Re: Railroads

[Janne Kemppi <jkemppi@mail.student.oulu.fi>]

> 	I have a quick question.  How difficult would it be for the project 
> to build a varient of the fusion forge in starnaman for quick, mass 
> production of railroad rails?  For some areas, RR's would be vital 
> for the rejuvination of the economy, especially since you wouldn't 
> need fuel to run a RR (use fusion engines from the vehicles.)  Just 
> wondering what the minimum team size would be, assuming that it was 
> planned for locals to provide much of the labor while the MP provided 
> tech skills and vital materials.
>  

There are few points that one should consider when thinking of railroad 
building.

1) Steel for railroad tracks themselves. In MP this is easily available
from power lines and cities but raw material could become complicated 
issue when working outside populated areas. In essense it is a matter
of logistical thinking and preplanning.

2) Most railroad blocks are made of concrete allthough before wood was
most popular material. In MP the weood is readily available allthough
it has few drawbacks (like such rails need to be refurbished more often 
than concrete ones but that is merely inconvenience compared to advantages
of railroad.

3) Railroads need a lot of construction work. You never just lay the
tracks to ground, you need first ensure that ground is turdy enough.
This is mostly problem of planning the actual railroad allthough bad
places cannot be go around too often. This is most manpower intensive 
part of railroad building. Railroad track building speed of 19th century
would be probably closest to what your people can do when we consider
almost complete absense of heavy duty machinery.

4)Locomotives can be hard to find...or not. For example in Finland the
railroad kept a lot of old steam locomotives and trains in stockpile
to ensure that in case of war there would be railroad equipment to go
around if modern equipment was lost for various causes. I do not know
if US has had similar arrangement? 

Assuming that there are no stockpiles of old locomotives to go around 
the work of building new ones would be obvious. I have no idea of how
quickly locomotives were constructed in 19th century but probably a
community could build the rolling stock with similar speeds. First
examples would take long to build and would be unreliable but as
experience increases the reliability and speed of construction would
increase.

5) The locomotives would be using wood and coal for fuel because
diesel and electrical rolling stock equipment could be out of reach
for many communities. Wood would present little problem after 150
years of virgin forest growth in North America.

6) MP team size could be conceivably anything from one to a hundred
but if we stay within idea of engineer team it could probably have
something like 6-16. Few would organise the reconnaissance of best 
areas to build (based on availability of metals and wood and water)
while most would be working on building of rolling stock.