Well, what I noticed about the earlier proofs I saw was that folks were running out to the big locomotives to complete this task. I wondered to myself, "Hmm, we have many forms of smaller railroads right here passing all over the city (or, as I think of it, THE City). Would they have the same effect on small bits of soft metal?"

So I went out to try.



First, the F car on San Francisco's Market Street, which is a set of historic street cars from all over the world. This one is from Italy, sometime around the teens or twenties, I think. Anyway, once the car was stopped, I simply leaned down in front of one of its wheels and placed a penny on the track.



Just a few inches away, so it is really rolling over the penny from a cold start.



This is what one pass did to the penny.



So I decided to see what a second pass would do. I waited for the next car (I think it was a green and yellow Pennsylvania car from the 40's, but I didn't get a picture).



This is what the second pass looked like.



and I think that this one is a third pass, but I'm not quite sure because my scientific method sort of went out the window.



I then thought about the F car's younger, bigger cousin, the N Judah Muni car.



Same methodology, Pop the penny down in front of the car while it is stopped. The main problem here was that I was at a busier intersection and the N Judah's wheels bounced the pennies around a lot. Here's a first pass.



Flatter than the F, but not as much as I'd expected based on the difference in weight (the original F car I used was made mostly of wood, while the N is all steel).

The next 3 pictures I'm not sure are even of the same penny. As I said, the N Judah's wheels tended to bounce the pennies around, to the point that I lost them pretty quickly (and had to duck around traffic to try to find). For the most part I could only get a second pass before I lost the penny entirely. So here are the other pictures of the other flattened pennies.


(note my reflection taking the picture in this one)