Trains....

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I love model railways and trains, and I have always been "Train mad". I am very close to being in a position now that I had dreamed about many years ago, where I can make my own locomotives and stuff. (I have made my own waggons and a coach. While I have converted locos to how I want them and I have kit built locos, I have not yet scratchbuilt a loco but I have plans and I now have most of the equipment I need. The bodies I can make myself anyway. The chassis I want to design and make that I want to experiment with).

Anyway. It is all great fun and to me, my hobby is a way of life.

Trains are a means of transport for me, not so much to get into ecstasy. Incidentally, I can get entranced when I see other people bouncing who do end up in higher spheres near a train. Just as an airplane needs a runway, a train also has a point of departure and a point of arrival, I mean train stations. In the Netherlands, the stations are very functional, in the Flemish city of Antwerp that functionality has an extra dimension. Namely the Splendor & Praal, an architectural beauty where I lack eyes to take it all in. It is a train station, but if it was a zoo, a museum or I don't know which destination I would have liked it just as much. Normally I don't like making videos with people, but a movie of Antwerp ~ Central without people is by evolution impossible. Where are you from, and where are you going? I did not ask them, (except for a pigeon, which did not answer), but these questions did flutter in my mind. If you are purely focused on the trains then you mainly look straight ahead, in Antwerp ~ Central, however, there are dozens of reasons to also look up, a 2nd Louvre. The reverberation and echo in the large halls also have something magical, it sounds better than those beeps from the entrance gates that make me shriveled at NS stations. Just under 3 hours of enjoyment crammed into a movie of half an hour, with a beautiful sun that cooperated as an lighting technician.



Some pictures i took that day at Antwerp Central Station.

Somewhere in Belgium.
The fire brigade is putting out a fire somewhere along the track. With the ingenious invention so that the trains can continue to drive, despite the fact that there are fire hoses on the track.

I grew up liking trains when I was a kid too. My first years we lived close to the railway, so I was naturally preoccupied with them.
I was very close with my grandfather and he too grew up near the rails, so it was also a thing connecting us.

I'm not that preoccupied with trains now, but I like them well enough.

It's the fun of the game that keeps me playing it, but maybe it's no surprise that I love playing Ticket to Ride! Planning and collecting my routes is really addictive, fun and engrossing

I like making model railway things. It is rather fun.

I'm assuming those ingenious inventions are intended to allow road vehicles to pass over the hoses and that the fireman who put them there have no understanding that trains work in rather different ways to road vehicles? Or am I missing something?

I'm a train driver and I really wouldn't want to be seeing something like that on the track in front of me.

I am appalled at the simple-minded pleas to just replace diesel locomotives with electric ones. Trains have been losing market share to more versatile road vehicles for a century, and now all those drivers are starting to lose out to robots. A modern train should be a line of fast, mixed traffic running at near-zero clearance but only connected electronically. Humans can do the tricky, low-speed local driving, but turn over control at the freeway entrances. The system would merge you into the first passing gap, and you could punch in your exit and get back to screen time. Electric cars could re-charge en route. For long distance travel, switching to steel wheels would save fuel.

An amusing observation on trains is that when steam locomotives are shown in children's books, they still usually get the relative sizes of the boiler and the cylinders correct far more often than proposals for new steam engines do.

The closest interest I have with trains are with the high-speed rail trains in Japan, and France.

LINK: 'Why do So Many people With Autism Like Trains?'
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-so-many-pe ... ike-trains

I understand that you dont want something like that when you drive a train. Maybe the fireman are not clever enough to understand. Or the fireman did put these things to make a funny picture

Below a picture from about 2 months ago, somewhere near the dutch city of Eindhoven have a couple of stork build a nest on the construction of a rail network. Im glad im not born there

i still have a toy train circa 1960, it needs a thorough restoration in order to work again, plus it takes an obsolete kind of battery.

Train wheels have flanges and enough weight to ruin that hose guard, but it is interesting that the flanges are not normally in use. The weight-bearing part of the wheel is slightly cone-shaped, so as a flange gets closer to the rail on a straight run, the effective diameter of the wheel increases on that side and decreases on the other, turning it away from the rail.

BTW, my father was in charge of inspecting the castings for the side frames that those wheels attach to. One week he managed to get the railways to accept a large batch of faulty parts, by arguing that the maximum turn and the maximum bump would not likely occur together, and, if they did, the train would not be going fast.

Yeah. Its the dumbest thing I ever saw. Those things would probably cause the train to derail! Certainly would not make anything safer.

Dumb or not, how else would you run a fire hose across train tracks? That is, for trains to safely drive over the fire hose. Not these things, it seems. Then how else?

I can think of many dumber things than those. To do it right, you need two A-frames to elevate the hose above the train.

You could inform the rail road to halt train traiffic.

Worse comes to worse just naked hoses would be better. The train's wheel would cut the hoses and stop the water flow, but at least the train would probably keep on going unhindered. But with those things the hoses would still be cut, the things themselves would be pulverized into plastic shards, and the train itself would likely derail.

I would have to assume these were tested thoroughly before the Fire Brigade and the Railroad decided to put them into use. Railroads in general tend to be very safety conscious. If somebody has enough time on their hands, I suppose they could even write a letter asking for details.