Motive power depot
The motive power depot is the place where locomotives are housed and maintained when not being used. They were known as "running sheds", "engine sheds", or, for short, just sheds. Facilities are provided for refueling and replenishing water, lubricating oil and grease and, for steam engines, disposal of the ash. There are workshops for day to day repairs and maintenance, although locomotive building and major overhauls are carried out in the locomotive works. MPDs in Britain are now known as traction maintenance depots; the equivalent of such depots in German-speaking countries is the Bahnbetriebswerk or Bw which has similar functions, with major repairs and overhauls being carried out at Ausbesserungswerke. The number of these reduced drastically on the changeover from steam to diesel and electric traction and most modern Bw in Germany are specialised depots responsible for a single rail class. Engine sheds could be found in many cities as well as in rural locations, they were built by the railway companies to provide accommodation for their locomotives that provided their local train services.
Each engine shed would have an allocation of locomotives that would reflect the duties carried out by that depot. Most depots had a mixture of passenger and shunting locomotives but some such as Mexborough had predominantly freight locomotives reflecting the industrial nature of that area in South Yorkshire. Others, such as Kings Cross engine shed in London, predominantly provided locomotives for passenger workings. Nearly all depots at this time had a number of shunting locomotives. 0-4-0T or 0-6-0T tank engines, these would be allocated to shunt turns and could be found in goods yards, carriage sidings, goods depots and docks. Many large rail connected industrial sites had engine sheds using shunting locomotives; each railway company had its own architectural design of engine shed but there were three basic designs of shed: Roundhouse - where the tracks would radiate from a turntable Straight - a number of tracks that would be accessible from either end Dead End - a number of sidings accessible from one end onlyThe turntables for straight and dead end sheds were outside.
Those in roundhouses could be inside or outside such as that at the East Broad Top Railroad & Coal Company Roundhouse, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, USA. There were six primary activities; when a steam engine arrived on shed it would drop its fire and the ash that had built up would be removed. Disposal of the ash was a filthy job and carried out at quiet times although some bigger depots had facilities for disposing of ash more efficiently. Study of photographs from the steam era show it was not uncommon for piles of ash to be scattered around the depot site. After completing their last duty and arriving on shed locomotives would have a regular boiler washout to remove scale, improve efficiency and protect safety. Locomotives ran on coal; this job was done by hand and many depots had significant coal stacks on site. These would be neatly constructed with the outer walls constructed of dry blocks much in the style of a dry stone wall with smaller pieces behind these; as technology advanced and the bigger sheds got busier this process became mechanised and huge coaling towers above the neighbourhoods indicated where the engine shed was.
The sheds were not clean. The large London depot of Stratford had an engineman’s dormitory and its occupants would “wake up with a layer of coal dust covering them and the bed”. Another key requirement of the steam engine is a supply of water, carried in the tenders or tanks of the engines. In Australia water was carried in water gins due to longer distances covered and scarcer water resources. In depots where the limescale content of water was high water softening plants were introduced. At Norwich engine shed in the UK the sludge was discharged into a tank and emptied every three years or so with the sludge being dumped into the sea at Lowestoft. Tender locomotives required turning. In the early days these were around 45 feet long; as the technology improved and engines got bigger the turntables got longer. In order to turn a locomotive the engine had to be balanced quite on the turntable and it could be pushed around; some turntables could be powered by fixing the vacuum brake of the engine to the turntable and using that to turn the engine.
Turntables were electrically operated. Many diesel locomotives in the UK have a cab at each end removing the need for the turntables. However, in Australia and America there are a number of single ended locomotives and turntables are still in use. Engine sheds would carry out basic maintenance and the bigger sheds would carry out more complex repairs. Locomotives that required further repair were sent to the company’s locomotive works. Withdrawn locomotives could be found at some depots before their final trips to the scrapyard. In the UK the general practice is that one shed would have a number of smaller sub-sheds where there were fewer facilities; when engines allocated to sub-sheds required repairs they were exchanged for a similar engine or just visiting the main depot on a Sunday when traffic levels were lower. In terms of locomotive allocation it seems to have been the practice that for some railways locomotives were all allocated to t
Corkscrew (Silverwood)
Corkscrew is an Arrow Development prototype Corkscrew roller coaster located at Silverwood Theme Park. Ten exact replicas of this same design were produced 1975–1979 at other scattered parks, followed by numerous other installations around the world featuring updated supports. After being sold as the prototype, this corkscrew operated at Knott's Berry Farm from 1975-89. Developed by Ron Toomer of Arrow Dynamics, a Utah-based design firm, the "Corkscrew" was the first modern steel inverting roller coaster open to the public, with identical models opening at three other parks days later; the ride starts. Following the turn is a 70-foot-tall lift hill; when the train reaches the top of the hill, the train speeds down again into a banked turn. The banked turn takes the riders down toward the first drop, which gives a sensation of airtime. Following the drop, the train ascends a small hill and goes down a turn towards the double corkscrew, the train travels through another U-turn into the brake run.
When Corkscrew first opened at Knott's Berry Farm, it achieved two things of historical significance. Corkscrew was not only the first modern inverting coaster in the world, but it was the first roller coaster to take riders upside down twice. Corkscrew was a prototype built on site at Arrow Dynamics in Mountain View in Santa Clara County, California. Once Arrow Dynamics completed reviewing the design, members of the Knott's family opted to purchase the prototype. Ten exact replicas were produced 1975–1979. In 1989 Knott's Berry Farm sold the Corkscrew to Silverwood Theme Park in Idaho for $250,000 to make room for Boomerang
Ferris wheel
A Ferris wheel is an amusement ride consisting of a rotating upright wheel with multiple passenger-carrying components attached to the rim in such a way that as the wheel turns, they are kept upright by gravity. Some of the largest modern Ferris wheels have cars mounted on the outside of the rim, with electric motors to independently rotate each car to keep it upright; these wheels are sometimes referred to as observation wheels and their cars referred to as capsules, however these alternative names are used for wheels with conventional gravity-oriented cars. The original Ferris Wheel was designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. as a landmark for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The generic term Ferris wheel is now used in American English for all such structures, which have become the most common type of amusement ride at state fairs in the United States; the current tallest Ferris wheel is the 167.6-metre High Roller in Las Vegas, which opened to the public in March 2014.
"Pleasure wheels", whose passengers rode in chairs suspended from large wooden rings turned by strong men, may have originated in 17th-century Bulgaria. The travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667 describes and illustrates "severall Sorts of Swinginge used in their Publique rejoyceings att their Feast of Biram" on 17 May 1620 at Philippopolis in the Ottoman Balkans. Among means "lesse dangerous and troublesome" was one:...like a Craine wheele att Customhowse Key and turned in that Manner, whereon Children sitt on little seats hunge round about in severall parts thereof, And though it turne right upp and downe, that the Children are sometymes on the upper part of the wheele, sometymes on the lower, yett they alwaies sitt upright. Five years earlier, in 1615, Pietro Della Valle, a Roman traveller who sent letters from Constantinople and India, attended a Ramadan festival in Constantinople, he describes the fireworks and great swings comments on riding the Great Wheel: I was delighted to find myself swept upwards and downwards at such speed.
But the wheel turned round so that a Greek, sitting near me couldn't bear it any longer, shouted out "soni! soni!" Similar wheels appeared in England in the 17th century, subsequently elsewhere around the world, including India and Siberia. A Frenchman, Antonio Manguino, introduced the idea to America in 1848, when he constructed a wooden pleasure wheel to attract visitors to his start-up fair in Walton Spring, Georgia. In 1892, William Somers installed three fifty-foot wooden wheels at New Jersey; the following year he was granted the first U. S. patent for a "Roundabout". George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. rode on Somers' wheel in Atlantic City prior to designing his wheel for the World's Columbian Exposition. In 1893 Somers filed a lawsuit against Ferris for patent infringement, however Ferris and his lawyers argued that the Ferris Wheel and its technology differed from Somers' wheel, the case was dismissed; the original Ferris Wheel, sometimes referred to as the Chicago Wheel, was designed and constructed by George Washington Gale Ferris Jr..
With a height of 80.4 metres it was the tallest attraction at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where it opened to the public on June 21, 1893. It was intended to rival the centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition. Ferris was a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Pittsburgh, bridge-builder, he began his career in the railroad industry and pursued an interest in bridge building. Ferris understood the growing need for structural steel and founded G. W. G. Ferris & Co. in Pittsburgh, a firm that tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders. The wheel rotated on a 71-ton, 45.5-foot axle comprising what was at that time the world's largest hollow forging, manufactured in Pittsburgh by the Bethlehem Iron Company and weighing 89,320 pounds, together with two 16-foot-diameter cast-iron spiders weighing 53,031 pounds. There were 36 cars, each fitted with 40 revolving chairs and able to accommodate up to 60 people, giving a total capacity of 2,160; the wheel carried some 38,000 passengers daily and took 20 minutes to complete two revolutions, the first involving six stops to allow passengers to exit and enter and the second a nine-minute non-stop rotation, for which the ticket holder paid 50 cents.
The Exposition ended in October 1893, the wheel closed in April 1894 and was dismantled and stored until the following year. It was rebuilt on Chicago's North Side, near Lincoln Park, next to an exclusive neighborhood; this prompted William D. Boyce a local resident, to file a Circuit Court action against the owners of the wheel to have it removed, but without success, it operated there from October 1895 until 1903, when it was again dismantled transported by rail to St. Louis for the 1904 World's Fair and destroyed by controlled demolition using dynamite on May 11, 1906; the Wiener Riesenrad is a surviving example of nineteenth-century Ferris wheels. Erected in 1897 in the Wurstelprater section of Prater public park in the Leopoldstadt district of Vienna, Austria, to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef I's Golden Jubilee, it has a height of 64.75 metres and had 30 passenger cars. A demolition permit for the Riesenrad was issued in 1916, but due to a lack of funds with which to carry out the destruction, it survived.
Following the demolition of
U.S. Route 95 in Idaho
In the U. S. state of Idaho, U. S. Route 95 is a north–south highway near the western border of the state, stretching from Oregon to British Columbia for over 538 miles. US 95 continues into Idaho from southeastern Oregon as an undivided two-lane highway for the majority of its length; as it is the state's primary north–south highway, Idaho is in the process of widening US 95 to an Interstate-style divided four-lane highway, from the Oregon state line in the southwest to Eastport at the northern border with Canada at Kingsgate, British Columbia. In Oregon, US 95 continues south, crosses into Nevada at McDermitt, meets Interstate 80 at Winnemucca. US 95 departs Malheur County and enters Idaho in the high desert of Owyhee County, about fifty miles southwest of Boise, it progresses north-northeast to just west of Marsing, where it meets with the southern terminus of State Highway 55. US 95 turns west north to Homedale, crosses the Snake River before a junction with concurrent US 20 and US 26 as it passes through Parma.
US 95 runs north concurrent with US 20/26 for eight miles. As it proceeds north near Idaho's western border, US 95 crosses Interstate 84 and US 30 before proceeding north through Payette and Weiser, it continues on to Midvale and Council climbs into the Payette National Forest, passing the Tamarack sawmill site, turns east to New Meadows. Here, US 95 joins with Highway 55, the two-lane undivided route that connects to Boise through McCall and Horseshoe Bend; the elevation at the junction in New Meadows is 3,865 feet above sea level. US 95 continues north through Meadows Valley north of the junction descends 2,000 feet with the Little Salmon River to Riggins, tree-sparse but surrounded by mile-high mountains. After Riggins, the highway crosses the main Salmon River and enters the Pacific Time Zone. US 95 northbound descends with the widening river until White Bird, where it climbs 2,700 feet in seven miles to the cut at the top of White Bird Hill, peaking at an elevation of 4,245 feet with an average gradient of over 7%.
The steeper and faster multi-lane grade was opened in 1975, after ten challenging years of construction. The two-lane road of 1921 to the east was first paved in 1938; the arcs, if combined, would form an average of 950 ° per mile. Following the completion of the new steel bridge over White Bird Creek, the new routing opened in June 1975, ending a decade of construction; the new Lewiston grade to the north was finished in just over two years. North of the summit, US 95 descends in a steep but short descent to the Camas Prairie and Grangeville at 3,390 feet; the highway travels northwest towards Cottonwood, whose bypass was finished in 1976 enters the Nez Perce Indian Reservation. New route construction in the early 1990s bypassed the main streets of Craigmont; the new routing is now above, rather than in, the curvy Lawyers Creek Canyon between the cities, crossing the canyon on an elevated bridge constructed in 1991. Lawyers Canyon is named after Chief Lawyer of the Nez Perce, nicknamed for his skill in dealing with the encroaching whites.
US 95 winds its way westward across the high prairie, near the many timber railroad trestles of the Camas Prairie Railroad, to just east of Winchester. Here, at just under 4,000 feet, the highway turns northward and descends over 3,000 vertical feet in the Lapwai Canyon, passing Culdesac and Spalding at 807 feet; until 1960, US 95 was routed through Winchester and descended Culdesac Hill, considered the worst of the three major grades, all of which were twisty. The new route through Lapwai Canyon was built in three years and reduced the distance by over four miles and saved 25 minutes of driving time. After Spalding, it proceeds towards the bridge over the Clearwater River to join with US 12 and depart the reservation; the current bridge for US 12 upstream at Arrow replaced the old Spalding bridge in 1973. After crossing the Clearwater on the new Spalding bridge, US 95 joins with US 12 for seven miles along its north bank, heading westward, adding lanes, descending toward Lewiston. About midway along the co-sign, the reservation is departed.
US 12 turns south to re-cross the river into the city center, west to cross the Snake River into Clarkston, Washington. US 95 turns northeast westward to climb a steep grade, gaining over 1,900 feet in five miles, ascending to the southern edge of the rolling Palouse region; the multi-lane grade was opened on October 28, 1977, after 27 months of construction and two decades of planning. It replaced the Lewiston Spiral Highway, a narrow and switchback-laden 1917 route to the west with 64 spiral curves and about twice the length. Similar to the White Bird Hill grade, the descending southbound lanes on the new route have three "runaway truck ramps" to halt any vehicles that experience brake failure. Just north of the Lewiston grade is a junction with US 195, which proceeds north in Washington to Pullman and Sp
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Idaho
Idaho is a state in the northwestern region of the United States. It borders the state of Montana to the east and northeast, Wyoming to the east and Utah to the south, Washington and Oregon to the west. To the north, it shares a small portion of the Canadian border with the province of British Columbia. With a population of 1.7 million and an area of 83,569 square miles, Idaho is the 14th largest, the 12th least populous and the 7th least densely populated of the 50 U. S. states. The state's capital and largest city is Boise. Idaho prior to European settlement was inhabited by Native American peoples, some of whom still live in the area. In the early 19th century, Idaho was considered part of the Oregon Country, an area disputed between the U. S. and the United Kingdom. It became U. S. territory with the signing of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, but a separate Idaho Territory was not organized until 1863, instead being included for periods in Oregon Territory and Washington Territory. Idaho was admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, becoming the 43rd state.
Forming part of the Pacific Northwest, Idaho is divided into several distinct geographic and climatic regions. In the state's north, the isolated Idaho Panhandle is linked with Eastern Washington, with which it shares the Pacific Time Zone – the rest of the state uses the Mountain Time Zone; the state's south includes the Snake River Plain, while the south-east incorporates part of the Great Basin. Idaho is quite mountainous, contains several stretches of the Rocky Mountains; the United States Forest Service holds about 38 % of the most of any state. Industries significant for the state economy include manufacturing, mining and tourism. A number of science and technology firms are either headquartered in Idaho or have factories there, the state contains the Idaho National Laboratory, the country's largest Department of Energy facility. Idaho's agricultural sector supplies many products, but the state is best known for its potato crop, which comprises around one-third of the nationwide yield; the official state nickname is the "Gem State".
The name's origin remains a mystery. In the early 1860s, when the United States Congress was considering organizing a new territory in the Rocky Mountains, eccentric lobbyist George M. Willing suggested the name "Idaho", which he claimed was derived from a Shoshone language term meaning "the sun comes from the mountains" or "gem of the mountains". Willing claimed he had invented the name. Congress decided to name the area Colorado Territory when it was created in February 1861. Thinking they would get a jump on the name, locals named a community in Colorado "Idaho Springs". However, the name "Idaho" did not fall into obscurity; the same year Congress created Colorado Territory, a county called Idaho County was created in eastern Washington Territory. The county was named after a steamship named Idaho, launched on the Columbia River in 1860, it is unclear after Willing's claim was revealed. Regardless, part of Washington Territory, including Idaho County, was used to create Idaho Territory in 1863.
Despite this lack of evidence for the origin of the name, many textbooks well into the 20th century repeated as fact Willing's account the name "Idaho" derived from the Shoshone term "ee-da-how". A 1956 Idaho history textbook says:"Idaho" is a Shoshoni Indian exclamation; the word consists of three parts. The first is "Ee", which in English conveys the idea of "coming down"; the second is "dah", the Shoshoni stem or root for both "sun" and "mountain". The third syllable, "how", denotes the exclamation and stands for the same thing in Shoshoni that the exclamation mark does in the English language; the Shoshoni word is "Ee-dah-how", the Indian thought thus conveyed when translated into English means, "Behold! the sun coming down the mountain. An alternative etymology attributes the name to the Plains Apache word "ídaahę́", used in reference to The Comanche. Idaho borders six U. S. states and one Canadian province. The states of Washington and Oregon are to the west and Utah are to the south, Montana and Wyoming are to the east.
Idaho shares a short border with the Canadian province of British Columbia to the north. The landscape is rugged with some of the largest unspoiled natural areas in the United States. For example, at 2.3 million acres, the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness Area is the largest contiguous area of protected wilderness in the continental United States. Idaho is a Rocky Mountain state with scenic areas; the state has snow-capped mountain ranges, vast lakes and steep canyons. The waters of the Snake River rush through the deepest gorge in the United States. Shoshone Falls plunges down rugged cliffs from a height greater than Niagara Falls; the major rivers in Idaho are the Snake River, the Clark Fork/Pend Oreille River, the Clearwater River, the Salmon River. Other significant rivers include the Coeur d'Alene River, the Spokane River, the Boise River, the Payette River; the Salmon River empties into the Snake in Hells Canyon and forms the southern boundary of Nez Perce County on its north shore, of which Lewiston is the county seat.
The Port of Lewiston, at the confluence of the Clearwater and the Snake Rivers is the farthest inland seaport on the West Coast at 465 river miles from the Pacific at Astoria, Oregon. Idaho's highest point is 12,662 ft, in the Lost River Range north of Mackay. Idaho's lowest poi
