Ever driven Lincoln Boulevard, in LA? They're all over.
I wouldn't go there at night, BTW.
--
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence
over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
(Richard Feynman)
Actually, the line will run from San Diego all the way to San Fransisco. So, it ain't all about LA.
The problem is that they are going to try to use existing track runs and existing "train" form factors.
This line needs to be mag lev. It needs to be fully enclosed. It needs mostly aluminum construction and ZERO rails(of the current type). It should be a mag lev on a suspended safety gantry. It should also be a slightly smaller form factor than current trains. We are not hauling freight here, so we do not need steel trucks and steel carriages.
The new form factor should be light weight and fro people designed, not some lame variant of a freight line.
That's "rails above the car". They never touch unless the mag lev dies out. The sealed line keeps saboteurs out. We could even use air evacuated passages to make things move even faster.
Then, this new design needs to get implemented in an national cross country line.
I AM the Slipperman.
You want to SLIP back and forth around a nation? You should consult with me, because I would put folks to work! That would include PRISON labor for the hard stuff.
"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
No, Boston is still the asshole. Californica is the toilet.
Ironically, LA itself has no center. It's just an endless matrix of chain restaurants, apartments, and laundramats, underneath a grid of megafreeways.
OTOH, San Francisco is entering its third or maybe fifth Gold Rush [1], with script kiddies cramming into SOMA from all over the world, living 12 to an apartment in Ikea bunk beds and eating out of food trucks.
It will end about like the previous Gold Rushes.
[1]1850s, real gold
WWII, embarcation point for the Pacific
1967, Summer of Love1990s, .COM 1
Today, apps, .COM 2
Then what is NYC? DC? Chicago?
Around here, smart meters are networked together (RF link) which then talk to a localized base station periodically during the day. They can now monitor your usage versus time. Some say they will start charging differernt rates per time of day in the future, then start controlling power to your house if power is scarce - all remotely. The folks who keed cell phones glued to their head are now afraid that the RF emissions eminating from the meters will give them cancer. Where I live, they have started the conversion process.
Our meters here are time-of-day, which varies with season. Being Arizona, nothing is forced down anyone's throat. Time-of-day metering is not mandatory. I chose to get time-of-day metering after keeping an hourly consumption log for a couple of months. I save $50-100 per month simply by scheduling pool pump, clothes washing, etc. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
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I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
The link I posted specifically says that the meter does that, and that about one in ten meters ends up being a repeater.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
PG&E == Pacific Gas and Electric.....
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I have Progress energy for electricity. It would be TECO, if we had natural gas available in this area. Otherwise, it's the propane dealer of choice, if you insist on gas for heat & cooking. I prefer an electric stove, and haven't used the gas furnace in over 10 years.
How long does it take them to find & repair damaged underground electric lines, VS overhead? Is there ever any flooding or heavy rain in your area? You can be without power for days or weeks longer, if the lines are underground. If the area has flooded, they can't even begin to restore power until all of the water has receded.
LA is not a good example. There are no trains or subways, only cars. SF is a better example for your arguments.
Some people don't have a choice, the flat where I live has no gas main and the landlord forbids any LPG appliances.
Recently in the UK a street was devastated by a gas explosion - that may have been intentional in the aftermath of a domestic violence incident, but houses being levelled by gas explosions isn't exactly rare!
They probably need to shift the emphasis from registered engineers safety checking gas appliances, to testing the fitness of doddering old fools to be using it!
On a sunny day (Sun, 08 Jul 2012 14:26:03 -0400) it happened "Michael A. Terrell" wrote in :
I think that is not correct.
Those cables are pretty much water proof. the only 'out' I have experienced is from workers accidently cutting a cable with digging machines. Do not forget cities like Amsterdam, and the surrounding areas are way below sea level, and somehow things keep working, also even with streets flooded[1]. It stops if the transformer houses flood, but then it is a mter high.. E'Trickcity is very reliable here. [1] Heavy rain, it sometimes happens.
I heard they're considering elevated water or gas in Alaska or something, because the 'quakes keep cracking the buried mains. Like the oil pipeline up there, zig-zagging across the countryside on elevated pylons.
Gas, water, sewer and storm drains are also a low 'slower', i.e., if you get a leak, fine you get a leak and lose some water or whatever. This happens fairly frequently. Sometimes, the leaks wash away the soil in the process, and a sinkhole quickly forms, sucking in roadway, parked cars, even houses and city blocks. In contrast, a "leaky" electrical line turns into a short circuit rather quickly.
Of course, you're inviting a higher frequency of maintenance with airborn lines too, but since Jan doesn't actually live here, he doesn't know just how stable our power actually is. Outages are quite uncommon, with 99.9%+ uptime typical. Outages are usually seconds (really hard winds whipping power lines around; fuses self-reset) to hours (downed lines).
Probably.. far as I know, it's like multilayer coax, typically unbalanced because it's not RF. They might put a 10AWG solid inside a few layers of polyethylene or related stuff, wrap with a loose braiding of nickel plated wire, then wrapped over all with lead cladding. The casing is grounded to shunt leakage, but it doesn't carry neutral. My direct experience with this material is in public lighting, where a constant current transformer sends perhaps 10A at a few kV down a chain of lamps; if a lamp fails, it "antifuse" shorts (rather than going open like a traditional fuse), taking it out of circuit. Usual streetlamp drops about 240V each, and they put
10-20 in series down a couple city blocks. Different cities and circuits are wired differently, of course. The constant current transformer is an interesting, old design.Tim
-- Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk. Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms
...and how do you bury lines when the water table is half an inch deep? ...or the rock ledge is.
d,
tied
,mento and Bakersfield, or even Fresno.=20
the Tehachapis, HSR means a high speed detour to Victorville and San Berdoo= . Even the Mt. Diablo/Mt. Hamilton range is a daunting obstacle to HSR's se= rving the Bay Area.
Modularized passenger service by flatbed over the Grapevine. Passenger mod= ules would be loaded back into rail cars in Santa Clarita. Passengers with = time on their hands could spend the day at Magic Mountain before reboarding= .
The current plan for California high speed rail includes a trip from Bakers= field to Mohave via the Tehachapi Loop, to Palmdale to Santa Clarita. If th= at routing makes more sense to you, fine. (I was joking about Victorville t= o San Bernardino.)
Nothing else is. Transformers sitting on (or under) the ground are pretty susceptible to flooding. Once you have flooding, severe erosion isn't at all uncommon. A little wire isn't going to hold back a flood.
That's pretty local and cheaply replaced. The worker pays.
Now take that water and move it across the ground at 20MPH.
It still amazes me how you lefty Europeons are so much smarter than the people who do this stuff for a living. You're just like Eeyore.
Ours is pretty bad. Third-world bad, but you'd expect it since the city runs the system. It's not uncommon for there to be an outage every day. It's rare, this time of year, for the power to go a week with no outage. Fortunately the outages are usually only a few minutes.
Just like Chinese Christmas tree lights. ;-)
In the UK the transformers are always sealed - usually filled with cooling oil, or special arc quenching gas if the housing also contains circuit breakers.
The cable entry glands on the (relatively) low voltage local substation are bound & tarred for a fully watertight seal.
Usually any cables 33kV or less are underground, they're sealed, insulated & armoured.
We do of course have the national Grid 400kV overhead cable pylons, we have pylons carrying cables as low as 135kV for outlying communities and industrialised farms.
Pole pigs are a rarity except in sparsely populated rural areas, the distribution voltage is pretty low and from a distance the poles/cables don't look much different from telegraph poles.
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