In article ,
jim rozen wrote:
In article , Doug Goncz says...

[ ... ]

I am not going to disclose in this article the chemistry of a thermite
reaction, because one can easily melt through a steel laboratory desk top, set
a house on fire (they were used as incendiary weapons in WWI, destroy an engine
block, or weld steel rail,

Then there's the famous MIT story. The students there were angry at
the trolley motormen because they sometimes would not stop to pick
up students, and sometimes would not wait long enough for the
crowd to exit the trolley before starting up again.

So those bad MIT guys got together a group to churn the doors
by climbing on and off the trolley for quite some time while
they packed around the steel trolley wheels with a mixture of
aluminum and iron oxide powder. Which was then lit off.

The motorman was rather suprised to see that his vehicle was
rendered immobile. They finally found it easiest to rip
up that part of the rails when they removed the car.

Urban legend or not? You all be the judge.

Well ... in that form, it may be. The story as I heard it while
I was there was that it wasn't just *any* MTA trolley, but one outside
the Harvard football stadium -- just before the Harvard-Yale football
game let out. And the car was held up by a student standing in the door
asking the motorman artfully dumb questions.

Repair process, I was told, involved a crane lifting the trolley
and the short section of tracks, cutting the steel tires off the
cast-iron wheels, and heat-shrinking replacements in place of the now
useless ones -- while the other crew laid fresh track to replace that
which had been removed. :-)

Still -- I have no proof that it happened that way, either,
since it was supposed to have happened some years before I got there
(1960).

Enjoy,
DoN.
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