With more time on my hands during the summer months and a conviction that I don’t get to write about railways quite enough on my usual Sunday blog posts, I decided to do a short weekly series this month focusing solely on trains. For my internship several years ago, I always had a monthly theme …
Continue reading “Thursday Trains Summer Series: Amtrak’s 50th Anniversary”
The codified protection by the government of historic monuments and other human-made structures is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history. In the United Kingdom, the preservation of antiquities remained a pursuit of wealthy men and was largely conducted within the private sphere until the 1800s. Ironically enough given the subject of this blog, the …
Sometimes the world of politics is just too frustrating to be believed and you just want to learn about something nice, like trains. This week we will be focusing on the concept of suspension trains in general, and then going into the specific details of Germany’s Schwebebahn. Suspension railways are a fairly old concept, and …
Continue reading “Taking a Politics Break to Talk About Trains: Suspension Trains & the Schwebebahn”
In the decades following the Civil War, the US was pulled into the Gilded Age, an era characterized by rank corruption and a stranglehold of Wall Street on the entire country (completely different from today). The wealthy collected immense fortune as millions suffered from abject poverty in the nations’ cities. Inequality was so rampant and …
If you live in the US, then chances are that you know of Florida’s reputation as a crazy state. After all, they did give us Florida Man! But here’s one wacky Florida story you probably haven’t heard before: the state once amended its constitution to REQUIRE a $2.5 billion high-speed train within its borders. In …
Continue reading “Oh, Florida, What Would We Do Without You? Bullet Train Edition”
Two posts in a row starting with Q! That observation aside… The railway has been a crucial transformational force in human history. It connected people and places in unprecedented ways, changing people’s lives and livelihoods forever. Railways have come a long way from the original wooden waggonways of the 17th century that were often used …
The total length of all railways in the US reached a maximum of 254,037 miles (408,832 kilometers) in 1916, and in the years afterwards began its steady decline to about 94,000 miles (151,000 kilometers). The economic hardship of the Great Depression was one causes of the decline of the railroad industry in the first half …
Continue reading “Northeast/Southeast: A Tale of Two Abandoned Railways”
Kentucky in the late 19th century was a hub of lawlessness and political corruption. It was the most violent state in the US at this time, with the number of murders exceeding that of the far more populous New York. People of the state dueled all the time from disputes ranging from the monetary to …
Continue reading “Storytime Sunday: Populism, Lobbying, and the Assassination of the US Governor”
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