Jim E
Donation Time
Sure like a train ride, used to ride it to FL from Ohio and SC when I moved here. Take a bag of sandwiches and a couple books, have a nap or two very relaxed way to travel compare to the same trip in a car. Never liked to fly just flat out gives me the hibby gibbies. The cost of the train ticket was not so good though and you had little choice on when you could catch the train and the station in Cleveland was something out of a slasher movie, an unmaned siding in a bad area.
When I was a little kid in Sandusky OH there were still street cars, the ones that ran on electric from over head wires. Can just recall mom taking me down town to shop and riding the street car.
Guess when we picked to build a freeway system it was the end of rail. Then too car makers killed street cars from what I have read they bought them all up and closed them down. So you had to have a car to get around town or else ride a bus, which was most likely built by the same company that closed down the street cars.
Wonder what our country would look like today if instead of freeways we had picked a rail system. Say all the freeways were rail lines. The steel indusrty might still be alive churning out rails, we might not have mountains of old tires no one knows what to do with. Auto makers would sure be a different animal, cars would tend to be smaller at a guess and fewer would be made. Might not be a gas station on every corner so less of all the mess conected with the oil industry. Then perhaps we would have gone to electric trains and would have clean burn coal tech in place and more nuke power plants. So we might have not been so concerned about oil. Now that would be different... the middle east would not be so important to us and would not have all the money they do now.
I figure the WWII is the reason we are a car nation there was a cusp when it could have gone either direction but with the auto makers all building for the war effort they had to many plants that needed converted to none war effort production for rail to ever have a chance. Would be real interesting to know who took money from who when those decisions were made.
Think we are just stuck with what we have, could you imagine trying to build the freeway system in todays world. We would need a court system just for the cases... not thru my house, farm or that wet land you don't or he knew it was coming this way and bought up the land on the cheap... no way a rail system is going to get thru, not even bringing in to it all the folks who would figure they would lose money and lobby against it. the only way it could ever happen is if there is a disaster. Say a genetic modified bug that eats oil all gone or climate change is real and we reach a tipping point then maybe we shut down half the freeway system and build rail on it.
When I was a little kid in Sandusky OH there were still street cars, the ones that ran on electric from over head wires. Can just recall mom taking me down town to shop and riding the street car.
Guess when we picked to build a freeway system it was the end of rail. Then too car makers killed street cars from what I have read they bought them all up and closed them down. So you had to have a car to get around town or else ride a bus, which was most likely built by the same company that closed down the street cars.
Wonder what our country would look like today if instead of freeways we had picked a rail system. Say all the freeways were rail lines. The steel indusrty might still be alive churning out rails, we might not have mountains of old tires no one knows what to do with. Auto makers would sure be a different animal, cars would tend to be smaller at a guess and fewer would be made. Might not be a gas station on every corner so less of all the mess conected with the oil industry. Then perhaps we would have gone to electric trains and would have clean burn coal tech in place and more nuke power plants. So we might have not been so concerned about oil. Now that would be different... the middle east would not be so important to us and would not have all the money they do now.
I figure the WWII is the reason we are a car nation there was a cusp when it could have gone either direction but with the auto makers all building for the war effort they had to many plants that needed converted to none war effort production for rail to ever have a chance. Would be real interesting to know who took money from who when those decisions were made.
Think we are just stuck with what we have, could you imagine trying to build the freeway system in todays world. We would need a court system just for the cases... not thru my house, farm or that wet land you don't or he knew it was coming this way and bought up the land on the cheap... no way a rail system is going to get thru, not even bringing in to it all the folks who would figure they would lose money and lobby against it. the only way it could ever happen is if there is a disaster. Say a genetic modified bug that eats oil all gone or climate change is real and we reach a tipping point then maybe we shut down half the freeway system and build rail on it.
