Even without any skunk apes to see, it’s a great scenic train ride.
I took it with my parents in the early 80s on one of the days they run the old steam engine train. I think they still do a few times a year. Just beautiful back then….almost completely undeveloped the entire ride, then Silverton was a quaint old West themed town.
Good times….good times.

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Its not so much a theory. We make so many simplifying assumptions about our surroundings that the underlying physics tend to elude us.

How many people REALLY understand how a steam engine works? Sewing machine?

Hilarious title/video made me lol, but i'm not buying it (waiting 6 hours).

(edit) Here is the story https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9542134/schoolchildren-left-distraught-when-train-blocked-their-view-of-historic-steam-engine-at-last-moment/

We also dont have the facilities in place to mass produce steam engines or build pyramids in the traditional way. Or computers - roll your own coils for memory, anyone?

Interesting, not disturbing.

A simple steam engine that deploys no "steam". New title... slightly heated water engine.

Wait @harlequinn take a step back from the borders of advanced theoretical physics back to practical stuff like geometry and astronomy and measuring time and heating stuff and using other sources of power than slave labour.

Religion did not get us far in many areas.

If science had to start all over again maybe quarks and strings would look different, but steam engines would be the same. Heart transplants would be very similar. Other parts of medicine might not.

Note, there is a significant weight advantage on that steam tractor. But you just can't deny the sheer power of steam engine, the torque that it outputs at low revs, 0-1RPM is just massive where as combustion engine has really none..

I love steam engines. This was awesome.

Reminds me of the steam engine and Rome...

Boy, that looks cool. I like the sideways steam engine powerslide effects. I will not be the one to apologize to the native American nations for what Johnny Depp is likely to do here though. I think he should do that himself.

*bluesy country song is The Last Steam Engine Train by John Fahey (1939 - 2001)

>> ^PancakeMaster:

Anyone know the tune playing?

@bmacs27 Mostly the costs, TEGs aren't cheap, so I would wager the low end on the cost scale is about 50 bucks or so for the stove version give or take about 20 bucks. And indeed you are right, improving the state of being for billions is what the cry of energy is about. Costs are important as it dictates how many people we can help via our limited abilities. If we wanted to help ALL of them RIGHT NOW, it would cost 100 billion or so, which isn't a huge sum. But it is only access to 2 Watt/hours. This is very back of the envelope, so there are many other factors, but lets say we used that money instead to buy power plants. Let's even get something fancy, some high tech CCGT plants. They cost about .6 bucks per Watt hour. For 2 billion people consuming 2W/hs of electricity, that is about 4 gigiwatts/H which on our stoves cost us about 100 billion. Now a .5GW CCGT plan will run you about .3 billion per unit, but you only need 2.4 billion in funds to supply that level of electricity. If you spent the same kind of cash on CCGT plants, you would go from 4GW/H to 166GW/H. Basically, you can help 2 orders of magnitude more people if you invested in other technology, or help that same amount that much more. Now, that isn't completely accurate, power infrastructure costs money, but it is money well spent, even if you burn up an entire order of magnitude. It wouldn't hurt if a few thousand people had one of these, but if you wanted to help 2 billion, it would be a huge mistake. The only reason I keep harping on this is because they marketed themselves so heavily as some wide solution for the third world. A good third world solution doesn't always look like a first world solution, so I am not suggesting there is no merit here, but it would help very few people and to a relatively low level compared to other options. Perhaps small progress, though, is a good way to go about it, I can't say. I would guess they would be better off dropping off some steam system that burns wood and let them power their entire houses instead of a cellphone. There is an older paper about using rice husks in developing world in steam engines to generate electricity, and husks have a bit less energy density than wood fiber. They seemed to think it was pretty viable. There are some technical challenges, but I think those are easier to overcome than spending 100billion for 2W/Hs for 2 billion people. But I digress.