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rex[_2_]

On 22 Aug 2007 02:43:14 GMT, (DoN. Nichols) wrote:

O.K. When I first heard about it, it was at MIT in 1960, and
already spoken of as a part of history.

The MTA car which was welded was not on MIT property. Instead,
it was just outside the Harvard football stadium, just before the end of
the Harvard-Yale football game. :-)

A student half entered the car, and standing in the door was
asking questions and being very stupid about understanding the answers.
(The car could not be moved while the door was open.) Four other
students came up to four of the wheel pairs, placed a paper bag of
thermite at the join of the wheels to the rails, and lit them. Again,
by the time that the student got clear of the door, the car was firmly
welded to the rails. They had to cut the rails, lift the car with a
crane, cut the steel tires off the cast-iron wheels, and heat-shrink new
tires in place while the cut out sections of rail were replaced.

That sounds almost exactly like the CIT story I heard. I can't say for
sure that the one I related is true, but the big old frat house next
door with not much happening seemed to tie in and make it plausible.

Maybe the same thing happened at MIT and CIT with one spawning a copy
cat at the other college?

Just did more googling and found this on the Practical Machinist forums
about a year ago.
---
"Interesting story about thermite welding. There used to be streetcar
tracks running up the street right by my college campus, right in front
of the fraternity houses. Legend has it that one day, one frat had one
of its brothers cause an altercation with the streetcar driver,
meanwhile several others snuck up and placed thermite by the wheels,
thus welding the hapless streetcar to its tracks. It supposedly was
several days before they could remove it.

I believe this was the same fraternity that was later banished from
campus for launching first billiar balls then gerbils with a giant
slingshot. The pool balls were supposed to have hit the library 300-400
meters away. The gerbils, not so much.

-Justin"
---
(Posted by a guy in Pittsburgh.)

Well, it is one more data point, but doesn't help too much because it
seems clearly inaccurate. I say it is inaccurate because the second half
with the slingshot was no doubt based on real events in my fraternity
while I was there, and we were not involved in the welding incident.

One of the fraternity brothers, T.J., brought a bunch of that stretchy
rubber tubing back from one of the labs. The first use was one of the
guys would grab the end and run down the hallway in stocking feet until
he lost momentum and traction and then fell down and slid back down the
hall as the tubing pulled back.

Soon a slingshot evolved with a kid's plastic beach pail and a window
frame. Nothing more dangerous than water balloons was ever launched but
T.J. found he could achieve great accuracy at hundreds of yards. There
was no library within range at the time, but there was the student
union, Skibo Hall, and there were some innocent victims who I don't
think ever figured out where the balloons came from.

So I'm pretty sure the slingshot was us, but we never launched anything
potentially deadly or alive and we never got in any serious trouble as a
result.