The Nose Does Know

Excuse me for being interested in anything and then sharing everything, but I just learned what to me is a fascinating fact.

While riding the beautiful blue-with-white-stripe metro in Montreal, have you ever come to a sudden stop in a station because of some suspected mechanical malfunction, been evacuated, and while biding your time on the platform before re-boarding smelled what you could have sworn was a strange fire, even though none could be seen?

That smell always struck me as strange, and not just because I couldn't see the source of it. The smell itself seemed awfully out of place. Now I know why: Bombardier, makers of our rubber-wheeled trains, saw fit to give them WOODEN brake pads. The smell after a sudden stop was so weird because in that very urban indoor environment with almost nothing but hard gleaming stone, plastic, and metal everywhere, I wasn't expecting the sweet smell of burnt wood. I expected something more metallic or acrid.

The engineer who passed on this info said that wood was chosen for the brake pads because it does the job of stopping the trains without causing any undue wear to the wheels (or could it possibly be the rails?), it is relatively inexpensive to replace, and it is a safer material to be under the carriages near the electric power sources because of its poor capacity for conducting electricity and heat.

Neat, hunh?