It has been a warm fall in New England this year, and the trees changed color much later than they usually do.
Climate change, anyone?
Sorry, I don't like that photo. At all. Call me a stupid environmentalist, but...
Colors weren't that good this year either--also like DC. Good colors want a moderately warm and wet summer, followed by a sharp turn to cold. This year we got drought, which didn't break until the equinox, and then warm and wet weather that has cooled only gradually.
Plutonium--This is the difference between nostalgia and reality: We love those monsters, but there is no way we would want them chugging through our lives right now . . . The Fates are kind.
I understand nostalgia, but the photo bothered me so much that I had my browser block it :-(
(A Swiss SBB Be 6/8 III "crocodile" class loco - most of the Swiss railway electricity comes from hydropower.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
Hydropower is not always as clean as we can imagine. It's partly recycled french nuclear energy: at night, water is pumped up in the dam using cheap electricity and sold back during the day.
So it's fairly obvious that this locomotive isn't always such a polluter. It's not terribly clean, no doubt, but 614 was built in 1948, just prior to the main switchover from coal to diesel-electric.
