Skiing Break was action packed for the kids. Monday museum, Tuesday playland, Wednesday skiing with grampa, Thursday swimming, Friday museum & puppet theatre and a museum-organised LAN party for the 10-y-o.
Yesterday’s museum was the Public Transport Museum which shares an entrance and a ticket with the Toy Museum. Lots of buses and trams, including one bus standing on a service pit where you can descend and check out the under side of the vehicle. Juniorette and I made a pink train carriage in the children’s workshop.
One thing that caught my eye was a mothballed experimental hybrid bus, part of a long-running project to improve the environmental footprint of the city’s public transport. It has a car engine running at constant RPM, which charges a large battery, which in turn drives an electrical engine, which drives the bus. Among its strengths is an ability to drive silently in sensitive areas. Among its weaknesses: a 110% fuel consumption compared to a normal diesel engine. Back to the drawing board.
According to a signpost, the fuel-guzzling hybrid is just one of a series of designs that have fallen by the road side during the project. The best solution so far has turned out to be ethanol buses, which are quite common, unmistakable with their smell of old drunk. But as everybody knows by now, ethanol is a useless replacement for fossil fuels as its production uses up loads of them. So it seems that the Stockholm program has yet to find even one working solution. Good to know that they’re trying, though.
In the future, we may see buses running on methane from the Henriksdal sewage plant. It’s inside a mountain that my commuter train passes through every day, and the housing area on its top (once the site of a 1st Millennium hillfort) is colloquially known as the Toilet Lid. Hope that idea pans out.