Power

Why The Baldwin Centipede Broke Every Railroad That Bought It — 91 Feet Of Failure
Cab Forward

I'm watching this video about the Baldwin Centipede locomotive, and he mentions the La Vergne 608SC diesel engine and I get distracted. He don't show a picture, or at least not a good one, so I go looking and found some passable images on The Baldwin Diesel Zone. 

La Vergne 608SC
Click to embiggenate

The 608SC shows up in 1945, but the company was around for another 20 years. So what were they building? In 1964:

The last 600 series engine was built at Eddystone. Stationary 608A #7113

Eddystone, where's that? Ask Google and the first interesting thing that pops up is the Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy. Okay, a power plant is not a locomotive, but they are like brothers from different mothers, brothers under the skin, so to speak. They are both industrial power machines, which is close enough. Besides, I have a soft spot for power generating stations, so I go take a look. On Google Maps, Eddystone is a suburb of Philadelphia and the power plant looks like this:

Eddystone Generating Station
The image is about one-half mile across

The power plant is surrounded by a double set of railroad tracks and most of the land inside the tracks appears to be flat, bare ground, or maybe concrete. If this power plant was burning coal, both of those features would be useful, but there doesn't appear to be any coal. However, there are two big oil tanks.

The company website gives a synopsis:

Ensuring Grid Stability Through Fuel Diversity

Eddystone Generating Station plays a critical role in delivering reliable power through fuel diversity. Owned and operated by Constellation, this six-unit, 820-megawatt (MW) power plant is located on the Delaware River in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia.

Eddystone Units 3 and 4, each with a capacity of 380 MW, were installed between 1967 and 1970. These subcritical steam boiler-turbine generator units can operate on either natural gas or oil, providing flexibility based on market conditions.

Units 10, 20, 30 and 40 are oil-fueled peaking units with a combined capacity of 60 MW. They are designed to run during periods of high demand and were installed in 1967 and 1970.

Construction of Eddystone began in the mid-1950s, with the now-retired Units 1 and 2 coming online in 1960. Both were supercritical steam boiler-turbine generator units that operated on coal. Unit 1 was retired in 2011, and Unit 2 followed in 2012.

Eddystone has been in business for 70 years, and for most of that time they were burning coal. It's only been in the last 15 years that they've fully changed over to gas and oil. I wonder how much it would cost to replicate that railroad track today. Google says one to five million a mile, for straight lines on level ground. I'm gonna say 10 to 20 million for this industrial location. Is there any other commodity that could use such a setup? A grain terminal maybe? Probably not while the power plant is operating.

There seems to be some disagreement over whether Eddystone should be operating or not. There's too many competing interests and it's too far away, I'm not gonna stick my nose in there, though maybe I should. Data Centers are one of the competing interests, and there are a bunch of them being built around here. I suspect they are piggy-backing on the electrical power distribution system that was installed to support Intel's Giant Ronler Acres Microchip Foundry. They might be piggy-backing as well on the tax deal Intel got when they set up shop in Hillsboro.

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An aside: While I was writing this post I tried to copy the phrase

Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy

from Google's search page, but when I pasted it I got:

Eddystone Generating Station - Constellation Energy

Curious as how this was being done, I used Blogger's html mode and found that pasting that line came with 3KB of html fluff. A little poking around reveals that including this little bit of text:

style="display: inline-block; transform: scaleY(-1);"

inside a <p> tag will do the trick. 

P. S. When I looked at this post on Feedly, the inverted text was not inverted.

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Horseshoe Curve Pennsylvania - on the way from Altoona to Gallitzin

The narrator in this video repeats some of his stuff a little excessively. I don't know whether he is just filling time, hoping to pound these phrases into the listener's brain, or whether he just likes the sound of his own voice. Is that even a real thing? Liking the sound of your own voice? I don't even know what I sound like, I guess my voice is acceptable. Anyway, I suspect the phrase 'liking the sound of your own voice' is just something some wag made up to describe someone who talked a lot.

The point I was trying to make is that I have seen several videos like this, and I guess I got to give these guys credit for putting together a polished video. Not everybody can do that, but I suspect some of these, especially the ones where the narrator never appears, are just having an AI read a script.

Robbery

Brinks Armored Car - AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Armored Car robberies seem to be on the rise, at least in Philadelphia. Looking at what Google tells me, it looks like there are, on average, there are roughly 35 armored car robberies each year in the USA. Now look at this story:

Two Armed Robbers Steal $1.8 Million From Brinks Armored Truck in Philadelphia by Bryan S. Jung

It lists at least six armored car robberies in Philadelphia in 2025. Can't say as I am surprised. Squeeze the proles enough, the pressure will get high enough that some of the them are going get squeezed out at high velocity and start bouncing off the walls.

Problem is nobody knows what to do. What we need is some kind big enterprise that will soak up a huge number of man hours. War has traditionally been the project of choice. Our military uses good number of people, but there are bunch who the military won't accept, for one reason or another. Doesn't mean they aren't capable of violence, does mean their vector is not under the control of the government.

Kaleidoscope - Netflix Series

Kaleidoscope Season 1 Trailer
Rotten Tomatoes TV

This series is being promoted as one where the episodes can be viewed in any order. We tried the 'first' one just to see if we could watch it. It was okay, so we started on the second. Then we got into a disagreement about the timeline. The first episode was seven weeks ago, wasn't it? Couldn't be, that wouldn't make any sense, so we go back and check and it turns out that its place in the timeline was seven years ago, so now we look over all the episodes, and we find one from 24 years ago and decide that that's where we want to start.

Jumping around in time is something we have seen in several series. In some cases the shifts in the timeline are clear and well defined and those in shows the time shifts are tolerable. In others the shifts are not obvious and it gets to be a lot of work to keep things sorted out. I am not sure there is any benefit to these jumbled timelines. If the characters and the story are interesting, I don't think jumbling the timeline adds anything. It just makes it harder to figure out what's going on. I think we can blame this all on Momento where the whole movie was a set of scenes shown in reverse order.

Back to our show. What we have is a pair of thieves. One is a handsome white man who dresses in suits and ties (Rufus Sewell as Roger Salas / Graham Davies), walks in the front door and charms the pants off the mark, so to speak. The other is technically competent black man (Giancarlo Esposito as Leo Pap / Ray Vernon) who sneaks in the back door while his partner is oozing charm and makes off with goodies. Naturally, when you have both operations (front door and back door) going on at the same time the whole operation is fraught with tension, and then there are the cock-ups when they come with a hairsbreadth of getting caught. Exciting stuff!

Exciting stuff! That's kind of important, because these guys are now middle aged and doing well enough that they really don't need to be putting it all on the line, but . . . it's in their blood and they just can't give up their thieving ways.

The technical details are a little sketchy in some places, and there is some slop, but I suspect this show is mostly about motivation. 

Technically it's not bad, and the ideas are pretty good, but the details aren't perfect. For example, our black man sneaks out of prison by hiding in the trunk of the doctor's giant Cadillac. He's tucked into the space behind the rear seat, above the rear axle, with a fake panel covering him. The doctor is a regular visitor to the prison and the guards check the trunk every time he leaves. An observant guard would have noticed something different in the layout of the trunk. This guard didn't, this time and that was all our man needed. Of course I noticed, but I'm a car guy. Most people aren't, so maybe I'm just picking nits.

IMDB has this little blurb:

Spanning 24 years, Kaleidoscope centers around the largest heist ever attempted, and the vengeance, scheming, loyalties, and betrayals that surround it. It's loosely inspired by the real-life story where seventy billion dollars in bonds went missing in downtown Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy.

New York Post has the original story that doesn't seem to involve any thieves, but that doesn't really exclude them does it?

P.S. In this show, seven (not seventy) billion dollars of bearer bonds have been deposited in an underground vault in Manhattan. They have been deposited by The Triplets, a righteous trio of big wheels. They make their appearance at the 10 minute mark in the Yellow episode. Since they went to all this trouble to invent these three characters, I got to wondering if there was any basis in fact. Short answer is no, but me being me, I had to poke around and this is what I found:

• Cho-Young Woo lead shareholder of Jongo, Korea's biggest private bank. He is Kim Jong-Un's nephew or cousin. In reality, Cho-Young Woo is a South Korean actor. Kim Jong-Un does have a nephew named Kim Han-sol, but he is hiding out from his uncle who is apparently trying to kill him. Jongo is a dance and musical genre from southeast Brazil. The largest private bank in South Korea is KB Financial Group.
• Suzanne Grosvenor, Lead Banker at Duncan-Welsh. The King has her on speed dial. In reality there is no Duncan-Welsh bank and Suzanne Grosvenor is an American pianist.
• Stephan Thiele, Swiss CEO of Banque Brunner, started by his great-great-grandfather in 1898. Nazi gold. In reality there is a Stephan Thiele at Deutsche Bank in Germany and there is an old Bank Brunner building in Belgium.

In 1982 the US Government made a rule that all bonds must be registered.