Used to be that almost everything — raw materials, finished products, people — traveled by rail. The metal ribbons connected just about everywhere you wanted or needed to go. Entire towns sprang up because of the railroads, or died when the railroads left. Ask your parents or grandparents; they should remember the days of multi-track main lines polished to a shimmering silver by the steady passage of the steel wheels.
Railroads built this country, and the engineering and construction feats accomplished in doing so left their mark on it. In many cases, while the rails themself are long gone, the scars remain. It is not at all difficult to take something like Google Earth or other satellite/aerial views and still be able to follow the trails taken by the Iron Horse. But they are not indelible. Farming, mining, urban development, highway construction, all are doing their part in erasing many of the reminders — even the ones carved and gouged into the rocks and dirt of Earth itself — that at one time the railroad came through here.
I wish I could afford the time necessary to do some sort of photojournalism "coffee-table" type book about the decline of the American railway system. I would focus not so much on what had been but what remains; rail corridors that once pulsed like arteries now reduced to a single line of track with maybe a couple of trains each way per day, or abandoned entirely. Old buildings boarded up and left to deteriorate, or some of the lucky ones that got repurposed and were given a new lease on life. The odd pieces of old and timeworn equipment, deemed not even worthy of salvage or scrapping, left to rust where it stood. The empty holes where the turntables and the roundhouses had once been, and the tunnels that had once throbbed with the power of fire, steam, and steel. And of course some of the locomotives and other equipment that has been preserved and placed on display, even if they are being displayed for all the wrong reasons; not so much in memory of its influence but rather as an object of curiosity, like a shrine to some long-forgotten god kept in order that we may view it with self-satisfaction, smugly secure in our belief that we have become so much more advanced.
This is the sort of thing that I wish NatGeo or maybe Smithsonian would do.
-"BB"-