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Engine villages
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Published: October 26, 2009
Just up the road from Salisbury is Spencer, North Carolina. Spencer is too nearby to be a "sister city" to Mooresville but in a lot of ways we're kin.
Like Mooresville, Spencer draws hoards of tourists. They come to Mooresville to see how racing engines are built. They come to Spencer to see how steam engines-locomotives-used to be rebuilt.
"Used to be" is the operative phrase. In the first half of the twentieth century Spencer was a boom town like Mooresville is today. Southern Railway's Spencer Shops employed thousands of highly skilled machinists and mechanics, managers who supervised them and clerks who ordered parts, cut paychecks and accounted for the powerful, majestic locomotives that were overhauled there day and night.
These were large displacement engines. One cylinder probably had more displacement than a whole speedway full of V8s right after the green flag comes down.
Mooresville's racing shops build "internal combustion engines." The termwas coined to distinguish a novel technology back when external combustion engines-fired steam boilers-were the norm.
External combustion locomotives could be fast. By 1901 an American one-car train had reached 105 mph and, per the Guinness World Record Book online, a British locomotive hit 125 mph in 1938-pulling seven coaches!
Spencer was a watchmakers' Mecca as well, back when accurate mechanical watches were literally a life-or-death necessity for running a railroad.
In 1925 the "oil electric" locomotive appeared and steam began its long slide into oblivion. Spencer maintained the new diesels for a while but the shops declined and closed in the late 1970s.
In the 1950s, my Dad took me through Spencer shops. The roundhouse and turn-table, the huge lathes and the traveling cranes were awesome. But if I had understood what I was seeing, I would have sensed the pulse of Spenser slowing even then.
Today folks come to Mooresville's museum to see how racing started. They come to Spencer's transportation museum to see to where steam-the external combustion engine-ended.
Fuel cell automobile technology is waiting in the wings today just as the diesel electric locomotive was waiting in the early 1920s. The diesel electric was quieter and cleaner and far cheaper to maintain than steam. The fuel cell car is silent, pristine, dramatically more efficient, and has no more need of oil filters or catalytic converters than diesel locomotives needed ash pits or coaling towers.
Conventional media wisdom tells us that "fuel cell cars are decades away." But I often wonder whether they are referring to the first showroom fuel cell Chevy or the last piston engine.
Things run to incentives. The growing focus on global warming, urban air quality and wild petroleum price fluctuations do not suggest the marketplace will remain patient that long. The Internet was not a remedy for any perceived public problem, yet look how fast it bloomed.
It's been said that fuel cell race cars won't replace piston technology because they're too quiet. But the new Tesla electric sports car, per the company's web site, goes from 0 to 60 in about four seconds and gives "...the equivalent of 135 mpg." How long will that remain boring for a generation to whom parents routinely turn for technical support?
The Kentucky Derby is still run but few would assert that horse racing is as exiting or as widely followed as NASCAR. They will still race piston cars in 2020 but it may be a nostalgia trip, like the racing of vintage MGs and Austin-Healeys today.
The moral of all this is that Mooresville could be tied to the internal combustion engine just as Spencer was tied to the external combustion engine and similarly at economic risk.
If that's the case, what can we do about it?
For one thing, we can quietly but persistently nudge racing toward diversifying its technologies, perhaps starting with pace cars burning hydrogen in nearly conventional cylinder engines.
For another, we can do whatever we can to introduce non-vehicular applications of hydrogen in Mooresville, such as forklifts and standby power generators, to de-mystify the technology through routine exposure to it.
We can identify the innovative and environmentally conscious thinkers in racing and maximize their visibility via civic organization speaking invitations and media interviews.
And finally we can go visit the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer. It's a truly fascinating place for a family outing. But it's also an object lesson in what happens if you're heavily vested in a mature technology and you don't successfully identify its terminal phase and manage the transition to its replacement early and thoughtfully.
(Mooresville's Stan Thompson is a retired strategic planner and environmental futurist for BellSouth Telecommunications. His column appears every other week in the Tribune. Email him at: HST2nd@aol.com)
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