Toledo Locomotive Derailment

Back on the Rail [Toledo Derailment Update]
7idea Productions

This happened this week not too very far from here- 80 miles as the crow flies. Here's a couple more videos about this incident:

• Derailed on a Trestle! 12 minutes. Mostly background information.
• Trestle Derailment Update 2 minutes
• Timelapse: Crews work to free 3 locomotives stranded on Oregon trestle 4 minutes Building the temporary bridge

Railroad Line from Toledo, Oregon, to Corvallis
This line runs over the coast range. Toledo is at the left end of the yellow-green line, just east of Newport. The word Corvallis is partially covered by that same line. You can read the last part of the name: -allis. I-5 is near the right hand side of the image.

I don't think I've ever encountered slugs before, at least not the railroad kind. Seems they have been around for awhile. Trains tells us that they got their start in the early 20th century at a copper mine in Montana.

Google Map

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6031

10 Short Videos #6031

The poverty pitcher. It ain’t never this bad kids.

How Much Play Doh Does it Take to Stop a Bullet?

High frequency hearing

3D Printed CNC bit holder

Russian Su-35 passes US F-16 intercepting a Russian Tu-95

Dirt bike corner techniques

Blender Warranty - Malcolm in the Middle

Heavy lift drone operations

Card Trick. I've seen a bunch of this guy's tricks and he is just baffling. Or maybe I'm just easily baffled.

I'm more emotionally invested in this ad than the entire MCU.

Zodiac Girl

Virgo

Very cool picture. Did not find out much about it. Google says it is "in the style of Gustav Klimt".

I Work in a Warehouse

I Work in a Warehouse
Blake Porter

Modern life lived to perfection.

Reefers

They Tried to Kill Swift’s Fridge Car — and Created a Monster Instead
Ewan Hargreaves

Swift and Armour, boy, those names are a blast from the past. I haven't come across them in a coon's age, but evidently they are still in business. Swift was purchased by Brazilian company JBS in 2007 and continues to operate. Armour has become Smithfield Foods.

Reefer Rail Car

I vaguely remember having a book about trains when I was a kid. It had pictures of various kinds of railroad cars, like boxcars and reefers, and they were loading ice into the reefer. I'm old, but I don't think I'm that old. Turns out the last ice cooled reefers were built in 1957, and the first mechanical refrigerated railcars were built in 1958.

Icing Reefers

Google gave me some numbers about railroads in North America. 

There are:

• 28,000 locomotives
• 1.6 million freight railroad cars, including:
• 570,000 covered hoppers
• 439,000 tank cars
• 208,000 flat cars
• 195,000 gondolas
• 104,000 box cars.

However, there are only 8,000 to 10,000 reefers.

Mechanical refrigeration (Thermo King) was adapted to long haul trucks in the late 1930's, just in time for WW2.

1965 DIVCO Milk Truck

Remember these old milk trucks? I got a look at one once. They had a weird refrigeration system. They had big blocks (tanks?) lining the freight compartment. These blocks were hooked up at night, chilled all night long, and then kept the truck cool all the following day. DIVCO stands for Detroit Industrial Vehicle COmpany.

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6030

10 Short Videos #6030

Crazy Gyrocopter

Steam and bend wood

Radar Hacked The Ghost Drone Strategy

The Boat with Propellers in the Front

Tank roaring through swamp

Insane Weapon Loadouts of AC-130 Gunship

How Far Behind Are Chinese CNC Machines

Mad Max - Ukraine Edition

Millions of Mini Motors ,One Perfect Process Y.

Woman excavates mine under her house

Secret Agent Miss Fortune

Secret Agent Miss Fortune

Miss Fortune is a character from the video game League of Legends. Never played it.

Club Des Belugas/Thomas Siffling - Get Shafted

Club Des Belugas/Thomas Siffling - Get Shafted
Lopez Repetto

Cool videos.

More Greenland

I'm enjoying this tempest in a teapot.

Great Hedge of India

The route of the 1870s Inland Customs Line (red) and Great Hedge (green)

More weirdness from 19th century British India. Giant hedge grown from prickly, thorny and otherwise nasty plants.

From Wikipedia:

The Inland Customs Line, incorporating the Great Hedge of India (or Indian Salt Hedge), was a customs barrier built by the British colonial rulers of India to prevent smuggling of salt from coastal regions in order to avoid the substantial salt tax.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Gold Noise

Saw this chart from ZeroHedge on feedly and thought 'this looks ominous', but the image was too small to see the numbers clearly, so I opened in a new tab. Now I was able to clearly see the numbers in the enlarged image. 

The gold line is the spot price of gold. The other two lines are some obscure market bullshit, I'm not even going to try and figure out what they are.

Now look at the numbers on the gold scale (2nd from the right). It ranges from $5300 an ounce to $5550, a difference of 4%, not a catastrophic collapse. Now look the time scale along the bottom. It starts at 3:30 AM and runs till 7 AM this morning. That's like ancient history. Gold could be a thousand dollars higher or lower by now.

I suspect anytime you use a microscope to look at any kind of financial market you will find what look like apparent huge leaps in prices. I imagine there are people who thrive on this kind of minutiae but I ain't one of 'em.

The ZeroHedge article is paywalled. I suspect that the feedly link will not work for you.

Su-30 Intercept

Su-30SM “81 Blue” with tail number RF-81885. (Spanish Air Force pic)

The Russians regularly fly over the Baltic in International Airspace and NATO dispatches jet fighters to follow them around. This photo is from one such encounter. I suspect that the Russians make these flights as a matter of 'freedom of navigation'. It's like if you don't exercise your rights, you are liable to lose them. Also flying (or sailing) over the Baltic is the only way to get from mother Russia to Kaliningrad. Both sides get to exercise their pilots and aircraft which is essential if you are going to bother about having jet fighter aircraft in the first place.

Excerpt from Defence Blog:

The interception was carried out by F-18M aircraft from Spain’s Wing 15, currently deployed to Šiauliai Air Base in northern Lithuania under the Vilkas detachment. . . . The intercepted aircraft included Russian Su-30SM multirole fighters armed with air-to-air missiles and cluster munitions. . . . markings visible on the tail show the aircraft belongs to the Naval Aviation branch of the Russian Navy.

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6029

10 Short Videos #6029
What does SPQR mean in Rome?
Please support our OnlyTails guys

What In The Confederate Flag Is He Talking About
The Insanely Fast German Howitzer — Just 3 Seconds Fire Rate!
By gently pressing with a 70-ton press,The powder then turns into cemented carbide plates
AV-8B Harrier II Dodges Every Osa AKM Missile in Action!
The bear fell into a trap
Some orb spiders rebuild their webs every night.
Employees at this mall even get a 40% discount benefit!
Swans have one of the coolest water landing techniques ever

"By gently pressing". Heh.

Morcheeba - Blood Like Lemonade

Morcheeba - Blood Like Lemonade (official)
piasrecordings

Awake in the middle of the night and this tune popped into my head. Only lyrics I remembered were 'moral code' and 'tastes like lemonade', which isn't quite right, but beating on Google enough I finally tracked it down. Released in 2010. Wikipedia page. Lyrics here. 

Park

Automatic Transmission Park Gear & Pawl

Masked men, presumably ICE agents, pulled two guys out of an Uber last week. Okay, that's ICE doing their job, or some cartel thugs doing theirs. But this is what caught my eye:

"They ordered her to unlock the doors, which the car did automatically when she put it in park. The agents then opened the back doors of the vehicle and ordered the men to get out."

Seems to me most cars will unlock the door when you open it from the inside. I've encountered a couple of cars where you had to specifically unlock the door before you could open it, but I don't think I've ever encountered a car that unlocked the doors automatically. Strikes me as the very opposite of safe. On the other hand, when I get out of the car and I go to get something out of the backseat, I have to unlock the doors and half the time I've already closed the driver's door so I have to open the driver's door back up, or I have to root around in my pocket for the stupid key fob.

Ask Google about this and I get this back:

Many modern cars can be programmed to automatically unlock doors when shifting to PARK, but it is not universal and depends on the vehicle's make, model, and settings. While some cars unlock upon shifting to Park, others only unlock when the engine is turned off or when the driver's door is opened. This feature is often configurable in the vehicle's infotainment settings menu. 

I suspect this is just another bit of marketing twerps trying to accommodate people who are not in tune with the mechanical world, i. e. the vast majority.

Joachimstein Water Castle

Joachimstein Water Castle

(Pałac Radomierzyce)

Baroque palace in Radomierzyce, Poland. Built in 1728, one of the most beautiful in Upper Lusatia.

Baroque palace in Radomierzyce

This palace is just part of a larger compound. The building shown in the top image is at the top of this image.

Joachimstein Water Castle Map

The palace is:

• 70 miles north of Prague, Czechia
• 55 miles east of Dresden, Germany
• 125 miles southeast of Berlin, Germany
• 165 miles south of Szczecin, Poland - Terminal for doomed ferry Heweliusz
• 200 miles south of Swinoujscie, Poland - location for excellent Polish crime series The Thaw
• 35 miles west of Grodziec Castle
• 270 miles west-southwest of Warsaw, Poland

Oder-Neisse line between Germany and Poland

The palace is right on the river Neisse, which forms part of the border between Germany and Poland.

Funnies

10 Short Videos #6028

10 Short Videos #6028

Never wrestle a bear!

Heavy lift drone

20mm ANTI-SOVIET SNIPER RIFLE! 🇫🇮 L-39 Lahti

Specialized NASA Aircraft Has a Bad Day

Full Ahead!

Drone bringing in the harvest

Somebody help the bro

Ice boarding

Has a Weapon Ever Been Fired in Space?

Winter Rally Recovery

1937 Model 8 350 Sports Sunbeam

1937 Model 8 350 Sports Sunbeam

More pictures of this bike here.

Sunbeam Cycles made by John Marston Limited of Wolverhampton was a British brand of bicycles and, from 1912 to 1956 motorcycles. - Wikipedia

1937 Sunbeam Model 8

Wolverhampton History & Heritage Website has a bunch of pages about Sunbeam Motorcycles.

10 Short Videos #6027

10 Short Videos #6027

Rescue hillside house near collapse

Unicycle in the winter in Alaska!

Nuclear submarine Surfaces Through Ice

Gizmo helps people with Tourette's

YAW3 Motion Simulator - DCS World Carrier Landing

Why You Can't Swap a Barrel with Bare Hands

Wheel driven track system

You bunch of biscuit eating kumquats

How Scientists Hunt Murder Hornets to Protect the Bees!

All The Mud at Woodstock (on this day 15 August 1969)

Funnies

Gold

A woman holds a 1kg gold bar at the headquarters of the Australian Bullion Company in Sydney [File: Daniel Munoz/Reuters]

Aljazeera: Spot gold price touches an all-time high of $5,110.50 for an ounce in the first hours of the day.

That would make the gold bar in the picture worth $180,000. Back before Nixon, when gold was worth $35 an ounce, this same bar would have been worth $1,200. A few months ago when gold was around $3,000 an ounce, today's dollar was worth one cent from 1963. Now it's only worth 2/3 of one cent. And somehow the U. S. dollar is still the world standard.

Minnesota Insurrection?

Eric Schwalm posts on X:

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

His description makes a lot of sense, it sound a whole lot like the illicit drug distribution networks we see on crime shows.

The thing is - both of these kinds of operations are fueled by money, they aren't grass roots organizations fueled entirely by people's legitimate concerns. They're driven by people with an agenda, and that agenda is to fill their pockets with money extracted from the government.

Via Lone Star Parson

Tips For Staying Warm

New York City. January 25, 2026. Laura Brett / ZUMA Press Wire / Scanpix / LETA

Russia's semi-opposition media Meduza offers some tips for staying warm during this winter storm. Ain't that sweet?

A historic winter storm has paralyzed much of the eastern United States, forcing airlines to cancel at least 10,000 flights and prompting more than 20 states to declare emergencies. On Sunday, more than a million homes and businesses lost power, leaving many people unaccustomed to severe cold to face freezing temperatures without indoor heating. For those suddenly confronting harsh winter conditions in parts of the U.S. that rarely see snow, Meduza’s employees — no strangers to the bitter cold — share their top tips for staying toasty.

Their tips come from:

• Denis, Moscow, Russia (average daily low temperature in winter: –8ºC / 18ºF)
• Sonya, Vologda, Russia (–13ºC / 9ºF)
• Dasha, Riga, Latvia (–5ºC / 23ºF)
• Vladislav, Perm, Russia (–17ºC / 1ºF)
• Sofya, Berdsk, Russia (–19ºC / –2ºF)
• Tyoma, Surgut, Russia (–22ºC / –8ºF)

10 Short Videos #6026

10 Short Videos #6026

Oscillation or Rotation? Is it real or is it Memorex?

Sitting on the bottom of the pool after a 20m Dive

This Brain Reading Electrode Unfolds Inside Brain Like a Tent Without Surgery

Iron heated above its Curie Point

This 1948 Steam Train Just Flew Past a Modern Station at 90 MPH

Houston Police with Swangas

Sonovox

Jam Jar Pulse Jet Thrust Test

Massive Magnet Fishing

I bought a $600 Soviet car in Russia

Funnies

747

747

Snabba Cash: Season 2 - Netflix Series

Snabba Cash: Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

On one hand, our girl, Leya, is trying to make a success of her company in the straight world. On the other hand we have a bunch of guys involved in the illicit narcotics trade. Unfortunately for Leya, some of those guys helped fund her start up, and they keep asking her for to do this one little meeting. But it's never just one little meeting, it just keeps going on and on and she keeps getting in deeper.

Meanwhile, Zaki, a new guy, has just got out of prison and somehow he has quickly amassed an organization of spies, street level dealers, and a squad of killers armed with AKs and mounted on dirt bikes. They cut a wide and bloody swath through the established drug distribution network. And now he wants Leya's drugs.

The show is intense. The narcotics business is insidious. Some people are just rotten.

Season One Post

Wikipedia

Cast

6 episodes, 40 minutes each.

10 Short Videos #6025

10 Short Videos #6025

Chuck Norris & the Tiger

The Poisonous Spice

Smoke Machine Leak Detection

Magazine Loader

Fidget Spinner

Trotting

Living on $300 in a Russian village

Shotgun Shell Caddy

Champion Carpet Stretching

3D Printed Gatling Gun

Funnies