Friday, December 10, 2004, 8:25am
Friday, December 10, 2004, 8:25am
Just now I’m getting started with no deviation from my normal morning routine, yet instead of pulling out of Framingham or West Natick, we are underway much farther east between Natick and Wellesley. The morning is a blur passing before my eyes – a wet dingy silhouetted world of bare trees and misting lakes. I’ve had plenty of time on this train to spoon my yogurt and boot this computer according to my timepiece, but it’s felt like a mad rush as the time displayed leaps ahead without much activity on my part accounting for the warp.
Is this what dementia is like? – no sense of disorder other than the accelerating passage of time? Or am I simply still half-asleep in a dreamlike state where perceptions have not reached a critical mass to form a sense of continuity?
Indeed this is a drizzly cool gray day, dimly lit, mordant, and no less dingy than when first light first let out her first few photons at daybreak. I’m not much of an early bird, but such is not required to meet the darkness passed off as ‘morning’ – with the Earth just weeks away from the rebirth of Her winter solstice. This is probably one of those mornings I would have slept on this train two years ago before finding so much to do – before this journal, nominally begun as writing exercise in support of my Thief mission designs, and before that, fiddling with the latest audio recordings of these clanging trains for material used that same project, and before this, reading Pirsig and Steinbeck to simply pass the time. In fact, only in the first few months did I try sleeping in any regular way, yet aboard the rattling old single-decker morning train it’s too damn noisy and uncomfortable and annoying to sleep unless I’m dog-tired and willing to accept backaches and numbed appendages.
The time aboard this train – as fast as it streams along sometimes – is often the best time of the day for creative thinking, and I can’t bring myself to hole up into a ball when the wheels of imagination between my ears are ready to spin. I’m hardly the workaholic type, and this is no time-efficiency obsession. I simply have so few other time slots where my creative side has this much freedom to explore. At other times pure contemplation might be seen as goofing off or shirking my responsibilities. But here aboard this train nobody gives a damn or even notices.
At our seats this morning we were greeted with our own individually placed MBCR Commuter newsletter – a glossy four-color four-page flier full of useful facts about the commuter trains along with the usual public relation crap found inside all institutional communications. The first thing that catches my attention is how the MBCR acronym is itself entirely new to me. I never knew that the running of this commuter rail system has been subcontracted to a company charted under the name of the Massachusetts Bay Commuter Rail Company (MBCR) – and no longer run by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA). Was there a privatization spin-off I never heard about? And are the conductors mere employees of some profit-driven private contractor?
The mysteries of these rails never cease.
One mystery partly resolved is the reason for the recent clear cutting of brush and small trees between Ashland and Framingham. According to the newsletter, ‘…trees and bushes adjacent to the tracks are carefully cut to reduce the amount of leaves that may fall on the tracks.’
Before I get into the a debate about the scientific merits of this program, I have to take minor issue with the phrase “carefully cut” since the ‘carefully cut’ tree limbs and bushes I saw resembled the work of a giant lawnmower with spinning crowbars for a blade – leaving every stump and frilly bush splintered and shattered and pummeled uniformly to a pulverized stubble.
‘Careful?’ By whose definition?
Machines don’t care about being careful anyway, and I suppose, except for creating a favorable impression, the people who write this PR copy don’t care much either – the writers being little more than another form of machinery.
Reading further into this flier I learn some of the science behind the brutality. Apparently leaves falling to the tracks deposit an oily residue on the rails and can act as a metal-on-metal lubricant. And supposedly this causes ‘intermittent delays in regular service.‘
Exactly how? Who knows.
From what I already know – not included in this fluffy publication – liquid water and ice can act as a lubricant in some measure as well, and for decades sand ejectors have been used to spray the rails ahead of the locomotive wheels to increase traction during emergency braking and severe hill-climbing situations – though I doubt such are standard equipment aboard the Worcester line or its sibling lines to the north and south.
The assertion not explained at all is why the leaf problem causes ‘intermittent delays in regular service.’ Are the trains really failing to gain traction during routine operations? And because of these leaf oils, are engineers running the trains into and out of stations more judicially, cautiously and slowly, like a car in the winter running on balding tires?
If the trains that come roaring to screeching and cacophonous halt at Ashland Station are any indication of cautious driving, then the leaf oil problem (as well as any other excuse based on the notion of caution and care) seems more mythical than real.
Now for some analysis…
The problem of lubricating all mechanisms has been the bane of mechanical engineers since before the time of the Romans. A metal shaft rotating inside a metal cylinder needs something to keep friction – and resulting heat – to a minimum so the metal pieces do not weld themselves together, start fires, or explode in a shower of ballistic shrapnel. One way to reduce friction is to add steel balls or pins between the shaft and the cylinder so the shaft rolls against another rolling surface instead of grinding metal-on-metal. These sorts of structures are called roller bearings and this is how axles are made in cars, trucks, bicycles, and railroad cars.
In some applications, like a door handle, there isn’t a lot of force involved so instead of a roller bearing, a simple sleeve is used – made from a durable yet naturally slippery material like bronze. These are called bushings and with a little bit of machine oil and gentle usage they can last a long time.
Even bronze bushings may be overkill in lightweight mechanisms, especially things like a cell phone hinge and other items where a half cent per unit cost can add up to a lot of profit in volumes of several million sales. Instead of bronze we often use Teflon or nylon as a nice smooth bushing axle. And because these are molded materials, the shape of the cylinder hole can be incorporated into the mechanism without added parts.
Sometimes there are situations where price and performance do not permit any sort of molded bushing – places where the budget is thin. What if lubricating proprieties could be added to common materials? Teflon is not cheap as a molded material, but it is cheap as a coating.
Here, finally is how I connect this with skidding trains. A common technique is not just to coat a surfaced with Teflon, but actually impregnate the upper surface molecules with pressure and heat to embed molecules of Teflon right into the surface. That way the bushing can have the properties of a strong metal like steel yet the naturally self-lubricating surface properties of Teflon.
Evidently the leaf oil problem is not so much a matter of fallen leaves sitting on the tracks like some discards banana peel. The problem is how leaves are crushed by passing trains year after year, pressing leaf oils into the steel to stay there indefinitely.
At that point the oil must be removed with high-pressure steam and serious detergent agents – which, in fact, is the second part of the MBCR plan once they’ve finished pulverizing the offending trees and brush.
