If You're Going To Be A Stickler
Then it should more properly be 'Val', as yes, we are once again discussing the clash of martial cultures in Italy during the First Unpleasantness, and with particular reference to a rather unique variety of railway transportation that I don't think we've covered before: the rack and pinion railway.
Before we get any further, I want to bring up a picture from one of "Bruno Pisani"'s mountaineering exploits, and no false modesty about him merely being a hiker, these were proper mountains he was climbing. Art!
This view is indeed of the Austro-Italian border mountain ranges, looking westward from the Dolomites inside Italian territory. If there is any level ground there, it will be very narrow strips of land at the bottom of valleys.
The British in late 1917 has been shunted around to the Asiago Plateau, on the mountainous northern border with Austria, sandwiched between Italian and French forces. Whilst the plateau was a vast, shallow depression, the routes to it lay up hills and mountains. Art!
Courtesy Imperial War Museum
The mountains were so steep that it was impossible for roads to traverse them in the normal fashion, so they were hairpin in layout, as you can see above. On a minor note, the British 3-ton lorries were too large to cope with the bends and Italian trucks with a smaller turning circle were purchased for use.
Right, so that's roads dealt with. Now let me throw a few maps into the mix. Art!
The salient part of the Legend here is the 'Rack Railway' which you can see goes through Cesuna and on to Asiago. These sketch maps don't detail things like contour lines, necessary for depicting how steep the land depicted really is, so - Art!
Here is where we come into the realm of gravity, friction, mass and physics. A normal railway cannot exceed a gradient of more than 4.5º, at which point mass and gravity will combine to prevent any progress being made and the locomotive's wheels will just spin on the track.
How to solve this problem took enterprising engineers no more than a quick peruse, which is a lot easier than putting it into action. Art!
However - yesss! - that angle creates another problem for normal locomotives, because they only function properly when horizontal, thanks to their boilers being sensitive to changes in orientation. How do you solve this problem? Why, you re-design the locomotive. Art!
These locos are optimised for travel up and down steep gradients, where their design and pitch keeps the boiler level. They look rather odd out of context, though. Art!
I nicked this picture from Wiki, as there aren't any others I could find showing this mechanical fish out of water. I don't even know if it would run on level tracks but looking at how angled the boiler it, one doubts it. Has anyone come up with a gimballed-boiler steam loco that adapts to changes in elevation? A bit of a niche market, one presumes. It is also noted that r-a-p locomotives are a lot slower than conventional ones, and 10 miles per hour is about the quickest they can manage.
ANYWAY back to sunny Italy, or, rather, snowy mountainous Northern Italy, where they had the Rocchette-Asiago rack and pinion railway, which you saw a portion of in the maps above. This was laid down (or up) in 1910 and was used until 1958. Art!
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| Note the middle r-a-p track |
The whole track was torn up decades ago, and since it went out of commission 66 years ago there's precious little evidence of it whilst it was running.
Today's rack and pinion railways are all either electric or diesel, so there are no peculiar adaptations to mountain conditions, which is an aesthetic loss we'll just have to put up with.
There you go, a great deal less blood and thunder than you expected if rather more steam and smoke.
Further To Being Buried Alive
We have covered this ghoulish yet interesting trope a while back, principally covering Victorian worries about being sent to meet your maker a trifle early, and methods of resolving this. Principal amongst them was not dying in the first place, or at least not seeming to die. What follows next is from "The Infographics Show"'s take on how to survive being buried alive.
Step One: Calm down. Art!
CO₂ monitor
As used by "Mythbusters" when they buried Jamie alive. You see, the more stressed and anxious you are, the faster you use up the available oxygen and the more CO₂ you emit. Since many coffins are airtight, you have a limited air budget to work with.
Step Two: What physsical assets do you have with you? TIS optimistically encourage you to hit the coffin lid with whatever hard objects come to hand, in order to potentially allow any sharp-eared cemetery worker or visitor to hear you. Art!
Handy yet unlikely
Step Three: Break out. Unless you're in a steel coffin, in which case you're doomed unless you were buried with a power drill and multiple bits. A very big 'unless' there. Assuming that the coffin is cheap and fragile, cover your head with your shirt to keep out dirt, then use whatever tool you have to attack the centre of the coffin lid, it's weakest point. Causing it to flex may be sufficient to break it under the weight of overburden. Art!
Step Four: Wiggle. As earth pours into the coffin, you need to keep on top of it and also to get out of the recently-dug grave. This earth will be relatively loose so your chances of getting to the surface are not 0%, as encouraging as that sounds.
One of the Commenters claimed to work in a cemetery and said coffins are often placed in a concrete vault which is massive enough to need a crane to assemble it. Plus, the burial takes place possibly a week after the body is placed in the coffin. Which rather takes the romance out of this subject. O well.
Our Journey With Berni
Will continue in a few minutes after I've made sure the pictures are available. Wait one. Art!
Kind of. The picture and Berni's comments were entirely separate, so I've had to meld them seamlessly with Snip, which also means that the text is horizontal, not vertical, if still a tad too small to read. Allow me to correct that. Art!
I think it's more about giving the slavering undead monsters a vulnerability that derives from supernatural forces, rather than them observing etiquette.
And This Just In From "R.G. Poulssen" On Twitter
Ol' Rog is a Dutch national who loves to post "On This Day" clips on Twitter - HA TAKE THAT ELONG TUSK! - and put up an interesting one that I've not seen before. Art!
He wasn't sure what it was, which is easily resolved, as it's the Sinister's knock-off of the British Vickers 6-ton tank: the T-26. There are British soldiery watching it trundle along and thanks to the dust and sand, other Twitter users identified the location as Iran, during the dual British-Sinister invasion of same country in 1941.
Finally -
Your Humble Scribe is finally feeling better, which means a prospective stroll into Lesser Sodom, which means a scrape and a scrub beforehand. Can't go around frightening people. Also I've run out of Codewords to do, Horrors! so a copy of the M.E.N. is also in prospect.
Chin chin!
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