• NotSteve_
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    23 days ago

    At first I thought it was really neat that the tram had tracks right through the building

    • blackn1ght@feddit.uk
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      23 days ago

      My first thought was why did they design the tracks with that weird bend in it and that the tram was coming out though a tunnel in the building!

      • f314@lemmy.world
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        23 days ago

        Too high speed through the corner.

        The tram was coming from the right side of the picture and was turning left (to exit out the bottom of the picture). Considering it went all the way to the back wall of that store it must have been going pretty fast…

        Source: I work 100 meters from where this happened (earlier today!)

  • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    23 days ago

    Damn, how the hell do I find out about this on Lemmy before my local news??

    Well, the actual reason is that I was inside a building at the time and didn’t hear it, haven’t checked the news, and didn’t go through the area this time… but still lol

    Anyway this sucks :< trams are good pals

  • Album
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    23 days ago

    Trains are really unpredictable. Even in the middle of a forest two rails can appear out of nowhere, and a 1.5-mile fully loaded coal drag, heading east out of the low-sulfur mines of the PRB, will be right on your ass the next moment.

    I was doing laundry in my basement, and I tripped over a metal bar that wasn’t there the moment before. I looked down: “Rail? WTF?” and then I saw concrete sleepers underneath and heard the rumbling.

    Deafening railroad horn. I dumped my wife’s pants, unfolded, and dove behind the water heater. It was a double-stacked Z train, headed east towards the fast single track of the BNSF Emporia Sub (Flint Hills). Majestic as hell: 75 mph, 6 units, distributed power: 4 ES44DC’s pulling, and 2 Dash-9’s pushing, all in run 8. Whole house smelled like diesel for a couple of hours!

    Fact is, there is no way to discern which path a train will take, so you really have to be watchful. If only there were some way of knowing the routes trains travel; maybe some sort of marks on the ground, like twin iron bars running along the paths trains take. You could look for trains when you encounter the iron bars on the ground, and avoid these sorts of collisions. But such a measure would be extremely expensive. And how would one enforce a rule keeping the trains on those paths?

    A big hole in homeland security is railway engineer screening and hijacking prevention. There is nothing to stop a rogue engineer, or an ISIS terrorist, from driving a train into the Pentagon, the White House or the Statue of Liberty, and our government has done fuck-all to prevent it.