Off The Rails

I Know, I Know

BOOJUM! is the poster child for this activity, as we sometimes occasionally constantly do this, darting off at a tangent in a manner that, were we a real train, would result in an hideous accident.  Hey, it's how we roll around here, if you don't like it there's a million other blogs about fluffy bunnies and rainbows and sealing-wax tin collecting.

     Time, I think, to bring in a completely unrelated illustration, because read the paragraph above.  Art!

If you so much as twitch you'll get the full 5,000 word monologue

     Now, let us consider railways.  They are a BRITISH invention, let no-one tell you otherwise, and are essential for the strategic movement of freight and passengers, which is one reason Turkey is in trouble as they have very few railways for a country of their size

     ANYWAY railways.  Your typical locomotive weighs in at about 200 tons, give or take the odd pound or two.  They need to be this massive as they need a massive engine to be able to pull dozens of freight wagons or passenger cars.  There were a few fantasy designs for atomic-powered locomotives back in the Fifties, when South Canada was still in love with nuclear fission.  Art!

STYLISH!  POWERFUL!  DEADLY DANGEROUS!

     Fortunately saner minds prevailed and none of these came to pass.

     Here an aside - hey see Paragraph One - whilst doing a search for the image above I also came across another one of interest, and if Art will put down his bowl of coal-

     Or, How To Win Friends And Influence People The South Canadian Army Way.  Stop and think about this one.  Unless the South Canadians are going to declare a 'Special' Military Operation against British America or Mexico, you can't deploy such a train in the CONUS.  So - it must be meant for Europe, right?  Except I doubt even the staunchest NATO ally would want a blatantly nuclear-armed train tooling around it's rail network.

     ANYWAY locomotives.  Big and heavy, right?  Great fun until an accident such as a derailment occurs, because then you have to recover two hundred tons of dead weight.  Art!

     There's an illustration for you, from "The Train" (cracking film by the way) that gives you an idea of how tricky it would be to recover that loco gone sideways.

     All this is by way of an introduction to a Youtube clip about a derailed Ruffian train near Bryansk.  Art!

As they should be

As they are

The culprit

     People were instantly agog on the Comments, loudly proclaiming it as sabotage <insert long list of gloating remarks> bar one chap who pointed out that there's no sign of explosive damage.  He said it's quite probably the result of poor or non-existent maintenance that led to the embankment giving way due to erosion or subsidence, and he may very well be right.  "Ruffian maintenance" is a bit of an oxymoron after all.  What the rail authorities will have to do is halt traffic in both directions, in order to bring in one of these - Art!

     To recover the overturned flatbed wagons.  They'll probably just leave the locomotive where it is, at least until the rails have been rebuilt and given a concrete facing, which will take a couple of weeks at least.
     Those remarks about sabotage aren't mere fantasy, either; a movement of railway workers in Belarus was rounded up a couple of weeks ago for sabotaging Ruffian military trains in transit.  And in "The Train" Burt Lancaster unscrews a few flange-plate bolts and shows how easy it is to derail a locomotive.  Art!

     I think that's enough for one Intro.

A Little More Wholesome

If not exactly well-mannered.  We've not had any Charles Marion Russell artwork for an age, so let us put up another.  Art!

"In Without Knocking"

     Clearly these boys are in high spirits, possibly after consuming some of same, and are being shockingly impolite.  Of course - obviously! - the hotel bears a portion of the blame, for having a door high enough for a mounted man to get in, minus his hat.  A party of drunks wielding and firing guns - what could possibly go wrong?

Tuscaloosa!

Conrad likes the sound of that name.  For the uninitiated, it's a town in Alabama, South Canada, and home to yet another astronomical observatory.  Art!

Old University Observatory

     As you may have guessed by it's diminutive stature, this is an olllllld building, becoming active as an observatory in 1849.  It went out of business in 1950 when a new, modern observatory was opened, but has been renovated and is still used as an arts building by the University of Alabama.  Art!

     And just in a fit of whimsy, also because it never hurts to up the word count, let's have a picture of a ferret eating a banana, because first paragraph.  Art!

We do what it says on the tin

Finally -

We'll get around to Dim - actually I have a new, crueller nickname for the tiny toxic terror toad: Bloaty Gas Tout.  Someone on a BBC gave him the nickname 'Gas Tout' and I am only adding a bit of chrome.  As ever, if the ongoing horror in Ukraine is too upsetting to follow, just read the next two paragraphs.

     First, we jump back to the First World 'Special' Military Operation, and the Arab Revolt.  This was a rebellion - you may be ahead of me here - by the Arabs against their Ottoman rulers, led in part by T.E. Lawrence, with weapons and equipment supplied by Perfidious Albion, who were always happy to sow sedition amongst the enemy's territory.  Art!

Loz.  Once mis-identified by a British soldier as "An Arab who can speak perfect English."

   
     Ol ' Loz had a strategy of relentlessly harassing the Ottoman supply lines to their various scattered garrisons in Arabia, making their situations alarmingly precarious.  His intent was to make their existence as difficult as possible and NOT attempting to overthrow, assault or occupy them; a withdrawal would have shortened Ottoman supply lines BUT power, prestige and pride did not allow them to do so.  Thus they bled from a thousand cuts.

     NOW Ukraine.  You have doubtless heard of Zmiinyi ('Snake') Island, taken by the Ruffians at the very start of Bloaty Gas Tout's war.  It occupies a strategic location off the port of Odesa.  Art!

Now with added burning buildings

     Moscow and it's trollbots are now claiming a fantasy Ukrainian amphibious assault against the island, with as much evidence as there is of Zelensky being a neo-Nazi shapeshifting alien invader from Pluto*.  Why would they need to attack it?  They are following Ol' Loz's strategy to a T.  So far the Ruffians have lost two Raptor patrol boats, a landing craft and the Tor mobile missile launcher upon it, another Tor missile launcher already on the island, a Strela mobile missile launcher, a anti-aircraft cannon and an MI-8 helicopter.  The piece de resistance was a treetop-level bombing raid by jets on Saturday, who laid a stick of bombs across the island.  Whilst risky thanks to the very low level, anti-aircraft missiles weren't a problem because the Black Sea Fleet's primary air-defence unit resides on the bottom of the Black Sea.  Art!

     The howling irony is that all those supposedly-deadly anti-aircraft defences were destroyed by aerial drones.

     Now, because Bloaty Gas Tout will never relinquish conquered land if he can possibly keep it in his hot sweaty grasp, as otherwise he would look weak, the Ruffians are going to continue to try and garrison and supply the island.  The Ukrainians, on the other hand, seem to know exactly what is being moved where and when <coughcoughNSAcoughcough>.

     O by the way there aren't any snakes on the island any more.  No, the Ruffians didn't eat them, they were gone long before they arrived.

    And with that, we are done!

*  "From Pluto" is obviously far too silly.