Portal:Trains/Did you know/November 2008

November 2008

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Silkstone Common railway station in 2018
 
A Citadis 402 of Line B on Pont de Pierre
 
Former Prussian T 20 95 028 in the Bochum-Dahlhausen Railway Museum
 
Georgia Railroad 1026, an EMD GP7 on permanent display in Duluth, Georgia
 
Poster advertising the Winter 1888-1889 timetable for the Orient Express
 
An Arriva train in service in the Netherlands
 
Map of railroad lines in north Hudson County, New Jersey
 
P8 locomotive
 
5711 stands in Junee yard ready to head north on 23 September 1961
 
Crossing river into Wilderness, South Africa
 
A Conrail train leaving Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1993
  • ...that prior to the passage of the Staggers Rail Act in 1980, Conrail was consistently unprofitable, sometimes posting losses of a million dollars a day?
 
A modern fusible plug showing the core of low melting-point metal
 
Steam locomotive with Giesl flat ejector
  • ...that the Giesl ejector, which replaced the traditional blastpipe of a steam locomotive with several, small, fan-shaped, diverging blast pipes, from which the diffuser gets its flat, long-drawn out shape, enabled a claimed savings in coal of between 6 and 12 %?
 
Dining car from the Blue Train
 
Samuel Spencer
 
A pneumatic buffer with sections cut away
  • ...that although the buffers in the very earliest days of railways were rigid (dumb buffers), they soon came to be spring-loaded, while those fitted to modern locomotives and rolling stock incorporate oleo-pneumatic shock absorbers?
 
The running gear of a quill drive-equipped electric locomotive
 
Chemnitz Culemeyer in the Saxon Railway Museum
  • ...that the Johann Culemeyer developed the Culemeyer heavy trailer, a heavy road trailer with four axles and 16 solid rubber wheels, in 1931 to enable the transportation of goods wagons on the road for factories and other places that did not have their own railway link?
 
An example flying junction track layout
  • ...that a flying junction is a railway junction at which one or more diverging or converging tracks in a multiple-track route cross other tracks on the route by bridge to avoid conflict with other train movements?
 
The 'Camden Tram' at the bottom of the grade upon leaving Campbelltown
  • ...that the Camden railway line in Australia, a light railway line that carried freight and passengers but was rarely busy, had steep grades and passengers would sometimes have to disembark from the train and walk alongside it, leaving their bags on board?
 
US Army No. 101, a Consolidation type 2-8-0 on display at the National Railroad Museum on April 26, 2004.
 
044-508 at Essen main railway station
 
A contemporary drawing of Stephenson's Rocket
 
Józef Piłsudski
 
DR Class 52.80, Rekolokomotive of the best-known Kriegslokomotive
  • ...that Kriegslokomotiven were German 'war locomotives', produced in large numbers during the Second World War, whose construction was tailored to wartime economic circumstances such as shortages of materials, goods transportation (in support of military logistics), ease of maintenance under difficult conditions, resistance to extreme weather, limited life and rapid, cheap, mass production?
 
'Platform 9¾' at King's Cross Station
  • ...that the fictional Platform 9¾ of King's Cross railway station, featured in the Harry Potter books and films, has been commemorated with a 'Platform 9¾' sign in the actual station building, complete with a luggage trolley ‘stuck’ halfway through the wall?
 
Heyl & Patterson Rotary Dumper
  • ...that rotary car dumpers, mechanisms used for unloading certain railroad cars that hold the car to a section of track and rotate the track and car together to dump out the contents, are making open hopper cars obsolete through faster unloading time and elimination of the wasted volume under the sloping bottoms of a traditional hopper car?