i can only sometimes control the rivets

Yay, machine sperg thread!

I have been watching this video of British steam trains passing at speed repeatedly over the last few weeks. Too often, we see old trains as these cute quaint ambling things, old horses out to pasture, tootling up and down some tiny little tourist railway.

But Britain has open-access railways; anyone who wants to run a train can on the national system, provided they pay access fees and use equipment that's passed safety standards and inspections. While a lot of the other things about the country's railway privatization in the 80s haven't been all that popular, the open-access part has meant that lots of high-speed steam trains get to run regularly all over the country pulling enthusiast trains. And there are enough train nuts to make this a profitable business.

They're limited to 75mph, while some of these used to run faster than that way back, but 75 is fast enough to stretch their legs and show what they're capable of. There's even one new-built locomotive, the Peppercorn A1 "Tornado", which was funded by enthusiast donations to re-create a type of which all previous examples had been lost. It appears a bunch of times in this compilation.

Warning: 45 minutes long!

 

American railroading these days is so homogenized and efficient and businesslike it tends to leave me cold, although the sheer scale is impressive in its own way. They're like giant cargo ships of the land, these days; miles long, tens of thousands of horsepower (each locomotive is 4400 engine hp). But so same-y.

I mostly grew up with diesel trains, actually; steam was something we rarely saw, the conversion to diesel for regular trains happened before I was born and you didn't see nearly as many on enthusiast trains in the 70s and 80s as you do now. Not so many electrics, but they were fascinating. Really all of them are.

 

I haven't experienced the Japanese bullet trains, but spending a month in Japan riding every single train I can is on my list of things to do in my life. I think they're awesome; the French TGVs are not quite so awesome but pretty awesome, as are the Eurostars, and I've ridden on those. Nothing in the US comes close to any of them. The US hasn't really been the star of fast running since the 1930s.

 

And also, the Japanese and Germans are the only peoples on earth who come close to the train-obsession of the British.

 

I did once; my partner and I spent a whirlwhind day in Paris via that. It's fascinating. And then when the train gets to France it absolutely flies. It has the "world is frozen" feel when you pass stuff so fast it seems to be unmoving because you're past it and gone before it has a chance.

I am pretty aviation-fascinated as well; I did at one point consider joining the RAF to work on coolplanes. But then the Cold War ended, defense spending was cut back, a lot of the cool stuff got retired, and I became computer-obsessed, so plans changed.

Watching an airshow with Lightnings and Vulcans was still one of the most impressive things I've ever experienced.

 

The camo Vulcans were after the RAF realized there was no way in hell that they were going to high-altitude bomb the USSR in those things anymore, so they went for low-altitude bombing in them instead. Like treetop-skimming height but flying something the size of a parking lot. And it's pretty much the same European theater camouflage the RAF has been using since about 1940 or so ...

The RAF in general were some of the craziest low-fliers of the modern era, especially in the Blackburn Buccaneer; there were several times in US-UK wargames in which the Americans were severely embarassed by their inability to track the RAF planes on radar, because they were just too damn low and too good at using the terrain to hide. And then they got the Tornado which basically automated that low-flying, letting it skim the ground on full autopilot.

Helicopters are neat but I never got quite as into them, except for the CH-53E "Super Stallion" I got shown around when I was pretty young, the USN flew one in for some reason near where I lived.

 

Only the B-2 Spirit is more wing, less body ...



and if you see one from this angle, prepare to be utterly deaf because only the Concorde is louder than the Vulcan at full throttle:

 

And then there's the Handley-Page Victor, which clearly came from some alien dimension:

 

I'm not much into machine stuff these days, but I had SUCH a nerdcrush on the Spitfire when I was in the fourth grade.

 

Utterly beautiful. The Spitfire is such perfection of form.

 

Proof that pilots are nuttier than myself, I guess ...

 

Last year we went to the annex for the air and space museum in DC and the plains they had.
they had a recreation of a wright brothers one!
I'm not as fascinated with electrical modern machine stuff because steam stuff is fascinating, through I keep getting distracted by my main sperg (writing/religion) to actually do much research.
all of these are so COOL
switching gears (heh) but the moon lander is so COOL
I saw part of it and it's so cool.

 

I'm not big on machines in general, but like. really complicated engines and such are so much fun to sketch and i don't get the opportunity to do so often. so if anyone has pictures of really cool things like that i can draw, that would be appreciated.