Magical Stone Arches

The stone arch bridge is one of those inventions, like the thermos flask, that just seems to work by magic.  There is no mortar in the bridge pictured above, which carried the Nashua, Acton and Boston Railroad across Stony Brook in Westford, MA.  This particular bridge was built in 1872 and for 53 years this bridge took the weight of trains.  For pictures of other stone arch railroad bridges in Western Mass, see The Arches.

Kim, Kara and I walked along the old line a week ago.  It's not really a rail trail, but it is a good and very pleasant walking path, at least until you reach the now absent bridge over the still active Stonybrook Railroad which runs between Lowell and Worcester.

The oldest known bridge of this type is in Greece and dates from 1300BC.  The design of these bridges owes everything to the fact that stone is extremely strong in compression.  Most modern bridges of course are built on the exact opposite principle: tension.  Stone obviously cannot be used for such a purpose.  But building such bridges had to await the development of steel.  Even the first Iron Bridge (at Ironbridge in England), which was built in 1779 from cast iron, which also lacks good tensile strength, was modeled on the same principles as stone arch bridges, i.e. compression.

Typical modern bridge design, such as the Zakim Bunker Hill bridge in Boston use steel cables which directly connect the roadbed to the towers.  Steel has a tensile strength of about 500 MPa (mega pascals) which is approximately half that of spider silk.  Other man-made materials can have much higher tensile strengths, in particular, carbon nanotubes which can have a strength of 10 GPa (giga pascals) or higher.

In case you're still wondering why the Thermos flask is so magical, consider this.  It can keep hot liquids hot, and cold liquids cold and you don't have to tell it which one you want!

Railroad Maps

I'm continuing my slow work on mapping the abandoned railroads of New England (and sometimes beyond).  Yesterday, I was able to do a little more fieldchecking of the Lawrence to Manchester line, while up at the doggie meet and greet with Pixie (Madison) in Windham, NH.

Part of this old line is in the form of a rail trail (the Windham rail trail).  It runs between Route 111 (where there is a very nice bridge over the highway) and the old Windham depot area where the line intersected with the Worcester, Nashua and Portland line.

I found a rather interesting old railroad map: Map of the Montreal and Boston Air Line, etc., the kind that promoted the lines and stations of a particular R/R company, which brings to life some of these lines, including the route mentioned above.  Indeed, I only just discovered this site: David Rumsey Map Collection which has thousands of historical maps of all sorts, free and browsable.  Wonderful!  I note that this particular map is from 1887 and is extolling the virtues of the Boston and Lowell Railroad, in particular the route through the White Mountains of the Portland and Ogdensburg R/R, which is the line that the Conway Scenic Railroad uses.

If you look closely at the Windham area, you'll see that the WNP is shown as a thin line (i.e. belonging to a rival company).  I also see that at this time, the Lowell-Framingham line that served Carlisle and is now partly in the form of the Bruce Freeman rail trail, is marked as the Old Colony Railroad, running all the way from Lowell to New Bedford.

Note also their obvious pride in the comment at the bottom of the map (their capitalization):

All Through Trains Start from and Arrive at the Magnificent
BOSTON AND LOWELL RAILROAD STATION, Causeway Street, Boston.

Postscript: there is now a blog dedicated to my railroad activities: http://robinsrailroadblog.blogspot.com/

Bunburying

I'm sure you recall that in The Importance of being Earnest, Jack Worthing, so named because the gentleman who found him as a baby happened to have a first-class railway ticket to that "seaside resort" in his pocket at the time, likes to lead a double life.  When he wishes to escape from his social obligations in London, he goes by train to visit his fictional invalid cousin called Bunbury.  Hence Bunburying.

One of my favorite types of Bunburying is looking for abandoned railroad lines.  During the bridge tournament in Cromwell, I was able to spend a little time investigating the lines that formerly crossed in Cromwell, or rather just over the river in Middletown.  While I was working on that, I happened to be close to the extant line, the so-called Valley Branch of the NY, NH and Hartford R/R.  Quite fortuitously, a train came through just then and I was able to get a photograph using my handy iPhone (see above).

The time I spent must have been good for my brain because later that day, playing with Peter Matthews for the first time, we ended up 3rd overall and 1st in X in the two-session A/X pairs.  The field was quite strong although many of the top players were still in the knockouts.  Due to a technicality which occurred at another table, we were given 3rd place rather than 2nd equal.  This doesn't seem quite fair (it made a significant difference in masterpoints) but that's the way it's done.  If you're curious about this, you can read Den of Iniquity?

In any case, it was the best result I've ever achieved in a two-session open regional event.  Kim says I've been in a really good mood ever since.

Meanwhile, I've made my Western Connecticut railroad map almost completely accurate for the area around Cromwell.