Skipping school, I decide to respond to what The Independent fosted Sun, 16 May 2004 02:43:46 -0700 in misc.survivalism , viz:
As I understand it, prior to the 19030s, "farm equipment motive force" was equine (horses). There were tractors, but mostly steam powered -which meant coal or wood. IT wasn't until IC engines got reliable (and relatively cheap) that the farmers traded in their horses for gas tractors.
My great uncle still had a team in the barn in the late 50s. I don't know if he still farmed with them, I was only 4 years old myself.
"force" or provided a user base to make it worth while?
On or around Mon, 17 May 2004 05:28:26 GMT, pyotr filipivich enlightened us thusly:
any of you with the National Geographic for last month, (I think) there's an article about the great plains and the corn belt. There's a little picture of them ploughing in the 20s, using a sod-off steam tractor pulling a
On or around Sun, 16 May 2004 21:45:35 GMT, "L0nD0t.$t0we11" enlightened us thusly:
fuel cell is much better than IC anyway - more efficient. It's quite likely that in 30-40 years all vehicles will be hyfrogen-fuel cell. They've already made credible prototypes, which like any prototype cost far too much money to be viable.
I like the water Idea. The thing that North built looks pretty good and might be able to scale up to get more power.
The steam engine thing is not doable though. First of all Steam engines are a maintenance nightmare. The firebox burn out, (burning wood and coal forms acids with attack the metal) the descaling of the boiler tubes. (The have to undergo periodic replacement) Just the plain lubing and greasing all the moving parts, the man hours of labor for the monitoring the dammed thing. The replacing of packings around the pistons and shafts.
You are talking work and a lot of it.
I think it would be simpler to build a simple steam turbine and power the generator that way. But the boiler thing whoooeee. Why do you think the railroads went to diesel electric locomotives.
The Independent wrote in news:40A85D2D.B15B2ED4@web- ster.com:
Most of that could be got around it the thing was buitl out of stainless steel , the real stuff , marine grade stainless . Onlt the firebox , boiler and cylender / piston need be stainless , cos thats about all that corodes during use . OK , cost a fortune to build , but it would last forever . Just an idea....
I guarantee neither you nor anyone here is going to set up a wood-fired boiler for a "20 KW household needs," which is precisely what you yammered about.
A couple of the illiterati here have described feeble efforts to take an automobile generator and fan and put it in a stream.
I ask again: where are you going to get the wood to generate 20 KW?
And I won't even _bother_ to ask why you think a household would be wise in lighting itself up like a Christmas tree by dissipating 20 KW in a situation where the overall grid has, as posited, gone down.
My plans are to keep a low profile, to use propane lanterns and stoves, LED lights with solar battery chargers, to use limited lead acid batteries charged from either solar panels or judicious use of a small Honda 2.2 KW generator (with el cheapo Generac 5 KW as a backup), and to generally avoid calling attention to my location on top of a hill.
Having put a watt-meter on some of the things I think are very important to have, I figure I can do OK on 2 KW for 1 hour, 1 KW for 2 hours, and 0.1 KW for 5 hours, or about 2.5 kilowatt-hours per day. And if I did without access to pumped water or central heat (which is doable here in coastal California), I could get by on much less.
And I have about 1.5 acres of heavily wooded land, of oak and madrone, and am adjacent on three sides to about 50 acres of wooded land I could scrounge on, probably. However, it's still better to keep a low profile.
Cutting and haulng the wood to generate 20 KW of electricity, as you described, seems silly, unneeded, and dangerous.
Doing it with the boiler you hypothesize, but certainly will never have, is just an idle fantasy.
My father in law left the Family farm in Minot North Dakota in the early
1930, because his dad wouldn't switch to tractors. Most of the tractors of the 1920's were oil pulls which were heavy oil (kerosene) mainly.
First Fordson (Henry Ford couldn't use Ford as a tractor name as is was already in use in England) came of the assembly line in 1917. Many other tractors were built in the 1920's and they primarily used distillate or tractor fuel as it was called. Tractor fuel was a form of kerosene. Gasoline started making inroads into farm equipment just before world war two. I think the John Deere model L was the first gasoline John Deere and was a fairly small tractor. I was first sold in 1938.
Tim May wrote in news:160520042352189062% snipped-for-privacy@removethis.got.net:
Tim , youre getting old , well ,youre mellowing at least . Not one " They need killing" or send them up the chimneies glorious burn off etc Keep it up , youre nearly becoming human
But...it took them over a hundred years to do the change over. Steam worked well enough for all that time to justify its issues.
Gunner
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. - George Orwell
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. - George Orwell
Actually it took about 30 years. The first Diesel electric units stated coming off the production lines in the 1930's and I think that the last steam locomotive was put to rest in the 1960's. The diesel electric units just could not pull long trains up out of Rock Spring Wyoming up the Green River Pass. I think that it took the development of the big double locomotives (4500 HP) to accomplish that task. Even today the Diesel locomotives cannot maintain the speeds of the old steam passenger locomotives. (100 MPH over long distances) I think that the best Am-Trac can do is about 70 MPH and that is slower than you automobile. Of course the track beds are in far worse shape than they were when the
100 MPH passenger steam locomotives ruled the root.
Conversion of farming to tractors started early in the 20th century, but did not make much progress until Ford started to make tractors in 1917. Although tractors were readily available, and making inroads into agriculture, the big change took place during WW2 with the shortage of manpower in the combatant countries, especially US, UK, Canada, Australia. The re-equipping of farming from horses to tractors in these countries was essentially completed by around 1950. Tractors were usually petrol or kerosene powered until around 1950 although there have been diesel or semi-diesel tractors available since before WW1, and by 1960 almost all tractors sold were diesel. Although requiring less cash outlay, horses need a lot more manpower than tractors, so the cost and availability of labour was the deciding factor. JD
Skipping school, I decide to respond to what The Independent fosted Mon, 17 May 2004 00:02:12 -0700 in misc.survivalism , viz:
And a cousin of mine left the city and moved back home, borrowed a team and put a crop in the ground, this in ~1929. They ate, even if i tended o be the same thing (My Dad describes it as "Peas and Potatoes for breakfast, Potatoes & Peas for lunch, and Peas, Potatoes and Ham for supper." Of course, I also get the "...and we ate rocks and we were glad to have them!" kind of stories as well.)
Yes, but that's partly because you Americans don't really do much with passenger railways. Even us Brits, who have a pretty lousy rail system, have 125mph long-distance diesel trains. The German ICE does about the same in diesel guise. But as far as I can see, anything faster uses gas turbine or electric power, so diesel does seem to have its limits.
The 19-year-old EPA tests for city and highway mileage actually gauge vehicle emissions and use that data to derive an estimated fuel-efficiency rating. The EPA tests pre-production vehicles in a lab to simulate vehicle starts and stops on crowded city streets and open road conditions. According to the EPA website, "The tests measure the waste substances emitted from consuming the fuel, not the actual fuel consumed. From the measurement of emissions, EPA can estimate the miles per gallon achieved by the vehicle on average."
U.S. Railway Chartered to Transport Freight and Passengers February 28, 1827 On February 28, 1827, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad became the first U.S. railway chartered for commercial transport of passengers and freight. There were skeptics who doubted that a steam engine could work along steep, winding grades, but the Tom Thumb, designed by Peter Cooper, put an end to their doubts. Investors hoped a railroad would allow Baltimore, the second largest U.S. city at the time, to successfully compete with New York for western trade. The first railroad track in the United States was only 13 miles long, but it caused a lot of excitement when it opened in 1830. Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, laid the first stone when construction on the track began at Baltimore harbor on July 4, 1828.
Another typical example
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's First Railroad Today we complain that they are noisy, dirty and dangerous, but almost
150 years ago people went out of their way to have a railroad come through here. A town just couldn't expect to succeed and grow without one.
The steam locomotive had become America's growth stimulant. Canals, which in this part of the country offered snail-pace transportation and were uselessly frozen over in the winter, had passed their brief heyday.
Railroad building was busting out all over America and within a short period of time Toledo, with its excellent outlet to the Great Lakes, was to have railroads approaching from all directions. The challenge for our village was to get one of them through here.
In 1850 a delegation a meeting in Norwalk, Ohio to plead for consideration of Perrysburg as the site of the river crossing for a new railroad to be built coming this way from Cleveland. Former mayor John C. Spink, speaking for the delegation, stated that his group did not think it possible to ever construct or keep up a drawbridge then being considered downriver toward Toledo. He humorously cited the backing of the high authorities: the U. S. Supreme Court, and God Almighty "who gave us a navigable river, except he put the bottom in a little too high in some places."
The citizens of Perrysburg and Maumee were even willing to tax themselves to buy stock ownership in the railroad, but it is not known if they actually did. However, in 1851 the people of the area announced with great joy that they had secured the permanent location of the Junction Railroad through Perrysburg and Maumee to Toledo. Stock sales had raised $120,000 from our town and adjoining townships.
The new railroad, organized a year earlier, was to run from Cleveland through Elyria, Sandusky, Port Clinton, Perrysburg, and then across the river to Maumee and on to Swanton where it linked up with a branch of the Michigan Southern and Northern Indiana Road. Completion was promised for 1853.
The line was to run through here along Third Street, as it does now, but continuing west at Cherry Street and passing just to the right of what is now Fort Meigs Cemetery. A new railroad bridge was to be built across the rapids near where the present vehicular bridge now stands.
Work on the railroad began, coming west, in 1852 and a local man, Shibnah Beach, had the contract to lay eight miles of track in this area. But sometime during this year Junction Railroad merged with the Cleveland, Norwalk and Toledo line and work apparently slowed down or stopped.
Three long years went by before the Perrysburg Journal reported that the stone piers and abutments for the new bridge were finally finished and trestle work underway. Local news coverage is apparently lost now, but sometime, probably in 1858, the "Iron Horse" finally chuffed into Perrysburg without much fanfare. People were probably so tired of waiting for it that they didn't feel like celebrating.
Backing up a little to 1852, Perrysburg got all excited about the proposed laying of a north-south line between Cincinnati and Detroit, organized at the Dayton and Michigan Road.
Plans called for it to cross the river on the Junction bridge, and the Village bought $50,000 worth of stock and the Township $10,000 worth. In time this was to become a hefty tax burden for the people.
But this rail line was also a long time a-coming. Four years went by and rumors were that Perrysburg might be by-passed. However, by the end of May track laying was completed from Toledo to Perrysburg, and by August of 1859 construction crews from both north and south met 50 miles south of here and the last spike was driven.
As the years went by, the original railroad went out of business and in 1861 the D & M built a two-story depot here and in 1879, a large frame engine house. Still later we had double tracks through here and passenger and freight trains ran at all hours. We especially needed trains then to carry passengers and mail, for this was before the days of trucks and automobiles.
We paid a high price, however, for over the years before we had gates and warning lights at crossings here in town and in the Township, a large number of people were killed by trains.
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there. - George Orwell
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