrificial. It is even possible, if it would even work, that the connecting mechanism would have to be entirely made of exceedingly tough carbonic fiber as is proposed in the solution of this interesting age-old "
Giant Space Rope" dilema.
In the end, the real solution is to build new cross continental super "Autobahn" power line grid structure as
Ike did concerning interstate highway systems. Burn coal at the mines and let power ship itself, relatively labor and railroad free. I think McCain would have been receptive to the idea, since he is also a nuclear power supporter, one of the few real supporters of this very viable
replacement technology IMO.
But considering coal interests, petroleum interests and railroad interests, it is easy to see powerlines will be cooly recepted by major political parties and why McCain, a moderate common sense guy as opposed to
all the rest, was not elected in my book. These days, common sense breaks the Golden Rule regarding who has the gold.
As for perpetual motion, I will try and start another another weird thread regarding perpetual motion, but, for now, I apologise for my late inablity to make timely replies, as I have hungry stock-holders clamoring to be fed. This week will be somewhere north of 100 hours, but I think I will get back to enjoy nearly all three of my days off starting late Wednesday, if I live through it.
Wes
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