The Autonomous Planet of Androids

 My personal wounds of loss have been well disguised for some time until now.  With the influx of Irish Catholic sentiment into the White House, necessarily my emotional psyche is being tweaked.  (The Apache helicopters don't help, nor does the idling SD-40-3 a few miles away)  No one ever will understand what an invasive technology AC Traction is.  No where in mainstream American life has low frequency alternating current been exploited on such a massive scale.  When choosing a system for America's power grid, there was a heated competition between DC and AC.  AC it was reported could kill you, and it did find several victims.  We choose alternating current but at a consistent frequency to run through our homes, power our appliances, and provide a service much needed by Americans.  It is a utility, a form of energy which augments our production and aids our existence.  The choice to harness AC on a larger scale and use it for transient transportation is a different matter.  The necessary challenge was not using a specific steady frequency of alternating current.  Until 1990 America had no way to change this chosen frequency anyway.  It remained 60 Hz, and products and services were made around this standard.  Enter the personal computer, specifically the Hewlett Packard.  With some sizeable achievements in the field of semiconductors, suddenly AC was available through an insulated gate bipolar transister (or IGBT) at varying frequencies which were engineered to coincide with the RPM's of an electric motor.  Of course this motor became known as an AC drive, a unit different from its sister DC motor.  With no brushes with which to wear out, its rotating magnetic field was efficient pulling the rotor of the motor.  What was more appealing was the software designed to control this electricity used to regulate the speed of the drive.  The speed of the drive or motor now was determinate on the frequency of the alternating current powering it.  The PC or personal computer made by Hewlett Packard was a core component in this new system.  It transformed diesel-electric locomotives from clunky mechanical beasts to well-tuned, smooth, and efficient movers of heavy freight.  The cost of and maintenance of this complex high voltage electrical system is an issue in its availability.  Over the course of thirty years since its invention, the rail industry mildly has been fickle on the attributes of AC traction.  The Norfolk/Southern initially decides not to invest in this technology, while CSX-T used it as a major tool in its corporate ascendancy.  Heavily they invested in AC powered locomotives with little knowledge of any of its effects on the environment.  If you chose to build mobile AC generating plants capable of outputting hundreds of thousands of volts of alternating current, placed these in a traditional locomotive and sent them on their merry way down the tracks, was is possible there could be environmental results?  Any bonafide engineer would tell you that characteristics of electricity are similar to the characteristics of acoustic sound.  They operate in waves, and these waves have peculiar abnormalities which produce harmonics, transients, and the like which may be perceived as undesirable.  If queried I am positive the Environmental Protection Agency would have not much to say on the matter.  I questioned representatives of the Federal Railroad Administration while living in Columbus, OH and they did not know what AC Traction was.  It can be extrapolated that thirty years down the pike the effects of AC traction have manifested themselves greatly in American society, and we have chosen to ignore it.  With the implementation of AC traction has evolved a bevy of illnesses which yet have been explained.  Still today we are grappling with the effects of Attention Deficit Disorder.  Largely it has been buried in the sand of red tape.  Big Pharma delights in each new disorder promptly offering a new miracle drug to quell its effects.  America and Americans are not the same, and largely if anyone paid attention it could be attributed to the effects of huge amounts of airborne low frequency alternating current.  Its effects, while not the same as electromagnetic energy, are similar.  This is why low frequency electricity of any kind is used sparingly in society.  Also it would be discovered that the HAARP facility in Alaska's task was to energize the ionosphere with long wave length low frequency radio waves.  They created a phased array system that would negate the use of the 150 miles antenna currently in use in the Midwest to communicate with naval submarines.  In terms of climactic results energizing the ionosphere would not be seen as a positive accomplishment.  Because of the magnitude of the corporate lobby, largely any of these adverse consequences of AC traction are overlooked.  Instead America suffers at the behest of a reinvigorated, newly profitable, and now powerful corporate conglomerate.  Not unlike Big Tech, Google, Facebook and Apple, the railroads have infiltrated our nation again with nary a care for the citizens who seek to use its services.  We are a distraction, and soon the distraction who provides the need for their product may disappear.