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.

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.

rex wrote:
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?

Cornell had a small bridge that provided entrance to one side of
the campus, and pranksters parked a VW Microbus on the bridge, and thermite
welded a pole from one railing to the other, through the bus's window.

-Chuck

In article ,
(DoN. Nichols) wrote:

According to rex :
On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:59:22 GMT, "Oppie" wrote:

Found this one on classic hacks -
http://www.skepticfiles.org/cowtext/...1/realhack.htm
Some MIT students once illicitly used a quantity of thermite to weld a
trolley car to its tracks.

The link and some others from google also mention CMU.

I was at Carnegie Tech (now CMU) in the last half of the 60's. My

[ ... ]

The reason, related to me in about 1965, was that some years earlier the
fraternity had welded a street car to the tracks. The googling I did has
references to both MIT and CMU (actually CIT back then) but no details.
Here is the second-hand story as I remember it.

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. :-)

The original application of this method was during strikes against the
streetcar company. The students were many decades late to the party.

Joe Gwinn

On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:42:57 -0400, Howard R Garner
wrote:

The Real Andy wrote:
On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:29:18 GMT, Rich Grise wrote:


On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:43:16 +0100, Eeyore wrote:

Oppie wrote:


It rather amazed the crud out of me to see these long flatbed cars - about
ten altogether, with the rails laid in grooves on the deck. I guess there is
a limit on how many rails they can cary and still make it around a curve...

The rail bends of course, just the same as the rails the train is running on.

With such long pieces of rail, how do they account for expansion?

Thanks,
Rich


There is a facility about 3 suburbs away from me that welds together
the short segments of tracks as described. I catch the train past the
place everyday and often see the trains loaded up with the large
sections. The track is placed on a greased up pad, then another is
placed on top and soforth. The track itself can move freely back and
foward. I have not really noticed how it is secured at each end but I
will take a look next time I pass one.


The track is secured to a center car so both ends move when it goes
around the curves.

I had a good look at one today, and you are of course 100% correct!!
If you had not mentioned this, would never have noticed!



Howard Garner
from a family of railroaders