Why would there ever be a train car full of ping pong balls?
Railroads are mainly used to transport heavy bulk commodities. Like Coal, iron ore, sand, oil, liquid chemicals, grain, etc. Not light, airy products.
And where would there be a destination with enough demand for a whole train car of ping pong balls?
Pattaya?
If you don’t know what this means, consider yourself lucky
Couple thoughts to the OP’s rhetorical questions.
Train crashes happen nearly every day. Only the HazMat ones make the news. So you only hear about those, not the “boxcar full of boxed new dishwashers falls off the track near the factory.”
Road bridges are government property inspected by government inspectors which the government has immediate access to the records. Railroad bridges are private property maintained by the owning railroad according to its own processes, doubtless informed by at least some Federal Railroad Administration (“FRA”) regulations. But doubtful FRA has those inspection records available in real time.
You also hear about the funny ones, like when a tanker full of maple syrup spills.
Well, plus or minus 794 (though granted, the Central Limit Theorem is only an approximation).
And did anyone else notice that 216,000 dice would be a perfect cube of perfect cubes?
\sqrt[3]216000 = 60
Perfect cube, yes. But 60 is not a perfect cube.
Still, I have to assume that particular estimate was chosen for the mathematical Easter egg it represents.
60 is not a perfect cube, but a d6 is.
That’s what I get for being too literal.
Yup. Although once in awhile a sweet food spill isn’t so funny:
A shipwreck.
“Filtering”, maybe not, but there will probably be some great big chunks that they can just pick up and pull out. And they probably will, if for no other reason than that the material is worth more than the cost to do so: After all, it’s clearly valuable to someone, or they wouldn’t have been transporting it to begin with.
Oh, and
Eh, dice would be packed in some regular way into boxes, and those boxes probably into larger boxes, and those larger boxes into pallets. You’d expect a number with a lot of factors. I’d guess that the truck was carrying 432,000, and about half spilled out, so they estimated 216,000.
Good idea in general. But depending on the downstream purity requirements the spilled stuff may need to be extensively reworked / cleaned / re-refined before it can be re-used. Which may eat into most of the spilled stuff’s potential salvage value.
The molasses flood article I cited upthread mentioned local people simply shoveling it off the ground into buckets then bringing it home to eat / cook with.
OTOH, the “purity” requirements after this little railroad faux pax meant nothing was reusable except as scrap metal. Google Image Search (Search safe for all audiences)
Despite the fact that 21 people drowned in it.
It was January in Boston. The stuff congealed to pretty darn hard.
Once you warm the molasses back up, you can easily fish out the dead birds, plants, dogs, little kids, whatever was in the block you chopped out of the congealed mess over by the fish cannery. Easy peasy. And oh so yummy.
The bodies of little kids add a flavor of ‘hope’, that you just can’t get from Aunt Jemima.
Kinda like this recent gem:
IMO Post #3 was especially tangy in that thread. In a Doperish sort of way.
And people could have been gathering it for animal feed, like for horses or cows. There were still a lot of them around. Even today, 100+ years later, molasses is still a common ingredient in dairy cow feed.
That area has to have smelled terrible, to say the least.
For quite a long time. “It is said” that the aroma lingered for several decades.