Aylmer Express "MoHo" Extravaganza 2006

I don’t know why but there is something about Revelstoke that agrees with me. I seem to be experiencing a growing predilection to being here. So I was looking forward to spending another day here. But after the fabulous day we spent up near the clouds yesterday, how do you avoid a letdown? Let’s see what happened.

First we swung by to visit one of British Columbia’s (B.C.'s) hydro-electric generation dams which happens to be on the Columbia River just outside of Revelstoke. I wasn’t sure what to expect. We are planning to visit the Hover Dam in Nevada so I thought that this Revelstoke dam, which I have never heard of, may prove to be slightly under-whelming. Here is what I found out.
When we arrived I am sure you can understand the disappointment I felt when they told me that I would not be able to bring my camera inside. They are concerned about terrorist attacks and I can see how a dam might be a reasonably desirable target. Although they did tell us on the tour that the dam can withstand a 747 crashing into it so …? Anyway, the Revelstoke dam construction was started in 1977 and completed in 1984. That is about 50 years after the Hoover Dam was built and a lot of things have changed in the half century or so since. For instance, this bad boy can actually generate up to 3 times the power of the Hoover Dam! The dam itself has 4 penstocks (tubes) that direct water from the reservoir to the 4 turbines which drive 4 electric generators that can generate up to 2,000,000 watts. Yes, I was careful not to lick anything while I was there, that’s for sure. One thing I didn’t realize is that you cannot really store electricity on this scale so any electrical power that is needed must be generated “in real-time”. So when power requirements peak, more power must be generated at that time. In these cases the dam simply allows more water to flow through and hence, generate more power. So to a certain extent, the dam does store energy by simply “saving” water in the reservoir for later use. This concept of peaking power requirements also exists at the macro level. For B.C., the peak power requirements are in the winter for heating, however, the amount of water entering the river also rises and falls. Unfortunately the peak for the river is in the spring which is when the snow from the mountains melts and runs into the river. And, as you might have already guessed, winter is when the flow of water is the lowest. So that is not the ideal situation. How do they handle this? I’m glad you asked. They take advantage of the storage capacity of the reservoir behind the dam to retain water throughout the year so that they can provide the power when it is needed. Nice, simple, elegant … even I can understand that. Another thing that was interesting (to me anyway) was that there are many, many dams all along the Columbia River. The furthest one up river is the Mica dam which is the tallest dam in North America, or so I am told. I didn't get a chance to measure it. The Revelstoke dam is actually the very next one down stream. They are 130 kms (80 miles) apart and the Revelstoke dam gets 70% of its water from the Mica dam. The other 30% comes from mountain runoff in-between. The Mica dam is the one that sees the most variation in the level of is reservoir throughout the year as it releases or holds back water to help maintain a more constant level of water for the rest of the dams down stream. The level of its huge reservoir can vary as much as 15 meters (48 feet) during the course of a year. The benefit to this is that the level of the Revelstoke dam typically varies less that a metre (3 feet) every year. Sorry for carrying on like this but I love this kind of stuff.
Ok, on to the exhibits. They had videos, self-guided tours with diagrams and models, lots of kid-friendly hands-on demonstrations, a huge model of the entire Columbia River system showing the mountains and the location of all the dams along the way (a lot!), a real, live fuel cell in action and even some computer-based programs to experiment with things like wind patterns or the angle of the axis of the earth. They even showed a working fuel cell. Cool! Lots to do and see. One of the demonstrations illustrated why hydro companies use “high-voltage” wires. You see, you can trade-off voltage for current when it comes to electricity. You can convert a given amount of electricity to be high voltage with low current or low voltage with high current. The advantage of high voltage electricity is that it loses much less energy to “resistance” as it passes through wires. So when they deliver electricity long distances they convert it to high voltage using transformers and then when the electricity arrives at its destination, there is a transformer that converts it down to the 120/240 volts that a typical household uses. In order to avoid having 500,000 volt wires coming into your neighbourhood, they step the voltage down in stages as it gets near its destination. There! End of lesson for today!

As you might have guessed, I had a great time at the Revelstoke dam and could have spent another hour or two there learning stuff BUT we also wanted to check out the Revelstoke Railway Museum. This is a nice looking but rather modest building so my expectations were low. However, they have done a great job with the exhibits inside. The highlight of the tour for us was definitely the steam engine they had on display. Well, not so much the steam engine as the person who was inside providing the colour commentary. Jim Pecora was that person. Jim was actually a train engineer with Canadian Pacific. And Jim was actually a steam-engine engineer from 1948 to 1957. And Jim was actually the engineer of the engine we were standing in! He knew what every knob and lever was for, which was good considering that there was not a label in sight, and was happy to tell us all about them. He also provided us with many stories of life as a steam engineer. You could tell just by the way he held the different controls that he knew what he was doing.
The cab? … the cockpit? … of the engine had almost no gauges and no speedometer. Jim told us that you could tell what your speed was just from the clacking of the rods driving the wheels. He also told us that they custom-built engines to deal with different conditions along the railway. The engine we were in was built for pulling cargo from Revelstoke to Kelowna. It was quite powerful and had smaller wheels for improved acceleration with heavy loads. (By the way, did you know they have a mechanism for putting sand on the tracks just in front of the steel wheels to help get better traction?) He said that the engines that went from RevelStoke to Golden where much bigger even more powerful. These steam engines actually burned oil rather than coal. The engineer would determine when more oil was needed as well as how the oil should be sprayed into the combustion chamber. Human carburetor? Human fuel injector? Of course, the steam engines also required water and they had to carry water wth them too, hence the big car that you always saw just behind the steam engine. He actually said that you could only go about 125 miles (200 kms) with the 15,000 gallons of water on board (the boiler already has 5,000 gallons in it to start with for those of you who looked closely at the picture) so you’d have to get your water topped up along the way. He also told us about the brakeman who, as one part of his job, would walk to the front of the engine and stand on the cowcatcher (this is actually called a “pilot”) while the train was still moving at about 5 mph (8 km/h) and then jump from the train while it was still moving to run ahead and to change the switch for the tracks and then jump back on. They would have to keep the train moving when they were on hills otherwise they wouldn’t get it going again. Now, he said, the railway has a rule dictating that nobody boards or embarks the train unless it is completely stopped. Things were different back then for sure. But my favorite story was about his days running the snow plow one winter to clear the avalanches off the tracks. But as I am running out of room and time, you’ll have to ask me about that one next time we see each other. Anyway, a good time was had by all as we spent another wonderful day in Revelstoke.

Today's word:

predilection \preh-d'l-EK-shuhn; pree-\, noun:
A predisposition to choose or like; an established preference.