#transport engineering

[mjalford98]

Discouraging people from driving is popular for improving urban air quality, but it’s unfair and unhelpful without viable public transport alternatives. Read more in my latest Medium article!

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Seat 600, 1957. Before Seat (Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo S.A) became a subsidiary of the Volkswagen Group in 1986 they were a state-owned entity who made Fiat's under license in Spain. The 600 was based on the original Italian Fiat 600, designed by Dante Giacosa. It quickly became Spain's best selling car and became so popular that it earned the nickname ombligo (navel/belly button) because "everyone" had one.

[ankewehner]

The rail network in Germany is in so bad shape that they had to get a centenarian out of retirement. That is, a steam engine built in 1921 and retired in 1977.

But let's start at the beginning.

The rail network runs on electricity.

Sometimes when there's big time repairs being done, there can't be electricity around that spot.

To transport materials to a railway construction site without electricity, you need an engine that doesn't run on electricity, but carries its own fuel.

So you get one of the remaining diesel engines.

Unfortunately those are getting rare, and there are a lot of construction sites, so at one point a company doing construction took to contacting an organisation that keeps historic trains going for train lovers as sort of museums, and asked if they could borrow their diesel engine.

The diesel engine was not available, but the museum guys joked that they could offer a steam engine. And the construction company was so desperate they accepted.

That job went well, and people in the business were like "hey, the old girl still got it!" so the steam engine got rented for more jobs like that.

At least one time a fire brigade had to help out with upping the water supply, I guess becaue not every station is equipped to do that any more, but over all, well. She occasionally pulls freight trains instead of passenger trains full of fans of historic trains.

Sounce links - mind the article is German:

original source: https://bnn.de/karlsruhe/ettlingen/kurios-dampflok-58-311-aus-ettlingen-zieht-wieder-regulaere-gueterzuege

archive link: https://archive.ph/pQFrj#selection-739.22-739.28

[foxprints]

As with most of my other Murderbot art, there's a long headcanon that goes along with this piece. This one can be summed up as: ART has an unexpectedly difficult time performing system maintenance on its engines using its repair drones after the alien synthetic incident. Murderbot steps in to help out and then continues to periodically help out because they both find that time together soothing.

[amtrak-conductor]

[phoebelovingcare]

very tempted to design a humanized al-an, not as if it were a human au, but as if he needed to sneak his way into alterra space or something and so he full-metal-alchemisted himself a human vessel who is very normal yessiree.

weird mannerisms? oh, he'd been another survivor stranded on 4546b for a while, it's been a very long time since he's interacted with another hu- person, sorry.

strangely distant emotionally? he'd never been neurotypical, but the head trauma from the crash and the regular trauma of isolation could've definitely done a number.

can't balance on his own two feet? sector zero was so cold he'd opted to spend his many years on the planet completely underwater, so his inner ears might be a little messed up from the pressure. sometimes he wishes he wasn't a bipedal creature, haha!

just picturing robin thinking "his disguise fucking sucks and we are going to get killed /reference" and good ol Alan Manning, structural and civil engineer, just blending right in as just a somewhat eccentric guy using just the knowledge of how humans think from his time in robin's head, and it just Works because humans are so odd anyways that it seems perfectly plausible for him to just be Like That.

[thecrowslullaby]

camping creatures

[karl-jensen]

Railway Series accurate Etienne

Perhaps one of the more obscurer characters in Thomas and Friends would have to be the Foreign Engines in The Great Race. All of which are based on real-world locomotives with some of historic significance. One of which would be Etienne the French Electric engine who broke the land speed record on March 1955.

I drew him last March as a "what-if" take on the character if he appeared in The Railway Series. I gave him an embedded face like some Diesel characters (such as Daisy, BoCo, Bear, etc.) and his real-world livery that the actual 9004 has. Instead of giving him his name as seen on the plates, I gave him his real-world number as well as the SNCF logo.

Below is the "gray face" version of Railway Series Etienne.

To accompany his "Railway Series" appearance. I made up a story based on his real-world record breaking run and made several original characters based on engines that the SNCF used. One of them is an American-built SNCF Class 141R as well as an SNCF Class 241A. Seen below are the characters that I created.

[wikipediapictures]

Escalator

[trainmaniac]

J17 BR 65567 at Doncaster Works being cosmetically restored for preservation in the National Collection 04-06-1963 by Paul Kearley Via Flickr: The photographer is unknown. A digitally restored image from an original negative in my collection.

[noosphe-re]

But for all its practical importance as a connector of industrial centres and an arch logistician of human movement, the shinkansen continues to play a role as an ideological encapsulator of Japan's sense of what it is and what it should ideally strive to be. There has never been a fatal accident. Average annual lateness across the JR Central network is 1.6 minutes. When the natural world forces the shinkansen to stop, you know conditions are genuinely bad.

Leo Lewis, Sixty years of the shinkansen, FT Weekend, 28 September/29 September 2024

[alphamecha-mkii]

Star Wars Gamer #2 - YT-1760 Small Transport by Jeffery Carlisle

[federationgothic]

[opendirectories]

[slack-wise]

Zipper

[night-for-night]

construction, jsq, jc - holga 135 & expired kodak color 400 speed film - developed at eliz digital & scanned with minolta dimage dual iii