this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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Solarpunk Travel
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Community for those focused on sustainable travel. Our society's current levels of energy intensive and frequent travel are not compatible with life on a finite planet. We advocate for long-term slow travel to see the world, and low energy local travel to deeply experience your community. Green washing free zone.
related to sustainable travel:
- !trains@midwest.social ← open to all train chatter (but note the instance is centered on the midwest USA)
- !rail@feddit.uk ← UK Rail and Trains
- !ukpublictransport@feddit.uk ← UK public transport
related to travel generally:
- !travel@eviltoast.org ← general travel
- !main@lemmy.globe.pub ← general travel (this whole instance devoted to travel but note there is an instance-wide no politics rule there)
- !traveltips@feddit.uk ← Europe focus
The communities listed above are decentralized. Centralized instances are omitted as they go against the fedi purpose and it’s better to cultivate digital rights in the free world. That means instances that have a disproportionately large population or are centralized on Cloudflare are not listed.
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There was some train that ran on quicklime, or something similar, I don't remember. Basically you get heat by pouring water on it, which reacts exothermically to create heat and calcium hydroxide. The heat you then use to create steam like a normal steam locomotive. You can "charge" the train back up by turning it into quicklime again by heating it. Theoretically you could do that with concentrated solar power. Aside from the steam turbine, it's pretty low tech.
This is really cool and lines up neatly with some discussions RoboGroMo and I have been having around solar furnaces, do you remember anything else about it - like was this historical or a research project/prototype? I'm having trouble finding it.
I did stumble onto this, which could perhaps work with fixed site solar concentrators to recharge the superheated water resivoires https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireless_locomotive