Hydrogen Cars, Vehicles and Infrastructure
by guest blogger Stan Thompson If you’ve ever seen a slow-motion video of a dropped glass object shattering, then—the video reversed—reassembling to form the whole again, you have some notion of futurism. Futurists pay attention to the moving fragments all around us: which are biggest; how they are shaped and spinning; and the direction toward […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson New Testament, Book of Matthew, Chapter 7, verse 3: And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? This familiar passage is quoted not because scripture proves anything about GM, Nikola or pundit journalism but […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Archimedes is quoted as saying, “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” Bell Telephone Laboratories gave mankind the transistor and—just as Thomas Jefferson foresaw— the free American pursuit of happiness (AKA the will to innovation) forged it into the Internet, daddy of all […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Davidson College is near our NC home and its proximity offers neighbors access to an astonishing parade of great minds. In 1962 I met cosmologist George Gamow there and got to ask him a few questions. Albert Einstein had died only seven years earlier; some would say Gamow was his […]
Continue ReadingBy guest blogger Stan Thompson Bill Thunberg and I, two of the three founders of the Mooresville Hydrail Initiative (Google it), are also members of the Mooresville NC, USA, Rotary Club. Imagine our delight when we received this month’s The Rotarian Magazine with its cover page article, “CLIMATE SOLUTIONS WITHIN OUR REACH.” In the […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson Fifteen years ago the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy introduced the public to the hydrail future of the railway industry in an invited article, “The Mooresville Hydrail Initiative” (February 2004: volume 29, issue 4, page 438). One main reason for the IJHE article was to establish […]
Continue Readingby guest blogger Stan Thompson On Sunday, September 16, 2018, at Bremervörde, in the State of Niedersachsen, Germany, I boarded the first intercity hydrail train—my dream since 2003! It was Alstom’s shiny new blue Coradia iLint Hydrogen Multiple Unit light rail train, wireless electric and silent as the wind turbines on the North German horizon […]
Continue ReadingThe Mooresville Hydrail Initiative, begun in August, 2003, as an invited proposal to the US DOT’s Volpe “think tank”, reached its primary goal this morning (17 September 2018) as the first ticketed passengers rode Alstom’s ghostly quiet Coradia iLint trains through Lower Saxony—the world’s first regular intercity hydrail passenger traffic! Stan Thompson (pictured above), the […]
Continue Readinga first step toward bringing hydrail back home by guest blogger, Stan Thompson North Carolina operates its own passenger railway service. The State Department of Transportation has begun plans to modify the locomotives on its line from the State Capital (Raleigh) to the State’s biggest city, (Charlotte) to be powered electrically by hydrogen via fuel […]
Continue Readingby Guest Blogger Stan Thompson A headline in the January 2018 online issue of Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers publication is the latest hydrail transition landmark: Transport Secretary calls for hydrogen trains Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has said the introduction of hydrogen-powered trains is “a priority” for Britain’s railways. The article by Amit Katwala goes […]
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