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Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Oct 2000
Posts: 5,400 |
actually, you can't do much better than einstein's description.
imagine you are on bike (or tram car in vienna!) you're traveling in a straight line.
the bike keeps going faster--so fast, it beings to appoach the speed of light! You are carried along with the bike..
how do you know that the speed is close to the speed of light? well, you begin to notice thing coming towards you are getting redder.. red being a highest frequence of light humans can see, and if you looked behind you, things would be bluer! (you are moving so fast, you can only see the leading edge of white light!)
just like the forward motion of the train, that "pushes" the sound ahead of it, (making it seem a higher pitch) and that adds its own speed to the speed of sound (making the whistle behind it sound lower) your movement pushes you into the red!
doppler effects show up all over, your hard drive has software to counter the dopple effect that it experiences!
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Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204
Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Aug 2000
Posts: 2,204 |
are carried along with the bike..
This is contrary to my experience - - and I have the scars to prove it!
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467 |
Bill:
Those long troughs were called jerkwaters, because the train literally jerked the water out of them. A town was called a jerwater town if it was so unimportant that the train going through would get its water on the fly rather than stopping under a water tower.
My kids were both into trains a good bit (I have had every Thomas the Tank Engine accessorry known to man) and we have taken several lovely train trips on restored steam engines here in Colorado.
On the Combres Toltec line, which crosses the Colo NM state line 7 times, there are several stops for water. The most interesting is the one that has the tank underground in a hillside above the stop. There's a large pole sticking out of the ground that has a float on the bottom so the train people can tell how much water is left in the underground tank.
The reason the tank is underground is to prevent it from freezing in the winter, since it gets down to around 20 below quite frequently.
Ted
TEd
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Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear TEd: I think "jerkwater" antedates the trough between tracks.
5JERK1 + WATER: prob. in reference to pulling the valve on the water tank to fill the engine boiler6 a train on an early branch railroad
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