Melt, Sag, Degrade Much Rail
Note: My purpose here is to bat a few ideas around about how Ukraine can shut down Russian rail deliveries to the front. I don’t know what ideas will ultimately prove useful to Ukraine, but I offer them for consideratiopn. My overarching philosophy is that there will be a tipping point where a combination of train derailment and long stretches of rail destruction/degradation becomes worthwhile militarily and financially to Ukraine. Team Ukraine, check it out.
One Rail Thermite-applying Sled Drone
Imagine Ukraine has developed a sled that runs on one rail. It contains a motor, a tread or wheel or two, a way to balance itself, a hopper and a spreader. No human rides on it. Humans only need to place it somehow on a rail and turn it on. It is a drone. Ukraine will helicopter in a crew to set, check functioning, and perhaps reload the applicator drone; or skedaddle.
Slabs Of Thermite Jelly
Imagine that Ukraine has also made a jelly that contains a lot of thermite. The medium of the jelly that contains the thermite is also flammable. Napalm would do this. A twenty gallon hopper is filled with the jellied thermite. Let us say that only nineteen gallons of jellied thermite can come out of the hopper.
As the rail-riding sled goes down the track, it deposits a set of three 1/2” x 2.5” x 2.5” slabs of jellied thermite on the top of the rail separated by one inch. It’s slab, space, slab, space, slab. Those sets of jelly slab squares are placed once every 22.5 feet for two miles.
Thermite ignites at a high temperature, then burns on at a much higher temperature. One typical way of igniting it is to first ignite magnesium and let the ensuing magnesium fire ignite the thermite. Another way of igniting it is to let a preexisting thermite fire hit it.
Small Quadcopter Thermite Fire Ignition
Once the thermite jellied squares are set, Ukraine sends a specially fitted, thermite-spitting drone down the rail. The drone is small. Ukraine does not need it to ignite forests and melt Russian artillery below it. It only needs to ignite jellied thermite very close to it.
This quadcopter drone has L-shaped titanium wire guides that extend down from it, hook under the head of the rail. They keep the drone centered on the rail, three feet above it. The quadcopter drone rips down the air above the track at a speed much faster than the applicator drone did, spits fire out of its ovipositor, and ignites all the jellied thermite on the track. It takes one and a half seconds for each square to burn.
Now we have two miles of pock topped rail. Will any one of those divots derail a train? Is the track sufficiently damaged to create an impossible-to-efficiently-fix rail situation? What if you had set the applicator sled to lay down slabs every 11.25 feet, instead of 22.5 feet, and only go one mile, instead of two, before it ran out of jelly in the hopper? What about setting the jelly 5.625 feet apart for a half mile? What about every 2.8125 feet for a quarter mile? What about 3/4 inches of thermite instead of 1/2 inch? What if, after the jelly burns, one Russian train goes over it really fast, makes it past, but the vibrations degrade the rail so that the next train can’t make it at all?
The purpose of all this, or any other thermite scheme, or any other non-thermite scheme, is twofold: to derail any train attempting to pass, and to destroy or degrade the rail such that it is incapable of letting a train pass over it. Not allowing trains to pass at all is more important than derailing any train. In other words, the purpose is to bring Russian railway shipments to the front line railheads to a halt.
We’re not just derailing trains, we’re destroying rail, lots of it. If we destroy enough rail, we halt the trains, all of them. Here are some questions and answers for your consideration:
Q. What if Russians replace entire lengths of rail?
A. They do not have enough stored length of rail to replace the meters of destroyed rail Ukraine will cause. They’ll exhaust their supply of rail before they make the railway viable again.
Q. What if the Russians weld over the Rail breeches?
A. The welders will be bombed, burned, or strafed by Ukrainian drones until the ones that remain refuse to go out and make the repairs or until they’re all dead. Continuing destructing of more and more rail will render their efforts moot. Railroads in any terrain are open to the sky.
Q. What if the Russian workers cut chunks of rail to replace the damaged parts?
A. See answer above about the welders. Plus, chunk cutting and welding is slow.
Q. Why is derailment by thermite destruction different than derailment caused by blowing a train off the tracks with explosives.?
A. A derailed train, blown off the tracks by explosives, can be set back on the tracks and go its merry way. A derailed train, clunked down off its track by thermite degradation of rail, can be set back onto thermite-destroyed tracks but is still stuck because of ongoing destroyed rail up ahead. Such degraded rail might as well be mud.
Something To Know
The Most Vulnerable Part Of A Rail
The vertical part of the rail is called the web. It is the thinnest part. If we can get it to melt, sag, or get brittle we are golden. That is, if we can get a lot of it to do that, we win. Just once won’t swing it.
Other Places To Put The Thermite
I have learned that burning thermite drips. Putting it right on top of the rail in a jelly eliminates the drip problem. However, it creates another problem. Only a portion of the heat from the burn goes into the rail, the rest rises into the air.
The Top Of Foot, Lower Fishing Area & Side Of The Web
The thermite or jelly won’t slide off if we put it at the bottom, and much of the heat of the burn will warm the rail, not just warm the air above. If we put the thermite jelly on the outside of the rail, it might not be visible immediately from above.
The Bottom Of Head, Upper Fishing Area Web & Side Of The Web
If we can get the jellied thermite, in a tube or not in a tube, to stay stuck in the upper fishing area, there are advantages to putting it there. (If thermite jelly alone doesn’t stick here, we put the jelly in flexible, plastic-encased tubes of thermite jelly (“slugs”). We could then glue the slugs into the upper fishing area, the part of the rail where the bottom of the head curves into the vertical part of the rail.
Advantages
- The jelly or slug presence is not detectable from aerial inspection. The detonator won’t be either. If you placed a microphone enabled vibration detecting trigger in the thermite, you could set it off just as a train passed above. Or you could set it to ignite once the applicator drone has safely passed. Ignition by a thermite-spitting drone from above would be much more difficult with the thermite on the outside of the rail.
- If you burn at the moments the train is on top, even if you are not able to get any part of the rail to melting temperature, you will get the head, or the upper fishing area, or especially the web to sagging temperature. If the rail is at sagging temperature with tons of weight above it, the rail will bend or squish and the train tilt left, right, or down.
- If you burn off the thermite while no train is above it, it might cause sagging, or/and cracks and brittleness, that are not visible from above, but are significant enough to cause derailment after enough seconds of heavy weight (aka train engine and cars) crush and vibrate over it. It might not happen on the first train, but the second or the third. It might not happen on a lightly loaded train, but on a heavily loaded train.
Bridges and Such
The following is better accomplished by well-provisioned soldiers out in the field, not one-rail sled.
Ukraine could set a team of men near the tracks, and they could put thermite or jellied thermite on bridges or above culverts or between the wood and the rails where roads pass over the tracks. Then it’s a question whether to burn it semi-immediately (give the soldiers time to melt back into the shrubbery or catch a ride back home) or to wait for a train and have it burn then. Does the AFU go for the bird in the hand (semi-immediately) or two birds in the bush (train)? I vote for a bird in the hand.
UKRAINE GOES ALL IN
The one rail sled is cute but Ukraine wants more, much more. They don’t want to shut down some Russian rail, they want to shut down all Russian rail. AND SO IT WILL BE. If they assign a design team and a few million dollars, they shall accomplish it. It can happen in a big hurry, too.
Here are my code names for the all-in ideas:
Some Assembly Required
'Mungo Sick Burn
Fire In The Holes
Sparky
Ukraine will have to change the code names.
I’m not going to explain these schemes to the Daily Kos community. They’re too powerful, too good. These ideas are for the Ukrainian military (or the US military). But if you are a well-connected Kossack, I’ll make you a deal. Promise me you’ll pass these ideas on to the Ukrainian weapons makers, and I’ll personally email you these ideas. You have to let me vet you. Leave a comment.
What I want from anyone reading this article is for you to give me a contact in the AFU or in the thermite or drone world, someone who can take my ideas and run with them. I don’t know how just yet, but I will vet the contacts. My ideas are free to the right entity, but if you want me to show up in person and say the same things, that’ll cost you a lot.
How It Ends
From “The History Of The Special Military Operation”, to be published in 2032, as translated from the Russian.
“Some of the thermite application ideas worked so well and cheaply for Ukraine that it was able to disable just enough track to make the railroads unusable. That track had been lovingly laid down by the workers of The Motherland, much of it during the Soviet era. Much of the track was in provinces adjacent to the Province of Ukraine. Some of it was in the part of “Ukraine” Russia took back from the comedian Zelensky after the initial phase of the Special Operation. Rail everywhere: near Berdiansk, Mariupol, Donetsk, Crimea, Rostov, Kursk, Belgorod became unusable. Exactly how this was accomplished is still top secret. All Russian trains for troop transport, tank, artillery, and munitions froze in place.
“The heroes in the Russian Army switched over to road and truck, but that didn’t work because the F-16’s unfairly given by the countries of Europe, by the Russian enemy countries of NATO, and elsewhere, and the artillery systems supplied by the United States, destroyed many of the trucks and their contents. Many others became undeliverable because the drivers were reassigned to the front lines for “meat attacks.” May the souls of the fallen heroes always be remembered, and always be revered for the highest level of competence and patriotism they showed.
“The Russian nation, the Russian army, and the Russian people did not surrender. We will never surrender to the Khohols. Once the rails could no longer be used, the Great Collapse occurred. See my “Great Collapse” chapter. After the Great Collapse, we fell back to defensible positions, positions seventeen kilometers forward of the nearest viable railheads, bravely facing outward. We are Russians, after all. I will drink to that! All of these positions are in The Motherland one hundred kilometers or more away from the illegal “Ukrainian” border. These positions are defended to this day. We will always defend them. We will never surrender.“
—-
Whatever. I want to visit Ukraine, hike the trails in Crimea, go to the opera in Odessa, look at the art made from wrecked Russian military equipment, taste the watermelon near Kherson, pay my respects to the people of Mariupol. I trust Ukrainian engineers to make the right decision about whether to use any of my ideas. I’m with them as they fight for their country. I hope they win soon. I have nothing to hide from U.S. intelligence or military either. I implore you to ask what my further ideas are.
Ukrainian Weapons Maker Contact Info Please
I do not have a direct line to President Zelensky or General Sirskyi. I don’t know anyone making thermite drones in Ukraine. Will you please help me? If you have a contact in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, please share my idea with them. PLEASE give me their contact information in the Comments area below.
— The Inventer
