The title says it all.
Not quite, because the title is missing a verb.
what?
“Should New York Subway Tracks Be Clogged w/ Corpses of Rats who Touched the Third Rail?” is what I’m guessing it’s supposed to be.
I for one am opposed to excessive amounts of rat corpses. However, I don’t live in NYC, so maybe they’re used to them already.
But seriously, it might be something like birds on power lines. Unless a circuit is closed with their body, the won’t be harmed by the voltage. What constitutes a completed circuit on New York subways? Is it rail to rail through the train, or is there a connection above the train (like there are on my city’s MetroLink)?
I’m sure that plenty of rats die in NY subways every day. Their corpses decay just like one would expect, so the bodies don’t pile up.
Lay off. He’s speaking E-Prime.
(He accidentally 100 milliamps right across his heart.)
Edited title to include verb. If the OP meant something else, please let us know.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’m figuring the CHUDS eat them at night.
The albino alligators like fried rat.
I’m pretty sure the subway trains turn any dead rats on the tracks into railkill.
All you’d have to do is connect the rail to ground. The ground being, well, everything else nearby. Touch a bit of concrete, and the rail, and you’re fried.
On the streetcars around here, the overhead wires provide the power, and the circuit is completed through the tracks, which are particularly well grounded. Nothing better than a large, continuous steel rail in contact with the ground to provide the return path for the circuit.
As I recall, the third rail is rather thick, and a few inches wide, so in many cases, ol’ rat would just jump up on it and run a way, and then jump off. Hence, no zapping. However, when doing either, if his tail managed to complete the circuit to the ground, then ZAP!!!
Rats are pretty intelligent. It would not surprise me if avoiding the 3rd rail is a learned behavior passed down through generations of NYC rats.
The third rail is not directly adjacent to the two rails the trains run on, so that an electrocuted rat would often fall where it would not be pulverized.
Maybe they learn not to? Rats are smart.
Eh, concrete’s a pretty good insulator. A rat might get enough of a shock that way to decide that it’s a bad idea, but I rather doubt that it’s enough to kill it. The bigger problem would probably be the capacitance of the rat itself (some charge will flow into it in the process of bringing it to the same potential as the rail), but I wouldn’t expect that to be deadly, either.
CHUDS, Morlocks, Molemen. Circle of life. Hakuna matata.
Well in Chicago, I’ve seen rats run on the third rail. Also in Chicago at least, they clean the subways. I see them often picking up garbage and pigeons that have died. I don’t know how pigeons get into the subway but they do. I mean I don’t know if they walk down into them like people or from where the el trains go underground and become subways.
I’m sure rats eat each other if they are dead.
NYC subway (and commuter train) third-rails are all DC. The circuit is closed by the third rail connecting to the actual rails (preferably via a train’s propulsion system.) Will making a connection to ground also cause current to flow in that case, or is that only for AC currents? I never did understand how that whole “ground” thing worked anyway. Batteries and light bulbs in elementary school is as far as I got.