Rail Transport

"Operations were commenced in January, 1883, so the works have now been some twenty months in progress, and about 170,000£. have been expended in plant and temporary works and 200,000£. in the permanent works of the bridge. At an area of about 20 s of ground have been laid out in shops and yards for the manufacture of the 1700 span steel girders and for other purposes. These shops are in direct communication with the North British Railway, and are connected by an incline and with a temporary timber viaduct 2200 ft. in length and 50 ft. in width, extending from the South Queensferry shore to the first of the groups of four cylindrical iron caissons which constitute the lower portions of the main piers of the bridge. At stores and offices have been built, and as this in an exposed island in the middle of the Forth the staging for the piecework is of iron pinned to the rock. Similarly at , on the Fife side of the Forth, stores, offices, and iron staging have been erected."

"The most interesting and novel features in connection with the earlier stages of the work was probably the construction of and piers by the . ... Each pier has at its base a diameter of 70 feet, and is built with a sufficient to reduce it to 49 at the level of the . From low water each pier is faced with granite averaging 2 feet in thickness. Below this point is a solid mass of concrete covering the 70 feet area already mentioned. The interior of these piers is composed of Arbroath stone set in cement. At the level of coping a course of granite forms the surface of each pier, through which project 48 steel bolts 2½ inches in diameter, extending downwards to a depth of 24 feet, where they are secured by washer plates designed for the purpose."

"The bridge across the Firth of Forth was completely redesigned, as a , by the engineers and . Its unusual form was a deliberate attempt not only to make the bridge stronger than but also to make it look like it could withstand the wind and just about anything else that nature or man could throw at it. ... Although the cantilever form was not totally new with the Forth Bridge, which was completed in 1890, it quickly became very fashionable. For the next decade or so, a cantilever design option was often presented as a challenge to any proposed design."

"The Forth Bridge is one of the world's most recognizable s and a milestone in engineering history. It opened in 1890 and is still going strong 125 years later."

"The for many years have striven hard to obtain a physical connection of their lines north and south of the Forth by means of a bridge. Twenty years ago they were authorized by to build a bridge across the Forth at a point five miles above the site now under construction., but borings 120 feet in depth showed nothing but soft silt and mud, and the bridge, which was to have been two miles in length, inclusive of the four spans of 500 feet each, was luckily abandoned, as the difficulties with the foundation would have proved practically insuperable. In 1873 another Act was passed for a bridge across a narrower and deeper part of the Forth at . At low water the width of the channel there is about 4,000 feet; and the island of affording a foundation for a central pier, it was possible to cross the 200 feet deep portion of the sea-way by a couple of spans from 1,600 feet to 1,700 feet each in the clear."

"The predecessor of California Street Cable Company commenced operation in 1878 with a line on between and s, and twenty-five cars seating approximately eighteen passengers each."

"... 905 The was started by as a tidy investment that could also, if he wished, transport him to his door. After a luxury apartment with an inner court replaced his palace. It was converted at great expense to a luxury hotel, but somehow the low-ceiling court does not convey a sense of grandeur."

"On January 7, 1952, the city purchased for $138,785.57 the privately owned and bankrupt California Stree Cable Railroad and with it acquired that company's three cable car lines. Within five years, this event would forever change the cable operations. The Muni ran five cable car lines."

"আধুনিক স্থাপত্যধারায় তৈরি কমলাপুর রেলওয়ে স্টেশন দক্ষিণ এশিয়ার আধুনিক ট্রেন যোগাযোগব্যবস্থার একটি ব্যতিক্রমী প্রতীক। ১৮৮০ দশকে তৈরি মুম্বাইয়ের ভিক্টোরিয়া টার্মিনাল, যেটা এখন ছত্রপতি শিবাজি টার্মিনাল নামে পরিচিত, আর বিংশ শতাব্দীর শুরুতে নির্মিত কলকাতার হাওড়া স্টেশন ছিল ঔপনিবেশিক স্থাপত্যধারার প্রতিনিধি। এ কারণে কমলাপুরের ঐতিহাসিক গুরুত্ব অপরিসীম।"

"কমলাপুর রেলওয়ে স্টেশন এতিম অবস্থায় দিন অতিবাহিত করছে।"

"কমলাপুর স্টেশন মানেই ছিল বিশালতা, মুক্ত আকাশ, আধুনিকতা। আমি অবাক হয়ে সাপের ফণার মতো কিংবা তাঁবুর মতো তৈরি করা ছাদের দিকে তাকিয়ে থাকতাম।"

"শুধু কমলাপুর স্টেশন ভাঙা কেন, আমাদের এখানে কোনো ধরনের ঐতিহ্যবাহী জিনিস রাখা হবে না এরকম একটা অভ্যাস শুরু হয়ে গেছে। কেননা এ ধরনের কাজের সঙ্গে যারা যুক্ত তাদের ইতিহাস, ঐতিহ্য ও নান্দনিক কোনো জ্ঞান নেই। সে জন্য শুধু কমলাপুর কেন কোনো ধরনের ঐতিহ্যবাহী স্থাপনা বা নান্দনিক স্থাপনার কোনো মূল্য তাদের কাছে নেই।"

"Though it is not as globally recognizable as Australia’s most famous building, Kamalapur Railway Station has assumed its own prominent position in the architectural identity of Bangladesh’s capital. The reproduction of the station’s likeness is common in both local memorabilia and imitative design from other parts of the country."

"If you draw a picture of Dhaka, Kamalapur will invariably come to your mind. People keep that iconic image as postcards. You can also find it as decorative paintings behind rickshaws..."

"Dan enjoyed bragging that the Kamalapur station was one of the largest railway stations in Asia. If one counted the length of its long platforms and adjoining railway staff quarters, the station structures stretched out over a mile."

"The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train."

"AMTRAK lives on subsidies; always has, always will. Americans have limited demand for passenger-train services. Nearly everyone prefers to use a personal automobile, for all sorts of good reasons, including privacy, flexibility, and convenience. None of this is news. Transportation economists have been documenting it in study after study for decades."

"In 2008, voters approved a $10 billion bond to begin construction of a bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco that would make that trip in less than three hours. So who knew that by 2011 the general consensus would be that the project is an ill-conceived, mismanaged boondoggle? Former Amtrak spokesman and Reason Foundation writer Joseph Vranich knew. In 2008, before the state Senate Transportation and Housing Committee, he called the project "science fiction." He said the train won't travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours because that exceeds the speed of all existing high-speed rail. But on French railway schedules, a TGV (Train À Grande Vitesse) takes two hours, 38 minutes to go from Paris to Avignon... 430 miles... L.A.-to-San Francisco...is 432. So what's going on here? It's simple. Vranich makes stuff up ... The Reason Foundation says the Europeans are abandoning rail in favor of driving and flying. Nonsense. Transportation market share of European high-speed rail lines has grown steadily and many are near 80 percent."

"Up to six million people travel on China’s expanding high-speed rail network on any given day...The sprawling legions of 5G cellular base stations and towers that China Mobile spent years constructing along trunk rail routes can now be readily tapped to transmit huge chunks of data.This will enable for the first time simultaneous ultra-high definition video streaming and conferencing between a driving cab and a control center for better monitoring and trouble-shooting, even when a bullet train is galloping along at 350 kilometers per hour. That is on the strength of the proof-of-concept beam-forming technology as well as millimeter wave spectrum as key enablers to offer reliable service to drivers and passengers alike, including as the backhaul for train marshaling and on-board Wi-Fi."

"Ever since ASCE (the American Society of Civil Engineers) began issuing its “National Infrastructure Report Card” in 1998, the nation has gotten a dismal grade of D or D+. In the meantime, the estimated cost of fixing its infrastructure has gone up from $1.3 trillion to $4.6 trillion. While American politicians debate endlessly... the Chinese have managed to fund massive infrastructure projects all across their country, including 12,000 miles of high-speed rail built just in the last decade... A key difference between China and the US is that the Chinese government owns the majority of its banks... The US government could do that too, without raising taxes, slashing services, cutting pensions, or privatizing industries..."

"(The United States is) the most warlike nation in the history of the world... How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country?... We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion (military spending) ... China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that's why they're ahead of us. In almost every way... And I think the difference is if you take $3 trillion and put it in American infrastructure, you'd probably have $2 trillion left over. We'd have high-speed railroad. We'd have bridges that aren't collapsing..."

"In Europe and Asia, there are numerous high-speed rail (HSR) lines. For 2015, the U.S. High Speed Rail Association reported that there were 29,792km (18,512 miles) of high-speed lines, 3,603 train sets in operation and 1.6 billion passengers traveling on those lines annually. China alone laid about 19,000km (roughly 12,000 miles) of HSR in just nine years. Compared to other industrialized countries, the U.S. is woefully behind. Why is the U.S., which is usually so proud of its technological acumen, so slow on the railway tracks? Though electric streetcars were prevalent throughout the U.S. in the earlier part of the 20th century, most cities saw this energy-efficient form of transportation disappear for various reasons, including a possible conspiracy by Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, Mack Trucks and General Motors to monopolize and dismantle the streetcar system. At the same time, auto interests fought pedestrians to reframe streets as designated for vehicles. GM also played a key role... [Presently,] the billionaire Koch brothers and their network of think tanks and dark money groups have been funding efforts to stop HSR and other public transit projects from taking place."

"The Green New Deal’s focus on invest­ing in high-speed rail could mean sig­nif­i­cant poten­tial work for elec­tri­cians and rail work­ers..."

"Former president Jimmy Carter recently made a profound and damning statement — the United States is the “most warlike nation in the history of the world.” Carter contrasted the United States with China, saying that China is building high-speed trains for its people while the United States is putting all of its resources into mass destruction. Where are high-speed trains in the United States, Carter appropriately wondered... As if to prove Carter’s assertion, Vice President Mike Pence told the most recent graduating class at West Point that it “is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life... You will lead soldiers in combat. It will happen.” Clearly referring to Venezuela, Pence continued, “Some of you may even be called upon to serve in this hemisphere.” In other words, Pence declared, war is inevitable, a certainty for this country."

"It is a fight to the death between Big Oil and everybody else. Everybody else will benefit from HSR. It cleans up the air. It opens up all kind of new possibilities where you can live a more affordable life and get jobs further away... Everyone is going to benefit, except the oil industry, and that’s where the problem is.... There are some major changes needed to our transportation sector, which means that we need to electrify it. That will mean a whole lot of work for engineers... This is a huge project that the engineering profession needs to step up and be the leaders on. It’s not just an opportunity that means lots of jobs. It means the engineering profession gets to be front and center when solving this humongous problem that everyone looks at as almost unsolvable. It’s not unsolvable. It’s very solvable.."

"The Reason Foundation is funded by Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute, Delta Airlines, the National Air Transportation Association and, of course, the Koch Family Foundation. They know what will happen once Americans, furious about gas prices and the way airlines treat them, experience electrically powered 200-mph trains. But big oil and aviation can't attack high-speed rail directly - that would be an obvious attempt to abort competition. So they hire a "think tank". Where does the corporate cash and propaganda end and the legitimate criticism begin? It was impossible to know in Florida, where high-speed rail was killed using the same techniques."

"China plans to expand its high-speed rail network by 3,200km in 2019, which is more than is currently being operated in either Spain, Japan, Germany or France, in a bid to aid a slowing economy locked in the trade war with the United States."

"While travelers in places like Europe and Japan enjoy high-speed rail travel, Americans are forced into a continued dependence on fossil fuel. Amtrak trips are either exorbitantly priced or entirely illogical... Even when travelers catch a bit of luck and get a discount price and a direct route, there is no guarantee of service since Amtrak has to share tracks with freight cars. Since commerce is king in American capitalism, Amtrak departure and arrival times are more like a best guess than a schedule. The solution... is exceedingly simple. Make a serious national commitment to create high-speed rail service. Not a public-private joint venture or an outsourced pastiche of private lines, but a national public rail service. If given the choice between the green efficient trains and pollution belching buses, I am sure millions of Americans would hit the rails."

"A tumult, riot, and mob exist on the Pennsylvania Railroad at East Liberty and in the Twelfth Ward of Pittsburgh. Large assemblages of people are upon the railroad and the movement of freight trains either east or west is prevented by intimidation and violence, molesting and obstructing the engineers and other employés of the railroad company in the discharge of their duties. As the sheriff of the county, I have endeavored to suppress the riot, but have not the adequate means at my command to do so, and I therefore request you to exercise your authority in calling out the military to suppress the same."

"It was bread or blood, and they could get any number of men to come up and prevent the running through of any train until the matter was arranged with them."

"You that know me know that I will obey orders...I have troops who will obey my orders and I tell you, gentlemen, these trains must go through. My troops will have no blank ammunition, and I give you warning of this in time."

"Meeting an enemy on the field of battle, you go there to kill. The more you kill, and the quicker you do it, the better. But here you had men with fathers and brothers and relatives in the crowd of rioters. The sympathy of the people, the sympathy of the troops, my own sympathy, was with the strikers proper. We all felt that those men were not receiving enough wages."

"We're with you. We're in the same boat. I heard a reduction of ten percent hinted at in our mill this morning. I won't call employers despots, I won't call them tyrants, but the term capitalist is sort of synonymous and will do as well."

"It's a question of bread or blood, and we're going to resist."

"Before the railroad... you simply could not transport agricultural goods more than one hundred miles by land. By that mile marker, the horses or oxen would have eaten as much as they could pull. Either you found a navigable water course... or you were stuck in bare self-sufficiency for all of your staples. ...[O]verwhelmingly, what you wore, ate, and used to pass your hours was made within your local township, or dearly bought."

"Outwards from London, Glasgow, Amsterdam and Hamburg there radiated the lines - shipping lines, railway lines, telegraph lines - that were the sinews of Western imperial power. Regular steamships connected the great commercial centres to every corner of the globe. They criss-crossed the oceans; they plied its great lakes; they chugged up and down its navigable rivers. At the ports where they loaded and unloaded their passengers and cargoes, there were railway stations, and from these emanated the second great network of the Victorian age: the iron rails, along which ran rhythmically, in accordance with scrupulously detailed timetables, a clunking cavalcade of steam trains. A third network, of copper and rubber rather than iron, enabled the rapid telegraphic communication of orders of all kinds: orders to be obeyed by imperial functionaries, orders to be filled by overseas merchants - even holy orders could use the telegraph to communicate with the thousands of missionaries earnestly disseminating West European creeds and ancillary beneficial knowledge to the heathen. These networks bound the world together as never before, seeming to 'annihilate distance' and thereby creating truly global markets for commodities, manufactures, labour and capital. In turn, it was these markets that peopled the prairies of the American Mid-West and the steppe of Siberia, grew rubber in Malaya and tea in Ceylon, bred sheep in Queensland and cattle in the pampas, dug diamonds from the pipes of Kimberley and gold from the rich seams of the Rand."

"a TEN-YEAR-OLD lad in Indianapolis who was arrested for picking up coal along the side of railroad tracks is now in jail. If the boy had known enough to steal the whole railroad he would be heralded as a Napoleon of finance."

"The old Great Western Railway shakes, The old Great Western Railway spins; The old Great Western Railway makes Me very sorry for my sins."

"Cases before the Railway Commissioners must not be cited as authorities to us."

"Every person of any experience in Courts of justice, knows that a scintilla of evidence against a railway company is enough to secure a verdict for the plaintiff. I was once in a case before a most able Judge, the late Chief Justice Jervis, in which I was beaten, I dare say rightly, in consequence of an observation of his: "Nothing is so easy as to be wise after the event.""

"RAILROAD, n. The chief of many mechanical devices enabling us to get away from where we are to where we are no better off. For this purpose the railroad is held in highest favor by the optimist, for it permits him to make the transit with great expedition."

"France had more than 11,000 miles of railway track in 1869. In the previous three decades the railway had transformed the nation more than any other single invention. It had stimulated the economy, created new social relations, and transformed the urban environment as metropolitan life began to revolve around the train station more than—as previously—the church or the town hall. The railway had likewise influenced artists, in particular landscapists, by bringing... destinations... within easy reach of their Paris studios. It had also, like photography, caused a shift in visual perception by altering the relationship between the viewer and the physical landscape, across which one could suddenly travel at speeds in excess of fifty miles per hour. It could be argued that the hasty-looking landscapes of Monet and Pisarro owed something to the brief vistas glimpsed as they loomed and then dissolved in the window of a train carriage. One Albert Wolff] critic of the Brignolles painters complained... that Monet "paints as if from an express train.""

"Man denke an den Bau einer neuen Eisenbahnstrecke. Soll man sie überhaupt bauen und wenn ja, welche von mehreren denkbaren Strecken soll gebaut werden? In der freien Verkehrs- und Geldwirtschaft vermag man die Rechnung in Geld aufzustellen. Die neue Strecke wird bestimmte Gütersendungen verbilligen, und man vermag nun zu berechnen, ob diese Verbilligung so groß ist, daß sie die Ausgaben, die der Bau und der Betrieb der neuen Linie erfordern, übersteigt. Das kann nur in Geld berechnet werden. Durch die Gegenüberstellung von verschie-denartigen Naturalausgaben und Naturalersparungen vermag man hier nicht zum Ziele zu kommen. Wenn man keine Möglichkeit hat, Arbeitsstunden verschieden qualifizierter Arbeit, Eisen Kohle, Baumaterial jeder Art, Maschinen und andere Dinge die Bau und Betrieb von Eisenbahnen erfordern, auf eine gemeinsamen Ausdruck zu bringen, dann kann man die Rechnung nicht durchführen. Die wirtschaftliche Trassierung ist nur möglich, wenn man alle in Betracht kommenden Güter auf Geld zurückzuführen vermag. Gewiß, die Geldrechnung hat ihre Unvollkommenheiten und ihre schweren Mängel, aber wir haben eben nichts besseres an ihre Stelle zu setzen; für die praktischen Zwecke des Lebens reicht die Geldrechnung eines gesunden Geldwesens immerhin aus. Verzichten wir auf sie, dann wird jeder Wirtschaftskalkul schlechthin unmöglich.Die sozialistische Gemeinschaft wird sich freilich zu helfen wissen. Sie wird ein Machtwort sprechen und sich für oder gegen den geplanten Bau entscheiden. Doch diese Entscheidung wird bestenfalls auf Grund vager Schätzungen erfolgen; niemals wird sie auf der Grundlage eines genauen Wertkalkuls aufgebaut sein."

"At this time ambassadors remained essential due to the slowness of communications. It could take a month for a letter to travel from London to St. Petersburg; in 1822 the record for an urgent dispatch to Vienna was one week. But in the 1840s and 1850s railways started to spread across the Continent, while steamships dramatically reduced the duration of sea voyages. After the introduction of the electric telegraph in the 1870s, ciphered telegrams replaced written dispatches for urgent business. Now that messages could be sent and answered within hours, the embassies in far-flung capitals could be subject to daily supervision. In 1904 the British diplomat Sir Francis Bertie complained that an ambassador had been reduced to the status of a “damned marionette,” with the Foreign Office pulling the wires."

"The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds! You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me."

"If the workers took a notion They could stop all speeding trains; Every ship upon the ocean They can tie with mighty chains."

"I feel assured, that in future ages the works of our English engineers on these ghats will take the place of their demigods, the Great Cave Temples of Western India, which have so long, to the simple inhabitants of these lands, been the type of superhuman strength, and of more than mortal constructive skill. Let us trust, Sir, that the blessing of God which has carried the work thus far may rest on the work, that it may be such a permanent monument to our rule as a thoughtful patriotic Englishman may wish to see raised by his nation, and as all who love India, whatever their race or creed, may rejoice to see completed, not merely uniting distant provinces in one bond of material prosperity, but knitting together distant peoples and races under our orderly and beneficent rule, and thereby advancing the cause of civilisation by means which may be blessed alike to India and to England.”"

"It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purposes of the British army and British trade."

"While it is gratifying to me to be thus able to state that the moral and social questions which are engaging attention in Europe have not been neglected in India during the last eight years, it is double gratifying to record, that these years have also witnessed the first introductions in the Indian Empire of the three great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations — I mean Railways, uniform postage, and the Electric Telegraph."

"A single glance upon the map recalling to mind the vast extent of the empire we hold, the various classes and interests it includes, the wide distances which separate the several points at which hostile attack may at any time be expected; the perpetual risk of such hostility in quarters where it is least expected; the expenditure of time, of treasure and of life that are involved in even the ordinary routine of military movements over such a tract… will suffice to show how immeasurable are the political advantages to be derived from the system of internal communication, which would admit of full intelligence of every event being transmitted to the Government,… at a speed exceeding fivefold its present rate; and would enable the Government to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bring to bear on any given point in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible. The commercial and social advantages which India would derive from their establishment are, I believe, beyond all present calculation. Great tracts are teeming with produce which they cannot dispose of. Others are scantily bearing what they would carry in abundance, if only it could be conveyed whither it is needed. England is calling aloud for the cotton which India does already produce in some degree, and would produce sufficient in quality, and plentiful in quantity, if only there were provided the fitting means of conveyance to it from distant plains to the several ports adopted for its shipment. Every increase of facilities for trade has been attended… with an increased demand of European produce in the most distant markets of our Empire… ships of every part of the world crowd our ports in search of produce which we have or could obtain in the interior, but which at present we cannot possibly fetch to them, and new markets are opening to us on this side of the globe under circumstances which defy foresight of the wisest to estimate their probably value, or calculate their future extent… the first object must be, then, to lay down the great trunk lines, with a view to the broadest future ramification, and on a principle that shall ensure the most profitable permanent working of the lines generally, bearing upon the intercourse of India with Europe. It needs but little reflection on such facts to lead us to the conclusion that the establishment of a system of railways in India, judiciously selected and formed, would surely and rapidly give rise within this Empire to the same encouragement of enterprise, the same multiplication of produce, the same discovery of latent resource, and the same increase of national wealth, and to some similar progress of social improvement, that have marked the improved and extended communications in various kingdoms of the Western world."