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.
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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What's crazy to me is that many of the railroads still exist and are used... But for freight only.
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.
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.
There is also the fact for a 450 mile trip you have to go 2300 miles.
What people with epilepsy or other conditions do?
Look at what they took from us!
Look how they massacred my boy!
Cars are much more convenient than railroads
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.
This is the whole fucking point. Cars being more convenient than rail is a choice. We have and can make a different choice.
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.
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.
Because your cities are built around cars.
You could use an ebike with a trailer attached.
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
I don't have time to do that.
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.
I want to go shopping every day?? I work for a living.
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.
Sure, if the store is right next to your house, you can just buy something real quick and eat it
No they're not - when I sleep during the car trip, everyone freaks out!
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.
It has not gotten too much better since then, for passenger trains anyway.
It got way better between the 1860s and 1940s. The issue is that starting in the '50s it declined again.
Not the stretch through Appalachia between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. That stretch is eternal and unchanging.
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?
If labour is free, you don’t need industrialisation, and that attitude carries over to logistics.
'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.
Tactical Acumen I think. That's the overall reputation of Lee, earned or not. He's never really been noted as a good strategist.
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.
Ah, yeah, completely correct then.
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.
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.
Cincinnati has a huge train station turned into a museum, it was pretty cool from what i remember
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.
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
And those lines that are in NYC? Yup the same ones we use today. They haven't been updated since I bet.