Rocket Powered Trains

[Tommygun]

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you strapped six Nike rocket motors onto a train and then crashed it into a truck carrying nuclear waist?

Well apparently the US government did too:

[Yukon0009]

Seems like the US government is secretly being controlled by drunk Kerbals.

Epic.

[Tex_NL]

That clip is nearly 40 years old. Older than many people here on the forum.

The main reason the locomotive is powered by rockets is a lack of space. The track they use is simply not long enough to get up to the required speed in the regular way.

[Tommygun]

It's not that hard to lay more track and they are in the middle of a desert, so space shouldn't have been an issue.

This is like fishing with hand grenades. It will work, but really.....

[lajoswinkler]

You don't need rockets for it.

UK did a normal test with a derailed full train, locomotive and vagons, in 1984. It was to ensure the safety of the nuclear flasks carrying spent fuel from old Magnox reactors.

It was broadcasted over BBC television to the general public, too. There was even a confused Greenpeace nutter in the studio doing their standard "lalala, can't hear you" chant when presented with empirical data.

Properly made, transportation flasks are virtually indestructible by common accidents. 14 inch thick steel in the 1984 Magnox case. Cooling fins will buckle here and there, but that's it.

I suppose an extremely powerful hydrogen nuclear bomb could penetrate it if it was next to it, but then you wouldn't need to worry about the flask, would you?

Edited April 12, 2015 by lajoswinkler

[Ten Key]

It's not that hard to lay more track and they are in the middle of a desert, so space shouldn't have been an issue.

Maybe it was a momentum issue? It looked like the rocket motors were still burning when the locomotive hit the target-- maybe that was their way of simulating the momentum of a fully loaded train, without actually having to have a fully loaded train?

[Tommygun]

Maybe it was a momentum issue? It looked like the rocket motors were still burning when the locomotive hit the target-- maybe that was their way of simulating the momentum of a fully loaded train, without actually having to have a fully loaded train?

I think in the British test (6 minutes into video) they mentioned that they placed three cars on the train and that adding more wouldn't have added to the force of the impact.

Adding more track and cars I think would have been more sensible. To me this is an over engineered answer to a simple problem.

You might even make an argument that the results of the test are not truly as actuate as they could have been, because they didn't use a more real world train set up as the British did.

In any case it makes for great YouTube videos.