Pennies on railroad tracks are all well and good, but when I was a kid, we used to put the pennies under the wheels of the oncoming stagecoaches. If the wheel hit the penny just right, the stagecoach would take a huge bounce, much to our amusement. Unfortunately, usually the horses’ hooves would knock the pennies out of the way. Some stage coach lines used to have “sweepers” to ride alongside the drivers with a very long broom to push obstacles out of the path. (We believed this was the Union of Shotgun Riders, since there was no longer fear of attacks on stagecoaches with all the Native Americans contained, these folks were out of a job, and so their union got them the cushier job of sweeper.) Where was I?
Oh, yes. My kids used to sneak out on the runways and try to put pennies in front of aircraft taking off or landing, but it was very hard to judge where to put the pennies.
CKDextHavn: that’s nothing! If you really want excitement, try putting a penny under the space shuttle when it departs. When it melts, the penny takes on all kind of unusual shapes.
Being the inventive kids we were, our method was to spit on the track and put the penny in it. It caused enough adhesion so the penny would not vibrate off the track.
We also once tried bullets ala *Pink Floyd, the Wall[/I} but they always rolled off the track. Has anyone tried the bullet variation?
First, regarding coins on train tracks; while it is fun and dandy and works fine on real trains, don’t do it on those baby carnival trains, the ones that run on a 1 ft spaced rails. You can derail those babies. There’s a carny near here, a lady I know works at. She supervises the crews who run the games and such, including the train. Said it’s happened there.
Second, regarding the shuttle. You don’t really want to put a coin on the launch pad. It becomes a thing called FOD (foreign object debris). FOD is very dangerous, as it can ricochet around and put holes in the tiles, for instance. NASA is very concerned with FOD on the launch pad. There is some nifty film footage of objects accidentally left on the pad and missed, like a soda can. Not a good idea.
Hmm, I used to drive one of those kiddy trains for a couple of summers, among other rides. I’ve never heard of it derailing from pennies on the tracks (and I’m sure that SOMEONE had to have tried it, at some point), but I do know that derailing that thing wasn’t too hard. I never did it, but just going around a turn too fast would do the trick easily. Note that it doesn’t flip over or anything dramatic like that, but it does take the half-dozen or so strongest employees to get it back on the track.
