Ticket to Ride Journey Back to the Age of Steam and Experience the Ingenuity That Shaped a Nation

JUNE – JULY 2013 Sparks!A Newsletter for Members and Friends of the Museum of Science Inside This Issue • The Engine That Could • Big Shoes to Fill • Try This at Home! Ticket to Ride Journey back to the age of steam and experience the ingenuity that shaped a nation. t stretches 14,000 miles—through forests, over wide, sweeping rivers, an authentic period train takes you alongside lakes and bogs, and across three on a journey once deemed impossible. Gorgeous giant-format mountain ranges. Many said it would never aerial shots swoop you through the chasms and over the dizzy- I ing peaks of our neighbor to the north. work. It almost went bankrupt. But engineers and luck prevailed, and the Canadian Pacific Railway Montreal filmmaker Stephen Low used a helicopter and a ranks today among the marvels of engineering. gyro-stabilized camera mount to get those shots. The crew also Ride the rails yourself in Rocky Mountain Express, fixed cameras all over the train, so that you feel the rush as the a new IMAX® film now showing in the Mugar Empress, a restored steam locomotive, speeds down the line. Omni Theater. Three-dimensional maps and carefully restored archival im- ages enrich the experience. All Aboard! Next Stop: Unification The new film follows the original route of the old railway as it In 1871 the Canadian government had extracted a promise tells the tale of how this ribbon of steel came to be—and how from British Columbia to join the fledgling nation. The prov- it became the backbone of a new nation. From the crumbling inces would unite to form a dominion from sea to sea—and sandstone of the Canadian West, past unbridgeable lakes and Continued on next page end of one story but the beginning of The Empress a nation. The great Canadian Pacific Railway was complete. by the Numbers End of the Line? She roars in gleaming blue-gray But how would the railroad pull through a cloud of steam. One of the through? Snowstorms, avalanches, most compelling characters in Rocky mudslides, and fires all took a toll Mountain Express is the engine known on the young railroad. The secret to survival ultimately lay within the as the Empress. Named Locomotive majestic mountains and vast prairies 2816 when she debuted in 1930, the that workers had toiled to traverse. engine underwent a three-year rebuild Continued from cover Tourists were drawn to what would and re-entered active service as an become Banff National Park, one of Canada would build a railroad all the ambassador for the Canadian Pacific the most beautiful places on Earth. way across. At the time, the interior Railway. Here are some key facts and The railroad enticed immigrants to the of the huge new country was largely figures for this historic steam engine, prairie and emerged as a critical link unmapped. Rocky Mountain Express in the development and settlement of the last of its kind. brings to life the story of William Cor- western Canada. Manufacturers in the nelius Van Horne, the American-born • Years in active service: 1930 – 1960 East could now count on raw materials railroad executive who saw the project coming in from the West. • Weight: 360,000 pounds through floods, avalanches, and near bankruptcy. Ultimately, the engineering feat • Length: 91 feet and 1 inch that strung a nation together would Under Van Horne, thousands of work- • Boiler pressure: 275 pounds per endure. Recapture the thrill of the age ers from around the world made their square inch of the iron horse in Rocky Mountain mark on a harsh landscape in the form • Operating speed: Over 70 miles per hour Express. of towering trestles and precarious cliff • Original technical drawings used in cuts. Many perished in the endeavor. Rocky Mountain Express is directed by Stephen Low and produced by Age of Steam Film Company Inc. the rebuild: 800 When financier Donald Smith drove that last iron spike in 1885, it was the Sponsored by • Miles logged: More than 2 million • Cost of the rebuild: More than $2 million Rocky Mountain Express Now Showing in the Mugar Omni Theater Uncovering the History Beneath Our Feet A permanent outdoor exhibit exposes the region’s Jurassic past. When you think of dinosaur discoveries, do you picture dinosaur. Similarities among bipedal animals (those that paleontologists brushing dirt off bones in the arid West? walk on two legs) allow scientists to make educated guesses Dinosaurs once roamed throughout the East Coast, and they about body structure and behavior from tracks alone. For left their mark here too. In fact, as the Museum’s newly over- one, bipedal dinosaurs generally have a leg length that is four hauled Dinosaur Footprints exhibit reminds us, New England times their foot length. Scientists can use that information is home to one of the richest concentrations of dinosaur to calculate an animal’s approximate size and, from a series tracks in the world! of tracks, how fast a dinosaur was traveling—whether it was walking, trotting, or running. They can also tell how social Set in Stone a particular species might have been, if it roamed alone or Dinosaur track sites are found in all parts of the world except walked in groups, and how many babies a mother might have Antarctica, and fossilized prints far outnumber skeletal fos- had in tow. sils for these ancient animals. The Connecticut Valley—a Huge new dinosaur trackways are still being discovered today. 100-mile-long stretch that extends through Connecticut and Who knows what mysteries scientists will unlock next from Massachusetts—is known worldwide for its wealth of tracks. these traces of the past? Last year Museum staff members made the trek down to Dinosaur State Park in Connecticut, where they made casts of actual dinosaur footprints. The trackway they installed along the Museum’s entryway gives you a peek at the First Impressions past, when a whole different set of species Did you know that the first recorded evidence of dinosaurs walked the Earth. in North America came from Massachusetts? In 1802, a boy Learning the Steps unearthed a sandstone slab imprinted with mysterious tracks while working on his family’s South Hadley farm. A local What can paleontologists tell from a professor and pioneer in the field of paleontology, Edward footprint? A lot! The prints in the Dino- Hitchcock, believed the tracks were made by a gigantic saur Footprints exhibit were most likely ancient bird; in 1869, scientists determined these were made by a Dilophosaurus (dye-LO-fuh- dinosaur tracks, and today we know that dinosaurs and birds SAWR-us) or a similar two-legged carnivorous are closely related. Rocky Mountain Express Now Showing in the Mugar Omni Theater H2 Oh Cool! Refreshingly simple science for a sizzling summer. Whether it’s a hard block of ice, a steaming hot bath, or hidden in the air around us, we can find water almost anywhere. While this common compound may seem ordinary, it has some amazing abilities. Test them out for yourself! Color Jumpers Icebergs Rushing water is a mighty force that sculpts our landscapes, Ever hear the phrase, “90% of an iceberg but even slow-moving water can transform our world. is underwater”? Well, the reason for that is Spend a bit of time and watch how water’s “stickiness”—its water’s strange property of expanding when properties known as cohesion and adhesion—can create it freezes. (Most substances do the opposite!) dramatic changes. 1 Fill a balloon with water and place it in the freezer overnight. (For less mess, place the balloon inside a bowl or other container in the freezer.) 2 Take the balloon out in the morning and observe that the balloon has cracked! Peel off the balloon so 1 Arrange five empty glasses in a row. Add blue food you are left with a block coloring to the first, red to the third, and yellow to of ice. the fifth; fill these halfway with water and stir well. Leave the second and fourth glasses empty. 3 Place the ice block in a bowl and fill it to the rim with liquid 2 Rip a paper towel in half and fold or twist it, making water. Notice how the ice floats a wick. Make four of these, placing them so they mostly under the water, but some floats above? bridge each glass. (See picture above.) Do you think the bowl This experiment takes a while, so be sure to put it where will overflow once the it won’t be in the way! Check it in a half hour. Do you see ice melts? Watch and anything happening? How does it find out! What do look after several hours? After you think this has 12 hours? What do you think to do with water’s causes this? ability to expand when frozen? A Sinking Filling Cloud work You’ve heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls (see our temporary We can’t tell you how to save time in a bottle, but this exhibition through October 20), but what makes the Dead project can show you how to capture a cloud in one. Be Sea itself such a wonder of nature? With just a couple of sure to wear safety glasses for this experiment; it puts glasses, this experiment should give you a few ideas. contents under pressure. 1 Add a couple teaspoons of salt to one empty drinking 1 Take an empty, clear 2-liter plastic bottle—an empty glass and several drops of food coloring to another. soda bottle works just fine—and add only enough water to cover the very bottom (a half inch or so 2 Pour half a cup of warm water into each glass.

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