I live up the road from a railway bridge with a clearance of 12ft. Not quite a crash a month, but everytime a Double Decker bus tried to take a shortcut it would lose its roof. Fortunately they never had passengers. We also had a Skip Truck tip itself over on the bridge and a 18 Wheeler rip its top off.

Oh, and whenever it rained too hard it flooded under the bridge and you'd always get a couple of people that didnt think the puddle was too deep. They didn't always make it across.

These P&T tamping machines (4:04 onwards) are fierce. They mostly use the P&T Unimat 09-16/4S over here and you can feel the ground shaking for several hundreds of meters.

Two years ago, they had a train around that renewed two tracks simultaneously, both rails and railway sleepers. Huge fucking thing. Attracted quite a crowd, too, even though they only used it at night to minimize downtime.

1. One point that was vastly un underlined, was that if this is a debate about how to combat global warming without reducing our electricity consumption, how long it would take for the coal-replacing energy source to go live is vitally important. If we indeed would have to wait close to 20 years for the nuclear plants to be built, that's too long. At the very least, we need both to be built immediately, and when the nukes go live, then we can decide if we still want the other.

2. A point that amazingly wasn't mentioned at all by the anti- side is the environmental damage caused by irresponsible uranium mining.

3. The most irresponsible point was when the pro- guy compared one person's lifetime nuclear emissions to a 1GW plant's daily carbon emissions. The three problems:

* a person's power consumption is not equal to a 1GW power plant's output
* a human lifetime is not one day
* the environmental damage of captured nuclear waste by mass is not the environmental damage of released CO2 by mass

So comparing a Coke can to a railway train is meaningless.

The NAFTA Superhighway thing always struck me as the weirdest rightwing conspiracy theory ever. Let's set aside for a moment whether or not it's real. Why is it something they oppose?

I mean, NAFTA is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Free trade is part of what you need for a free market. Business people love it, liberals kinda hate it.

Mexico and Canada are physically adjacent to the US, but to ship goods to and from them, it makes most sense for us to use road and railways as the primary cargo carriers. Since we're opening up trade, we expect the volume of goods transported between the countries to increase, putting additional load on our state-run road and rail systems. So they need to be enhanced, to deal with the added load.

Now yes, building highways is technically a big socialist public works project funded by tax dollars, but I've never met a Republican who thought roads weren't something government should build, and I've never met a crackpot Ron Paul-style "constitutionalist" who thought building roads weren't something the Federal government had the power to do.

That said, the talk about Spain controlling it actually comes from this (no, World Net Daily isn't reliable in the usual sense, but it is usually the source of most right-wing crazy these days). Basically, Ed Rendell (PA-Gov, and a DEMONCRAT) auctioned off the contract for managing the Pennsylvania Turnpike, possibly the most well-known toll road in America, to private companies. Who had the winning bid? A private corporation based in Spain called Abertis Infraestructuras that manages toll roads all over Europe.

So, basically, I'm left wondering...why the hell this is supposed to be scary?

Now, I can think of a few good reasons why liberals would be opposed to such a thing. Specifically, it makes it easier for companies to move manufacturing to Mexico to take advantage of their cheap labor, low taxes, and low regulation, plus it makes it so they can use non-union ports to unload goods coming in from Asia, and then truck them into the US. But those should all sound like positives to your average right-winger.

I get that this is lumped in with a fear of some sort of EU-style North American Union, but I honestly don't get why that is supposed to be scary either.

Are all conservatives so xenophobic that they see any signs of long-term collaboration between the US and its closest neighbors as a threat of some sort?

Anyways, for those who are curious, this is the most thorough debunking of this nonsense I've seen.

You mean, it would have been stunning scenery if someone hadn't constructed a railway straight through it...

Haha, you really are my dupe police. Maybe I should pass any potential submissions by you first, that would probably be easier for both of us.

In reply to this comment by demon_ix:
This time I didn't have to look far. Both your video and the original were on the same page, both with 5 votes

http://www.videosift.com/video/Railway-inspector-has-a-close-call-Twice-Within-5-seconds -> http://www.videosift.com/video/Lucky-train-inspector-32-Seconds

This time I didn't have to look far. Both your video and the original were on the same page, both with 5 votes

http://www.videosift.com/video/Railway-inspector-has-a-close-call-Twice-Within-5-seconds -> http://www.videosift.com/video/Lucky-train-inspector-32-Seconds

>> ^EndAll:
and then there was a timid silence, as the rain fell on the overturned masses of steel, sparks created by the force of friction fizzled out, and the smoke rose.. the conductor wiped his brow, exhaling a weary "phew" and stepped out onto the tracks, now littered with debris. he looked on the wreckage for a while, brow furrowed, considering all that would happen next. with another sigh, he walked with heavy steps down the line, over rubble and wreckage to find the nearest railway phone.


That was beautiful. Are you the author of this gem?

and then there was a timid silence, as the rain fell on the overturned masses of steel, sparks created by the force of friction fizzled out, and the smoke rose.. the conductor wiped his brow, exhaling a weary "phew" and stepped out onto the tracks, now littered with debris. he looked on the wreckage for a while, brow furrowed, considering all that would happen next. with another sigh, he walked with heavy steps down the line, over rubble and wreckage to find the nearest railway phone.

Reminds me of the Railway Rifle!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR_g3XNBaxU&fmt=18#t=0m15s

I'm sure the Indian Railways got this guy to put that phantom pick pocket safety guide in my pocket. There's no way it could have just landed in my pocket like that. Careless idiot that I was I left my wallet in that pocket, with my mobile phone in the other, both could have easily been stolen but I experienced what I would call a reverse "pick pocket" moment. Instead of mystuff getting stolen I get a little booklet telling me exactly how to avoid getting my stuff stolen. Lesson learnt. But I still have a sneaking suspicion that it's this fellow

>> ^Wingoguy:
What's going on at 2:46?!! NSFW!!!


Very "alive" humans.

Your video, World's Largest Model Train Railway - Miniatur Wunderland, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

>> ^bcglorf:

Thank you for your reply.

You made it clear that I may have made an error in my previous comment. I think I should clarify that what I meant by "personal transport" was light vehicles for personal uses, as is the minivan or motorcycle used to get to work, the store, not transportation in general, which I view as a different, though not unrelated, problem. Moving freight, airplanes and battleships requires different solutions (in my opinion) then the problem of getting your kids to the hockey game.

I think we agree that the transition from oil is an important issue. You seem to believe that better batteries (and electric engines) will solve every facet of every issue facing the end of oil, and that this will result in little or no social or political change or turmoil. While I deeply wish that the next century comes to be shaped after your expectations, I do not believe it will be so. I do not believe that batteries alone will solve the coming crisis. Even if energy storage technology was to rapidly become what we would need it to be, where would the energy come from if the source for more then half of our current use was to vanish? Replacing that energy by renewable means will require a huge amount of investment and several decades to implement.

What I see coming, is a myriad of interwoven problems of which the central spine is energy use. All of them are have energy use at the at the root of their problem. This is because oil has done more then just let people drive their cars around cheaply. Cities are no longer shaped after people's needs, but to suit the demands of the automobile. There has been a great deal of optimism in investing in electric cars to allow people to continue to access modern cities as they have been constructed.

"When people say that they want to go to the electric car, I love it! But remember, they say 'car' not 'truck.' A battery won't move an 18 wheeler. The only thing that will move an 18 wheeler is foreign oil, diesel and gasoline, and our domestic natural gas." -T. Boone Pickens (on The Daily Show)

However continuing to access these cities will get more difficult when costs of energy begin to come down from the bubble of cheapness that I and most of the people I know have grown up in.

"Consequently these (cities) will be places that nobody wants to be in. These will be places that are not worth caring about. We have about 38,000 places that are not worth caring about in the united states today, when we have enough of them we will have a nation that is not worth defending. -James Howard Kunstler on "The greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world."

Even if cities are reshaped for the new economy of energy, there is debate on what that will be. Some people believe that there will be a magic-pill cure, like super batteries that will allow life to continue as normal. This will not be the case.

"The central delusion that we're seeing right now is the idea that we can magically come up with a rescue remedy to continue running the interstate highway system and all the other accessories and furnishings of the happy motoring system. I happen to think that we're going to be very disappointed about that. In fact there are a lot of intelligent thigns we can do, but one of the least intelligent things we can expect is that we can continue happy motoring. You can demonstrate that you can run cars on hydrogen, cow shit and fried potato oil, but can run 230 million cars and trucks on it? Forget about it.

And then you get into political questions, like if driving becomes something only for the elite. Right now 4% of americans can't drive for one reason or another. What happens when that number becomes 13% or 27% of the people do you think that's going to be politically okay? It would create huge resentments and grievances against the people who can still do it." - James Howard Kunstler

But when I said that personal transportation is not the biggest issue, I meant it. People will be less concerned with their car or the "happy motoring system" if they are hungry.

"Food prices are rising and they're about to soar. There have been a lot of rising grain prices that have not been passed on to the consumer, they're about to be. High food prices always create political peril, as we've known since the French revolution at least.

The era of cheap food is over in this country, just as the era of cheap oil is over as well. (...) The old fix, ramping up production is not going to work this time, because cheap food depends on cheap energy, something we can no longer count on. Without reforming the American food system, it will be impossible to make progress on the issues of energy independence, climate change and the health care crisis because the way we feed ourselves is that the heart of all those three problems.

Let me explain. The food system, uses more fossil fuel and contributes more greenhouse gas to the atmosphere then any other industry. Between 17 and 34 percent. Meat production alone is 18 percent." -Michael Pollan, on The End of Cheap Food.

So when faced with the choice between fuel for their cars and fuel for their bodies, some will choose to fuel the car, leaving others to go hungry. And when people are hungry, they turn to first to the government for solutions. Governments know that they will need to bring resources to appease a population and avoid that political peril they have known about since the French Revolution. Remember that wars are always about resources.

"How curious, that the First World War is never taught in our schools as an invasion of Iraq. (...A reaction to) the Berlin-Bagdad railway, which commenced construction in the years leading up to the first world war," with the goal of bringing oil from Iraq to Germany. (-Robert Newman, A History of Oil)

"Oil is what drives the military machine of every country. It provides the fuel for aircraft, the ships the tanks for the trucks. The control of oil is indespensible. When you run out if your army stops." -Chalmers Johnson, Why we fight.

Oil is more then just a transportation issue. Riding the bus won't help much. The bus runs on gasoline, just like your car.

>> ^illeto:
Do you think that the airshots were from a helicopter or an airplane? Can a helicopter go this fast?


The sky footage was taken from a jet plane, you actually see the plan from the train in some of the shots.

Luckily for me, my country invented the railway, so we have always had the infrastructure for train travel, it just needs a little "upgrading".