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Railway steam power. Oil shortage.

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Combwork

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This is nothing more than a trawl for information. Back in the 1960's, steam power was finished on British Rail on a specified day (can't remember the exact date). Some engines were on their last legs, well overdue for rebuild while others had been overhauled recently and were good for another 300k miles or more. Didn't matter; from that date on nothing ran and apart from a few sold complete to private enthusiasts or museums, all were scrapped. Except that serial numbers never added up. BR claimed that this was just 'accountancy errors', but there was a persistent story amoungst enthusiasts that some had been mothballed, to be brought back in use in case of extreme emergency. Define emergency? At that time Britain had plenty of good coal reserves; all the alternatives relied on imported fuel. The kind of emergency the gov't had in mind would have been anything that could have cut off oil imports. That "doomsday" scenario hasn't happened, but with oil prices the way they are, the economics of burning coal to shift freight might begin to make sense.

So, what's the situation in the U.S.A.? Is there known (or thought) to be a gov't reserve of coal fired freight engines that could be brought back into use? In the U.K., the gov't repeatedly denied the existence of any reserve and after a while, people stopped asking. After all, the gov't had given its answer, and we all believe them don't we? I remember a few years ago seeing footage on a news programme about some American millionaire who was convinced even then that oil prices made coal fired steam a viable alternative, and he was conducting tests over 80 miles or so of track. I don't know if anything came of this.............
 
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Our railway system in the US sucks. I highly doubt it. The Europeans have always had the edge on the US as far as transportation goes.
 
Ben Franklin once said, "A conspiracy of three people can be kept - as long as two of them are dead." That may have been true back in the 18th century, but somehow I think secret-keeping has been improved since then.
 
Personally, I think if it gets that bad, we'll use our strategic reserves to fuel the machine and just go take what we need/want.
 
With Lord Beecham closing the railway tracks down in the 60s and Thatcher and her hangers on closing the pits, which had good steam coal in some of them, Theres no chance of that ever happening!
 
Sorry, folks- whether it's sniping about the U.S. government, or the U.K. government, it's politics, plain and simple, and this is going absolutely nowhere.

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