Perhaps it’s fitting to end the week with musings on trains, a medium that connects. The thoughts were triggered by the news that about 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the president’s farcical ‘national emergency’ the administration plans on cancelling $929m in grants for what Mr Trump has called a “failed” project: high-speed rail in California.

The bullet speed – train project has indeed seen its share of problems, recently described by Governor Newsom in his State-of the State – address. Overrunning costs and delays have plagued the project and led to scaling the project down and focusing on connecting regions in the Central Valley for now. Just the reminder that Trump needed to rage against the “green disaster.”

He would have probably waged war against an earlier train project as well, the historic transcontinental Sunset Route that connected Louisiana to California and helped shift migratory patterns: people trying to escape the remnants of slavery and the segregation of Jim Crow laws moved en masse from New Orleans to Los Angeles, establishing a large Creole population.

Financed by four railroad barons (and built by Chinese labor) the train connections brought huge commercial interests to southern CA, followed by a speculative real estate bubble. The exodus of black people from the South to the West Coast was spearheaded by the families of the Pullman porters who were employed by the railroads. Many others followed and by the 1940s doubled the black population of LA, helping to diversify the city.

Parts of that line are still in use by Amtrak, although havoc reeked by hurricane Katrina in 2005 still hasn’t been fully repaired over a decade later.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sunset-route-railroad-los-angeles

Maybe it will eventually make its way into a book that describes railroad lines that were lost: “The lost railways disappeared for all sorts of reasons. They were outcompeted by airlines, better roads, bigger railroads, or speedier subways. Or they were brought down by wars. Or they simply grew old. Sometimes, they were flawed from the beginning.” I would not have minded to accompany the author on a trip visiting all those sites spread across the world…. the photographs are amazing.

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Railway-Journeys-Around-World/dp/178131747X

Then again, maybe all that travel, by train in particular, might unleash madness – here is a fun report on the Victorian belief that train rides could cause instant insanity…https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/railway-madness-victorian-trains

What we know for certain, though, is that train traffic takes business away from car, truck and bus traffic, and thus the fossil industry. More importantly, high-speed railways compete with plane travel/transport and thus would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Here are the particulars ( and a description of conservatives screaming about it….) https://www.vox.com/2019/2/8/18215774/green-new-deal-high-speed-train-air-travel

Here is my favorite train poem (Auden) with music by Benjamin Britten:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0

Photographs today are of trains and stations encountered in my travels.

And for those who like celebrations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=Y6UV2Of1L8E

Berlioz’s grand cantata for tenor and six-part chorus was commissioned by the Chemin de Fer du Nord to mark the opening of the Paris to Lille and Brussels railway line in June 1846. Having just undertaken an arduous European tour largely by stagecoach, Berlioz was an enthusiastic advocate of train travel and jumped at the chance, completing the work in a few days.