Transportation and transit film and video, contemporary and historic, mainly Los Angeles from the MTA's Transportation Library and Archive collection at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) or "Metro".
They're all worried about the environment as they all gleefully hop on The Number of the Beast bus (666). They've been pushing this propaganda for a very long time and now the hippies are running this country into a garbage heap!!
I remember that very well. Some laugh about it today, but at least they were trying do do SOMETHING, and they weren't trying to take away our personal mobility to do it.
And it went nowhere. Another taxpayer's money grab pipe-dream. It would only cleanly work if each bus had a miniature nuclear reactor to boil the water. And guess what? Currently, fossil fuel technology and infrastructure, and in the intervening 52 years has been the predominant mode of transportation. Just another piece of film history to show that 'hippies' are always wrong regardless of the century or whatever they call themselves curently.
Smog kills you . CO2 kills your great grandkids if they are dumb enough not to move … And the model is actually right this time . The 1970’s model had us freezing in an ice age …..
Wow... thanks for sharing... BTW those be my legs at 17:07.... really... my summer job back then... darn overalls were never long enough.. great to see Bob, Jim, Carl, Fran and WMB
I'm addition zinc air batteries were used in Las Vegas buses and also by the German post office. Dates for this about 20 years after this. Steam is hoss with plenty of torque for such applications as this.
No, the Blue, now A line, has never looked better today. It's become the most used line on LA Metro surpassing the B subway line in 2024. It's also now the longest LRT line in the world. If anything, it's in the midst of it's golden era now.
Bill Brobeck was a superb mechanical engineer who spent most of his career designing particle accelerators at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Prominent among these was the Bevatron, where the antiproton was first generated. He died in 1998. William P. ("Bill") Lear was not an engineer. He was a business tycoon that never finished high school. He was widely regarded as a visionary genius and was the Elon Musk of his time. But he was neither of those (and neither is Musk). Bill Lear simply hired people to work on his concepts and didn't treat many of them very well. The Lear steam project was conducted at Stead Airport in Reno, NV. As the film states, it used a steam turbine as the motive element. The working fluid was regarded as proprietary and dubbed "Learium" in press releases. I suspect that it was just deionized water. The bus had extensive operational difficulties with high pressure steam that led to rather poor reliability. I think Bill had given up on this program long before it was over, preferring to spend his time at the craps table in Reno (usually at the Holiday). I knew Moya Lear (Bill's wife). She was a delightful woman.
When I saw Bill Lear's poodle following him around, that said it all. There are a large number of brilliant retired scientists and engineers from the LBL (or Rad Lab) and its descendant, LLNL who were true geniuses of their day, now growing old and gray but still full of life and incredible smarts. And there are plenty of wealthy tycoons who hire them and crack the whips of progress. Regarding Learium, any good water chemist in the utility industry could detail the pros and cons of every possible additive. I've used deionized water in a megawatt-class steam plant but it is called "hungry water," it attracts metal ions and must be run through a resin bed or replaced regularly. And it freezes, not good in New York or Chicago. And god forbid you accidentally introduce any sodium chloride (resin bed cleaner) which dissolves the piping, or bacteria into the system, which quickly fouls it. Deionized water is apparently not the slightest bit antimicrobial. In the video, it wasn't mentioned what was used for a steam accumulator and there wasn't much room for one. For a vehicle application, rapid control of a variable firing rate is essential for the boiler. Unfortunately without a steady-state firing, boiler combustion can be incomplete, requiring jets of steam to periodically blast away soot which forms on the boiler tubes and the process exhausts black smoke, especially with liquid fuels. Single-stage turbines like the one shown are of relatively low efficiency. The piston version might have been longer-lived and lower cost, but of much heavier weight. It would be possible to build this bus today, with microprocessor control and multistage turbine, but the money and motivation just isn't there. One of the biggest challenges for public transport today is how to prevent violence and the use of firearms, and maintaining public confidence. Clean air takes a back seat to those needs.
Too bad only party of the system has been built to date and it's split between train types which makes transfers annoying and slow... However I'd still love to see more subway, LRT and YES even trams make their way back to all parts of Southern California.. Revive all the Yellow and Red lines please for the same reason as before... They might be "loss leaders" but they help revive real estate projects and Transit Oriented Developments that need proper mass transit to make them work... And FFS, add affordable housing! The only type of housing that there NEVER seems to be enough of...
Number 666 has the standard GM New Look front trim rather than the redesigned one GM made for their own turbine-powered prototype. Weirdly that front trim wasn't put in production as a much-needed midcycle facelift or even an alternate (Chevrolet?) version. Number 6200 is a Flxible.
What is the fuel creating the steam? The efficiency of the steam locomotive has been given as 11 percent and that of the electric locomotive as about 20 percent. Neither value compares favorably with the 28 percent estimated for diesel locomotives So was the bus still burning oil? Or was there a little guy at the back shovelling coal?
The thermal efficiency of the steam locomotive is so poor because it lacked a condenser for the expanded steam. It just used the steam exhaust to create a draft for the firebox. Then it was released to the atmosphere.
They burned diesel fuel, but because the combustion was premixed and occurred at atmospheric pressure, it produced very low hydrocarbons, low carbon monoxide, low particulates, and low NOx. Probably almost idenitical to an oil furnace burner.
@@MrShobarI wonder what the condensing pressure/temperature was on these. Most condensing locomotives didn't use condensers for added efficiency, only to improve water economy. Many of them suffered an efficiency loss due to high condensning pressure and the difficulty of getting sufficient condesing surface area.
Lots to see and hear. The groove track, sounding like "Spirit In The Sky" catches hold and carries you safely all the way to the end. Both the milling machine operator and test bus driver have lit cigarettes dangling from their lips, that's the way it was! Sadly, our country continued on with the smoke-belching, road-oiling Detroit Diesel 6V92s and other members of their 2-stroke family many years after that. The typical GM city bus had a folded 2-speed transmission that was anything but efficient. Many hours riding those. In 1998 our crew developed the first Blue Bird hybrid diesel-electric school bus at Solectria in Woburn, Mass. Glad to see more progress over the years. Thanks for posting this wonderful blast from the past!
Kevin, I was in NYC, Queens when the Solectria Sunrise made the record breaking Boston to Ny trip on one charge . Prof Wouk , the Novelists brother Organized it .hr was prof at NYU and apioneer!
@@josephpadula2283 So wonderful you remember the event, which almost didn't happen! The Solectrians worked hard for long hours to promote alternative transportation. On the night before the event, the Sunrise developed an electrical problem and it was midnight before it was all back together. With no opportunity for a test drive, John Rogers drove it while indoors, back and forth 10 feet and proclaimed it was fine. We crossed our fingers and went home. Soon the morning crew arrived and took the Sunrise to downtown Boston for the big sendoff. Solectria's founder James Worden was not a man with a lot of time for trips to New York, and they didn't do a dry run. As a result, James got lost twice on the way to the Big Apple but still arrived. A camera crew followed him all the way to document the event and prove their was no cheating. When the Sunrise arrived back in Woburn, there was chuckling how the Brusa NLG level-one charger would take no less than two and a half days to fill the Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries which cost a tenth of a million dollars. The newly-developed batteries didn't even belong to us, they were on loan from the manufacturer. There was another chuckle about the network television interview on a Manhattan street corner, James lifted up a display model of the car's motor and transaxle using only his bare hands. He made it look easy, and it was, partly because the heavy induction rotor and steel gears had been removed from the inside. Not so much to make it lighter, but so the costly parts could be used in another car and not wasted on a static display.
@@kevinamundsen7646 Thank you for the history . Yes they were very late and we figured something had gone wrong . Who killed the electric car movie has the inventor of the NiMh battery that lent the batteries telling of him getting in trouble for doing it . I loved that car . I lost all my money in a company called phoenix motor car . We got so close we crash tested cars ! Then the investors had more stick than founders and Angeles and bankrupted the company . The next company was Tesla …..
Actually the Brobeck Bus was quite successful and used in San Fagscrisco for quite a length of time. It used proven Doble steam technology and was as close to zero emissions as you can get with a combustion engine, the emissions being a little CO2 & water vapor.
@@OKFrax-ys2op Musk promptly dissipated billions of dollars of value in Twitter when he took over. An unparalleled achievement in financial destruction.
Sadly yes. Here in the UK there is the persevered steam ship Shieldhall. I remember back in the day many of engine room volunteers actually came from the electricity generating board as it was the only pool of steam experience locally.
Most all of your power plants still run on steam. There are a lot of steam engineers left. Siemens Westinghouse, General Electric, are all still building steam equipment until this day. Not to mention the navy ships that run off steam. It’s not common knowledge anymore but it’s far from lost knowledge. I know this because I am a steam turbine technician. 😅
@@shawnjosey8203 I was involved with Shieldhall 20 years ago. I don't know who manages the engine spaces now. So back in the day......... I really pissy little comments that say fuck all. Bore off.
Sorry to say no more Navy ships are steam except the Nuclear carriers and subs ! The Last Navy ship I know of was the Ponce and it had Civilian engineers running the steam plant !!! There may be one or two more but the boiler rate BT was limited a decade or more ago . Gas turbines for warships Diesel engines for Auxiliary type ships .
It's great to see this. Much of what was promised has come to pass. On the list of stations, 13 of the 18 on there were built or will be once the D line extension opens. Several other stations that were never on the list got built when the Red line went north under Vermont. There will be close to 130 miles by 2028. And within 12 years it will surpass 150 miles promised in this video. Very cool. Thanks.
smog was first reported in the Los angeles basin by spanish explorers, in the 1400’s, los angeles had a brilliant and extremely successful electric light rail system that the politicians did away with in the late 1950’s . so smog was here before cars, and the pollution from vehicles had been solved in the 1930’s.
photo chemical smog comes from hydro carbons, first the LA basin is surrounded by a pine forest, pine trees emit hydrocarbons from the pine sap and needles, second the basin shape creates a perfect inversion layer to cook the hydrocarbons into smog and hold it, the indians people that lived here for thousands of years called the basin “the valley of fires “ because of the smog.
The "Red Car" was actually killed by City Lines, Firestone Tire and Rubber, and Standard Oil. They colluded together to drop the price of bus fare so low that the electric railway couldn't make money, then bought it and dismantled it.
Very nice! I remember seeing those nice drawings of the Metro Rail in the early 80's as a very young kid. Now in the present day the Red line looks like a rolling bum shelter. Sometimes with up to a dozen passed-out bums in a car. And ah! Henry Waxman killed the expansion of the Purple line west due to the methane fires.
LA Metro has improved noticeably over the last year. I've taken it many times since June 2023 after not using it for 3 years during Covid, and it's been fine. I've had no issues. I've used the A, E, B, and D lines. Yes, you see homeless once in a while, but I've never felt unsafe or bothered. Ridership has continued to increase for the last 17 months that indicates feel better about using it.