This is inspired from the post on Märklin using magnetraction. There it was stated that an O scale AC6000 would weight 8000 pounds.
The discussion of an 8000 pound O-scale locomotives have me thinking about what it would take to get an 8000 pound Lionel GP35.
https://ogrforum.com/t...95#45918751637014495
This is a picture of a Lionel GP35 next to a 25 pound dumbbell weight. It does not take too much imagination to see that they are roughly the same size. Thus, if the Lionel GP35 was made out of solid iron it would weigh approximately 25 pounds. Just an approximation, need not be exact.
Iron has a density of 7.874 grams per cubic centimeter. Most of you do not deal with grams and centimeters too often so I will change that to pounds and inches. A centimeter is about 2/5 of an inch. The density of iron works out to be 0.017 pound per cubic centimeter or 0.266 pound per cubic inch (abbreviated lb/ci from now on). Unusual set of units, but hopefully approachable. Pounds in this case is the engineering pound-mass. The pound-mass is how much matter something contains. When one weighs themselves, they are using the pound-force. The two are different. In Earth’s gravity, the pound-force and the pound-mass exerts the same force on the surface. However, one pound-mass on the moon exerts a force of ~0.2 pound-force on the moon.
The densest material on the surface of Earth is Osmium which has a density of 0.777 lb/ci. If Lionel were to make the GP35 out of solid Osmium the locomotive would weigh 71.76 pounds! Heavy, but far short of 8000 pounds.
So let us take the material out of Earth’s core and make the GP35 out of that. Well, Earth’s core has a density of about 0.447 lb/ci which would give the GP35 a weight of 41 pounds. That does not work.
So let’s use the core material from our largest planet. The density of the core of Jupiter is approximately 0.86 lb/ci. If Lionel were to make the GP35 from the core material from Jupiter the locomotive would weigh 79 pounds here on Earth; still far short of the 8000 pounds.
It seems that there is no planetary material to make our locomotive out of to get our 1:48 scale GP35 to weigh 8000 pounds. Let us try stellar materials, or the stuff that makes up stars.
Red dwarf stars are stars are bodies the fuse hydrogen in their cores and are between ~7.5% and 50% the mass of the sun. These stars are very small and the red dwarf stars that are 10% (~100 Jupiter masses) the mass of the sun are about the same size as the planet Jupiter! They are very dense. Proxima Centauri which is ~140 Jupiter masses is only 20% larger than Jupiter and has a mean density of 1.93 lb/ci. Thus, if Lionel made its GP35 out of red dwarf star material it would weigh about 180 pounds! Not there yet.
The overall density of Sol (our solar system’s star) is a little over 0.03 lb/ci. However, the core of Sol where the fusion of hydrogen nuclei takes place has a density of 5.16 lb/ci! The core is under a lot of pressure which makes it denser. If the scale GP35 was made out of solid core material of Sol it would weigh 476 pounds on Earth! Not even the material from the core of the sun would give our GP35 a weight of 8000 pounds.
How about the core of Betelgeuse, the red star in Orion’s shoulder. It is 10-20 times the mass of Sol and has an estimated core density of 26 lb/ci. If we were to make the Lionel GP35 out of solid core material from the star Betelgeuse it would weigh roughly 2400 pounds here on Earth. OK, now we are in the neighborhood. To make our Lionel GP35 weigh 8000 pounds would take producing the locomotive from the stellar core material of a very massive star; most likely an O-class star.
We can take this further: white dwarfs with a density of 34,000,000 lb/ci. If we were to make the GP35 out of the degenerate material from a white dwarf start (our sun will become a white dwarf ~5.2 billion years from now) our GP35 would weigh 3,000,000,000 pounds on Earth.
Neutron stars are the core remnants of large stars. Betelgeuse will become a neutron start in the future. Neutron stars have a density of 3,000,000,000,000,000 lb/ci. Our GP35 would weigh 330,000,000,000,000,000 (that would be 330 quadrillion) pounds here on Earth. If you were to pick up the GP35 and accidently drop it onto the ground the energy released would completely destroy the North American continent. The GP35 would sink through the ground until it reached Earth’s core.
