“Right out of Atlas Shrugged. IIRC, they weren’t so good in the tunnels.”
I gotta read some of those Rand novels again!
I lived near a railroad underpass that was near our train station. Standing on the overpass when a steam train was accelerating out of the station, belching oodles of black smoke along with its chug chug chug, was a thrill.
In Atlas Shrugged they ignored the day to day experts and ran a steam locomotive through a long tunnel that was only rated for diesel.
As the rail workers warned, the steam displaced so much air in the confines of the tunnel that everyone on the train suffocated.
Guess who got blamed.
Hint, it wasn’t the people ordering the use of the steam locomotive...
The Taggart Tunnel, in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, was an eight-mile-long main-line railroad tunnel through the Continental Divide. Its eastern portal was at Winston, Colorado.[1] Through political maneuvering by an outraged passenger and several railroad officials who each was acting only to “cover his tracks,” a gross violation of safety rules occurred and caused the destruction of the Tunnel and the deaths of more than three hundred passengers and crew on two trains.
Wikipedia