To think of all branch lines all over the country that had passenger service (and freight) are no longer - even the
Rail was the only way to go in the 1890s. CNN says Amtrak runs on 21,400 miles in 2023. How Stuff Works says the peak for all railroad mileage in the US was in 1916, when it was 254,000, a number CNN also states. The resurgence of intercity rail travel in WWII, partly due to gas rationing, was followed by a steep decline. Considering how the population has concentrated in cities and suburbs, you'd have to count commuter rail and transit now, though, to be fair. Look at how undersized New York Penn Station is at track level. Then again 254,000 miles, how much ever passenger, was for a much smaller population.
Wow!
Even in "Car Crazy" Texas, Rail is making a Comeback in the Major Cities, with the exception of Anti-Rail San Antonio!
Track has been pulled out of the ground but very likely going back into the ground for what should be a Raleigh-Wilmington Amtrak. Most of the rail is in place and I am not sure how much is missing but I have never heard of that happening before. Generally once pulled it is gone forever and even Rails to Trails very seldom goes back to rails for freight.
Where can one find a copy ? I don't need an original edition but a decent reprint is good enough for me. That is pretty much the zenith of passenger rail in the US for number of routes served and miles of passenger rail. I have been to webpages with PDF pages here and there but a printed book would be nice.
I have that 1916 reprint (you can tell it's a reprint because it's on better paper than usual). Besides the interurbans it also has a lot of waterways services that were gone by the 1941 reprint. Those services had survived rail competition because they served out of the way rail cul de sacs or crossed Lake Erie, and some people hated the railroad, etc. Just as with the interurbans, not everyone started driving in 1919, but enough did try the highways to put marginal carriers into the red.
That ad from 1946 appears to be the work of Robert R. Young, the C&O chairman who was often tweaking the rest of the railroad industry in that era (most famously with an ad that proclaimed, "A hog can cross the country without changing trains -- but you can't.") He was a big advocate for innovation and modernization in an industry that was slow to change. The previous year, in 1945, Young had led an unsuccessful bid to acquire the operating pool of the Pullman Company, which instead went to a consortium of the large railroads -- hence the criticism here of the big railroads' unambitious (in Young's view) plans for updating the sleeper fleet. Later, in the mid-1950s, he won control of the New York Central in a proxy fight and did his best to shake up the corporate culture there; alas, the NYC's problems by then were too big to be cured by innovation alone.
And of course it was the growth in air travel that made baseball expansion possible. "The expansion of MLB coincided with an increase in the ease of travel by commercial jets, making it easier for players to fly across the continent. This is important given that when Walter O'Malley moved his Dodgers to Los Angeles, the closest team, other than the San Francisco Giants, was in St. Louis." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_League_Baseball_relocations_of_1950s–1960s. Both the Dodgers and the Giants made the cross-country trek in 1958. And some fans are still heartbroken.) Before then, every team was east of the Mississippi, well, if you count St. Louis which is literally on the Mississippi, and train travel to an "away" game consumed a day at most.
The Yankees were one of the last teams to stop using Trains for travel, especially since the GM
The Yankees were one of the last MLB Teams to move frommostly Train Travel to Air.
Also most games were still in the Daytime, which allowed teams to travel overnight on Trains, but with the move to mostly night games and an expanded schedule, Air travel became necessary!
I ran across that ad as well.
At 2:30 p.m. Pacific Time, skilled union craftsmen in the composing room at the Oregon Journal locked up the chases for the Night Sports Final, known as the "green streak" for an ink strip down the right margin. Thanks to the difference in time, it carried the most active NYSE stock finals and MLB afternoon game results. At 3:00 pm we got out of elementary school. At 3:30 p.m. a green and white Journal truck arrived at our rendezvous point and we were distributing the still warm newspapers, over an hour ahead of the evil evening Oregonian.
Seems it was Eddie Cantor who read it on the radio, and someone else wrote a song from it. The poem was written by an ad-man named Nelson Metcalf, Jr. https://blogs.lib.uconn.edu/archive...vertising-campaign-of-the-new-haven-railroad/
The San Francisco Examiner, an afternoon paper, put out early editions downtown in the late 1980s, starting about noon. At 1pm the NY Stock Exchange closed and I was amazed on lunch break to see the paper appear in boxes with the Dow Jones index about twelve (?) minutes later. SF had the Pacific Stock Exchange, the only major public trading floor west of Chicago, as well as some other institutions representing all of the West Coast: the Federal Reserve Bank and Federal Circuit Court. At "the other end of the spectrum" as you say, the Xam was trying to shake off its stodgy image by publishing a column called "Media Critic" by Hunter S. Thompson, and another by some other 1960s luminary. Thompson was well past his prime and mainly mused on his girlfriend and argumentative life in Colorado. For all its institutional bona fides, the SF newspapers were great, by the higher standards of the time. The paper of record was the LA Times. It was influential enough, or ambitious enough, to distribute itself to boxes in Washington DC. At that time you could get a wider geographic variety of papers on the street in DC than in NY.
During the 1950's and well into 1990's one could buy any major paper in the world as well as all major U.S. papers in Times Sq. The newsstand was at the east side of the square at 44th St or 45th St.
This happens in industry all the time even today. It's like the fable of the scorpion and the frog crossing the river. I started out in the computer mainframe industry and saw its demise mostly caused by fiber optics. IBM touted the installation of fiber optics because it speed up information transfer between mainframes. At the same time it made much of their computer rooms obsolete. Where businesses might have multiple computer rooms in a city now had one in a far off remote location. Mainframe computers still exist but only as a very small market.What I always found amusing, was that some of the railroads themselves, notably The Southern, actively promoted the “Good Roads” policy movement during the early 20th century, in effect biting themselves.
The SR even had an entire display train touring its territory to accomplish same…
