Why Three Rails?

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Going from bullock to steam was a big improvement, I'm sure.

It's hard to see that it's an 0-3-0 from the pictures, but it's been restored and is running.

Interesting! I wasn't aware of this one. Thanks for the post!

I suppose it could be argued that this example is really 3-rail (two load bearing stabilizer rails and one guide rail). Stability on monorails is a potential problem. I've seen photos of a couple others, one of which was an underhung system with the single rail above the train (automatically stable), like many industrial converyor systems.

Dan Mitchell ============

No, there are only stabiliser wheels on one side, the 5% of the weight carried there is achieved by the rail wheels being slightly off centre so it always tries to fall over the same way. Although there is concrete in the Museum I believe in its original state the stabiliser wheels just bounced along the dirt roadway. Keith (If you go to the Delhi museum call about a week ahead so they can arrange to steam it for you, you pay for the fuel, at least that was the arrangement 10 years ago). Make friends in the hobby. Visit Garratt photos for the big steam lovers.

Thanks for the clarification. So. it's more like a single sided outrigger canoe. Must have been a bumpy ride with the outboard wheel just bouncing along on the roadside. Anyway, it's NEAT!

Dan Mitchell ============

Actually, it was just one steel load bearing rail, and one outrigger wheel on the road next to the rail. Half the cost to build as even a narrow gauge railroad, as long as there was a road going to where you wanted to go.

Another famous one also still around (or rather re-created) is the Listowel & Ballybunion in Ireland. See

Is it just coincidence that so many of these unusual rail system have ties to Great Britain? Gary Q

Wow, this post got dredged up from a while back.

Keep in mind that there were very few appliances of any type back then. I don't know what may have been commercially available. I suspect there was some low voltage apparatus available, as there still are.

Think mostly lighting, perhaps a washing machine, and maybe an electric fan. That was about it.

Purely resistance units like lights, toasters, heaters, etc. would need no modification, other than getting an appropriate resistance match for the input voltage. This was do-able by either changing heating elements, or varying the series/parallel arrangement of existing elements.

Motorized apparatus of the period was normally driven by a belt. Thus, modifying such a device would only mean substituting a different motor.

Radios and such of the period normally operated from batteries anyway. Normally, such an apparatus used several voltages, and needed several batteries to provide this needed electricity. If any of these were similar in voltage to the farm's 'mains' battery, then that portion could be connected to the available supply. Such connection was likely more bother than it was worth, however.

That's interesting! Thanks for the info.

I'm mildly surprised that low voltage refrigerators were available, as even 110 volt ones were not all that common in that time frame. Even in the 'big city', electric household sized refrigerators weren't the norm until about 1950. I can remember the local ice men making daily deliveries to many homes until perhaps 1955 or so. On the other hand, rural customers would have LESS access to ice than city dwellers, so perhaps the market for a mechanical refrigerator was proportionately greater there.

Large commercial operations used mechanical refrigeration much earlier.

Dan Mitchell ============

I grew up in New Jersey. Everyone we knew had refrigerators from at least post WWII. Television from 1948-1950....Ice chests were considered "Antiques". We had bread men and milk men and the occasional Italian Produce truck, but no icemen...Except of course, good humor. I spent the summers on farms in north west mountains of the state. I do vaguely remember ice being delivered. It was such a novelty we all helped carve up the block and sucked most of it in the summer heat. It is possible that one of my uncles got it special.

It was lack of transmission lines, not technology that prevented electrical appliances in many places. Some of the more prosperous farms had wind generators (cant remember the firm) that were 27-36 volts. WWII military equipment was that voltage also. I think it was DC cause it had storage batteries.

Jim Stewart

In the mid 40's my folks rented a house in Toledo Iowa, I can only recall a refrigerator. Though a neighbor in the back had a icebox and was serviced by a horse drawn wagon that had heavy canvas covering the ice. The blocks were chopped to the customers needs. The iceman would let us take chips off the wagon, they were considered a treat at that time. A very different era. Roger Aultman

My dad was recalling these old days over lunch at my house a few months back. A couple of details I found interesting...

Ice customers had a card with different numbers on it, sort of like a

4-cycle waybill. You'd put the card in a pocket stuck inside your front window with the appropriate number visible to indicate how many pounds of ice you needed that day. So the iceman knew how much ice you needed before he left his wagon and only had to make one trip into your house that way. These numbered cards in the front window might make an interesting detail.

Dad also remembered the milk man in a horse drawn wagon. The milk man would stop at one end of the block, fill up his hand carrier with his wares and walk up one side of the block making deliveries. When he got to the end of the block, he'd whistle and the horse would bring the wagon to him so he wouldn't have to walk back to it.

I often wished I could do that on my paper route as a kid. I really had to hustle to get papers delivered to ~300 customers in the 2.5 hours between getting out of school and the 6pm delivery deadline. Fortunately didn't have to deal with monster Sunday papers as there was no Sunday paper in those days, but the Wednesday papers were always pretty big as that was the heavy advertising day.

Cheerio...

Mike

There's another possibility to consider - some refrigerators of the old days operated off of gas. I have no idea how that technology worked but I know that they existed. Apparently such things still exist for people living in remote locations that don't have electricity but do have propane gas:

You can still get them. These are the "sharper image" car units. they work by allowing the gas to expand in the frige (cool) and compress it outside. Gas or electric is used to compress.

Dugan's bread had the cards for the window. Yellow with a big D.

Jim Stewart

With regard to non-electric 'fridges, I think that you could get ones that worked off kerosene, using the 'absorption' (or was it adsorption?) process, which I'd have to look up to see how it worked. Regards, Bill.

Whaaa?? Sharper Image??? the Thomas Kincaid of the tech world?

How about Servel, maybe Norcold?

Actually, they boil ammonia using a heat source - and can use electricity for that, but not to run a motor to power a compressor. Running in gas mode most do need a little electricity to run a positive draft fan for the boiler. The whole idea is to NOT use electricity. I've been in folks' houses that are off the grid, and they don't want to waste precious power out of their (typically) photovoltaic panel fed battery banks running a compressor.

---SNIP---

Aermotor was one of the more widely distributed manufacturers. You can still get them

I helped a friend install one about three years ago to be used as a well pump. Practically no one needs to generate their own electricity in the southeast USA, but you still could if you wanted to. All the necessary devices are still available.

Aermotors were quite common in the rural south, being mainly used as well pumps, until the early '60s. You don't see them much any more in the southeast, but there are a few. A good working model of an Aermotor windmill would be an interesting attention-getter. Froggy,

On Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:42:11 GMT, Roger Aultman wrote:

Not surprising. I grew up in Brooklyn, NY and have clear recollections of the icebox being recharged with cake ice by the guy with a a horse drawn cart. Sometime around 1955 or 1956 a mechanical refrigerator made its appearance. Soon after that the ice delivery business declined seriously, at least in our neighborhood as most neighbors converted. A little earlier, before my memories begin, Pop had the coal furnace replaced with oil and in 1957 the oil furnace gave way to natural gas. But I can clearly remember the neighbors coal deliveries. Two or three large oak barrels filled at the curb from a tipping truck bed, rolled by muscle power across the sidewalk up into the "airy-way" or front yard, and spilled down into the basement on the coal men's tin chute. Not a bad idea for a mini diarama, come to think of it. I have been planning an urban coal distrubuter, served by rail anyway and have a couple of resin coal truck kits. Should not be difficult to build the scene at any sort of building, residential or business. As a matter of fact, the scene could be set as late as the seventies or eighties, if the customer were a public school. In the late 1960's til about '71 I worked part time as a relief stationary fireman in a public school in Staten Island that was coal fired. forty years earlier, the Long island Rail Road had ash hauling trains running from Bay Ridge to the Corona Dump which became the Flushing Meadows site of the 39-40 and 64-65 World's Fairs.

Sorry for the thread drift.

We too had Dugan's bakery trucks, by the way.

Richard Albuquerque