Railway network in the United States at the start of the US Civil War

235 points · 41 comments · view on lemmy.world

41 Comments

grue@lemmy.world · 80 pts · 1y (24 replies)

I think a more recent map is more interesting:

Remember, America was not built for the car, as ignorant people often claim. It was demolished for the car.

FinnFooted@lemmy.world · 19 pts · 1y (5 replies)

What's crazy to me is that many of the railroads still exist and are used... But for freight only.

nokturne213@sopuli.xyz · 12 pts · 1y (4 replies)

I looked at taking the train from Albuquerque to Denver, it goes east to Chicago before going back to Denver. It is a 7 hour drive, but a 32 hour train ride.

prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · -1 pts · 1y (3 replies)

To be fair, we're using really fucking old technology so it's not surprising that it's that much slower.

If we had proper high speed rail, like the Shinkansen, it would be much shorter.

nokturne213@sopuli.xyz · 17 pts · 1y (2 replies)

There is also the fact for a 450 mile trip you have to go 2300 miles.

jnod4@lemmy.ca · 2 pts · 1y (1 reply)

What people with epilepsy or other conditions do?

Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 1y

suffer in silence
but also hopefully they have friends and family who will chaffeur them, and greyhound buses exist, airplanes too.

TwiddleTwaddle@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 17 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Look at what they took from us!

PugJesus@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 1y

Look how they massacred my boy!

sommerset@thelemmy.club · -7 pts · 1y (15 replies)

Cars are much more convenient than railroads

explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 12 pts · 1y

No they're not - when I sleep during the car trip, everyone freaks out!

suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 1y (11 replies)

This is the whole fucking point. Cars being more convenient than rail is a choice. We have and can make a different choice.

sommerset@thelemmy.club · -1 pts · 1y

No u see railroads were before cars. We humans made a choice to use cars. That's because they were drastically more convenient.

I don't want to use the railroad I'm sorry. I would rather have a car. I mean yes I want a flying car, I want an electric car - but its still need to be an individual means of transportation I don't need to share with anyone and with a cargo compartment.

sommerset@thelemmy.club · -9 pts · 1y (9 replies)

No we cannot. There is no way trains would be more convenient than cars. Have u tried going to the store and bringing a cart of groceries home? I have.

Jumi@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1y

Because your cities are built around cars.

guynamedzero@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 1y (6 replies)

Then make stores we can just walk to in like 10 minutes. Then you don’t need to take a whole cart of groceries home and you can just go shopping every day for whatever you need

Texas_Hangover@sh.itjust.works · -1 pts · 1y (3 replies)

I want to go shopping every day?? I work for a living.

guynamedzero@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 1y (1 reply)

Sure, if the store is right next to your house, you can just buy something real quick and eat it

Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 1y

i like to say that the grocery store is my pantry, what i keep at home is basically just pasta, spices, stuff like vinegar, and the fresh things i've bought from the store that day.

bent@feddit.dk · 3 pts · 1y

I go to one of the 5 stores close to my home several times a week, sometimes multiple times the same day. We have gone insanely overboard with store density, but it's completely feasible to have small stores everywhere if the incentive are there.

sommerset@thelemmy.club · -2 pts · 1y (1 reply)

I don't have time to do that.

guynamedzero@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 1y

Then how do you go shopping if you don’t even have the time to walk for 20 minutes? It’s pretty likely that you have a 30+ minute commute by car, trains/buses would help free up that time.

ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net · 3 pts · 1y

You could use an ebike with a trailer attached.

Krauerking@lemy.lol · 3 pts · 1y

I mean sure. I just wish I had the choice and could do cars for just the last miles.

Cars are more convenient than a bus route locally but long distance travel where everyone can sleep to be rested for vacation and there no big security theater for local travel and I just keep my bags and snacks? Ugh so good.

It doesn't have to be more convenient in destination choices but in travel I think it has some positives.

shalafi@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1y

I'd take trains for long trips, but no way could I get by without a car. How would I carry our family's crap to the beach, camp, lake? How would I get 15 sacks of groceries home? Forget hitting the hardware story for much of anything.

OTOH, I'd love to hop a train and roll to New Orleans or Mobile for a day trip.

nokturne213@sopuli.xyz · 14 pts · 1y (2 replies)

It has not gotten too much better since then, for passenger trains anyway.

grue@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 1y (1 reply)

It got way better between the 1860s and 1940s. The issue is that starting in the '50s it declined again.

suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 1y

Not the stretch through Appalachia between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. That stretch is eternal and unchanging.

FerretyFever0@fedia.io · 10 pts · 1y (7 replies)

Funny how the southern states literally only had Mobile, New Orleans, and Charleston. The war should've been a year long no diff ngl. Good generals make a difference, who could've guessed?

PugJesus@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 1y (3 replies)

'Good' is a strong word. A lot of '61 was two sets of incompetents flailing at each other, and the dice coming up lucky for the South, while '62 and '63 was largely a series of unforced errors on the part of incompetent Northern generals. The strategic acumen of Lee et co is much overstated.

FerretyFever0@fedia.io · 12 pts · 1y (1 reply)

I wasn't saying that southern generals were good, just that most of the northern ones didn't seem to be. Sorry for being unclear.

PugJesus@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 1y

Ah, yeah, completely correct then.

njm1314@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

Tactical Acumen I think. That's the overall reputation of Lee, earned or not. He's never really been noted as a good strategist.

AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space · 9 pts · 1y

If labour is free, you don’t need industrialisation, and that attitude carries over to logistics.

logicbomb@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y

The north was also fighting in enemy territory. If you ignore that part, for example, then our recent wars in the Middle East don't make any sense.

join@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 1y

The northern elite also didn’t want to win at the start of the war: the union as it was, constitution as it is (with slavery that is). For the northern elite the south was a source of cheap cotton and an export market for finished goods, winning decisively would break that balance.

The end of slavery was truly a bottoms up movement, that forced the contradiction to be so great that it could not exist in one country.

John Dolan (aka the war nerd) has a great series on this subject on his podcast: Radio War Nerd.

Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 7 pts · 1y (2 replies)

Cincinnati has a huge train station turned into a museum, it was pretty cool from what i remember

shalafi@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y (1 reply)

There was a meme the other day about every American town having a train depot that was turned into a museum. I have never lived in a city that didn't have that exact thing.

PugJesus@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1y

In my hometown, there was a train museum, and an old train you could take to a (very close) neighboring town... where there was also a train museum, lmao

Aedis@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1y (1 reply)

And those lines that are in NYC? Yup the same ones we use today. They haven't been updated since I bet.

Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 1y

oh sure they have! they tore down the overhead wire :))))))))))))))))))))))))))