Got a mystery...

[[JiF]KellysHero]

From another site, thought a Jiffer could shed some light on this...

I've had this ever since i was about 10 years old. I had a friend growing up who's dad was a war nut, and he had literally 100s of these things in a grocery bag in a bottom drawer of their gun cabinet. I was told at the time that they were used to derail enemy train shipments. I believe it's a block of sulpher (based off the smell and the fact that they'll burn under water) wrapped in a waxy paper with lead/tin straps out to the sides that would wrap around a train track, and when the train runs over it, they explode.

I don't know how true that is but i know they definitely were used on train tracks and i know they will explode when trains run over them....when we were kids we used to get a bunch of them and break them open and break off little pieces and hit them with a hammer on concrete and they'd pop...and i mean pop louder than any fire cracker you've ever heard. You couldn't pop a piece anywhere near the size of a pea because not only would it blow your ear drums but it would send rock dust shrapnel in your face. It also takes a tremendous force to pop them...you can't just stomp your foot on them to make them go, and i don't think a car could do it...it takes solid impact to make them blow.

One time when i was about 15 me and some guys got curious and rigged up a way to crush a whole brick. One of my friends' dad was a truck driver, and they had some semi wheels (without the center hubs) behind their house. Anyone who's ever tried to pick one of these up knows how seriously heavy they are. We stacked 3 of them up and put a brick on the ground inside them where the sulpher block laid, then put a big ladder over the tires and ran a long rope with another brick tied to it so we could drop it from a safe distance. It took a few drops but when this thing went off, all 3 wheels went a good 15 feet into the air and we all hit the deck. It scared the hell out of us and i don't think any of us ever played with them again. This one has been in a keepsake box ever since.

[[JiF]Blind Trooper]

Not too sure what it is, but it sounds like hours and hours of fun!

[[JiF]zougathefist]

Ah, back in the good old days of my mis-spent youth I and some (unnamed) accomplices liberated *ahem* some of these from a railway storage shed.
we used to call them detonators or dets.
I was always under the impression that they were for warning a train driver of danger/problems ahead on the line,
you would put one on the track and when a train went over it there would be a massive bang and the driver would know to stop. this was before the days of radio I guess...
All I know is that if you throw one into a bonfire you best stand well back, and make sure your tent is not too close.
The effect is spectacular, plus you get a cool mushroom cloud effect.
they are not all that powerful explosion wise, perhaps the effect that the guy describes with the wheels is the result of it being in a confined space and youthful exaggeration (15ft, hmmm?). I certainly couldn't imagine one of them derailinga train
Z

*****EDIT*****

should've looked here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_torpedo



*****END EDIT*****

[[JiF]KellysHero]

Nice find!

[[JiF]ALargeWoodenBadger]

They look like the little packs they used to free up frozen switches. When I was a kid our house backed onto the freight switching yard on really cold days (-30 you could hear the occasional popping sound as they freed ice jammed between the rails. I could never see exactly what they were doing but I remember the neighbors’ Dad claimed to know all about it.

Of course he often smelled like burnt rope and he claimed he use to camp in Area 51 (he said was “invited” but I didn’t want to probe!).

[[JiF]{zs}wids67]

Zoug is quite correct Its a detonator,
a very old one at that I used to live near a railway staition and we had a signal box quite close too..
I oftern went there to talk with the signal guy he had some of them but yellow in colour, they are for warning trains of problems on the line as not all driver notice the signals.

That brings back some momories