London Trams c.1950s

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High Line in the past

The High Line is a 1-mile (1.6 km) New York City park built on a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) section of the former elevated freight railroad spur called the West Side Line, which runs along the lower west side of Manhattan; it has been redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway. The High Line Park currently runs from Gansevoort Street, one block below West 12th Street, in the Meatpacking District, up to 30th Street, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to the West Side Yard, near the Javits Convention Center.

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Kiss and say Goodbye

General Motors Aerotrain: A Rider's Report

The photos above are of General Motors' Aerotrain, a mid-1950s attempt to put pizazz into rail travel and sell many similar locomotive-and-coaches combinations to America's ailing passenger railroads.

Basically, the Aerotrain was a flashy, automobile-styled locomotive pulling a string of coaches using some of the body stampings from inter-city buses GM was building at the time. By the way, that automobile reference is more real than one might think: the guy behind the design was Chuck Jordan, who many years later went on to head GM's styling operations.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives (more)

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Early American Streamlined Locomotives

Pre-streamliner passenger train in Alamama - 1948

Locomotive No. 1, a Norman Bel Geddes design - 1931

Union Pacific M-10000 (left) and Burlington Pioneer Zephyr

The M-10000 is open for inspection in Denver - 1934

M-10000 and Chrysler Airflow - 1934

Full-length photo of the Zephyr - 1935

The Interurban Station

The Interurban Railroad provided passenger service between Port Washington and Milwaukee for over 40 years.  The station on Center Street became the Colonial Photography Studio after service was discontinued and functioned as such until recently.

The Interurban ran along the western edge of Cedarburg until 1948. The first major subdivision, Westlawn, was built in the field to the right in 1953 and 1954.

The Interurban provided a popular method of traveling to and from Milwaukee. Trains composed of one, two or three cars were used, depending upon the number of passengers expected. Even so, some riders occasionally had to stand, as shown in this photograph taken on one of the train’s last trips before service was discontinued on March 31, 1948.

Train wreck at Montparnasse, 1895

Washington, D.C., 1926. Southern Railway. Ladies' car

World's Haunted Railway Station In Stalin's Lost City

Introduction : We’ve had recently an abandoned railway in Abkhazia, abandoned as a result of USSR collapse when new “independent” republics couldn’t maintain the complicated and high-cost USSR legacy objects. But this one was abandoned long before the USSR collapse, it was doomed to be abandoned from the beginning. It was built by a personal Stalin’s order in the middle of nowhere - deep inside Northern Siberia between Salekhard city and Igarka town. It was not connected with any other Russian Federal Railway System and the purpose of it still is not very clear, so as a senseless toy it way abandoned pretty soon and now rusts accessible only with a helicopter.

It was one of the most ambitious projects of the Stalin era, known as the "railway of bones". At least 10 people a day died during the four years of its construction, but unlike most of Uncle Joe's grand designs it was never completed and now sits unfinished in the tundra, an icy road to nowhere.

Yet today officials are considering restarting work on the vast railway that Stalin hoped would run inside the Arctic Circle, initially from the north Siberian town of Salekhard to the port of Igarka. Work was abandoned in 1953, shortly after the dictator's death, yet its usefulness appeals to Moscow today.

The Kremlin, which sees its global influence resting on its abundance of natural resources, may have the railway finished to link the bountiful gas fields and metal mines of Arctic Siberia with Europe. Sergei Ivanov, deputy head of Russia's massive state rail company, said recently they were considering extending the railway to the nickel-rich town of Norilsk, responsible for 2% of Russia's GDP. A local engineer told the Guardian last week that he has been instructed to revisit the plans for the railway, considered to be technically excellent.

Renewed interest in the project comes as an exhibition in its memory opens in Moscow, at the Sakharov Museum, named after the Soviet-era dissident. Ludmila Vesilovskaya, curator of the exhibition, said it was designed to show that prison labour was a vital part of the Soviet economy and that its purpose was often not as "senseless as the many myths about the Stalin era try to show".

The decision to begin work on "Projects 503 and 501" was announced in January 1949. Stalin wanted to improve access to the Bering Strait, then the easiest route to the Soviet Union's new main adversary, the US. "We must take the north in hand", he is reported to have said, adding that "labour power and resources will be no problem".

In fact, work on the 750-mile railway had already begun in April 1947, heading in two directions, project 503 west from Igarka, and project 501 east from the town of Salekhard. "At the peak of activity in 1951, 85,000 prisoners were working on it," said Oleg Prikhodko, a researcher in Salekhard. "The climate was awful, the winters terribly severe." The walls of the barracks in which the prisoners lived were "very thin" and it was "difficult to understand how they survived in 50 below zero".

Ms Vesilovskaya said there were no exact figures available for the number of prisoners who died making the 435 miles of railway that was completed. A report from one of the directorates for January 1951 showed they lost about 1% of their prisoners, she said. "Each had 30,000 to 50,000 workers, so that's at least 300 dead a month."

Among the survivors was Lazar Shereshevsky, 79, arrested in the army in 1944. He was part of a troupe of 200 entertainers who travelled along the railway construction site, staging operas for the labourers. "The main causes of death were working accidents, disease and illness," he said, adding that scurvy was a major killer, as were disputes between criminal groups in the camps that the guards did little to prevent.

"The main thing was to build quickly and effectively," he said, adding that work was impossible during winter.

Actual labour was confined to the six warmer months of the year. "The work was hard, but the hardest thing were the mosquitoes - myriads of them that covered everything", he said. He added that in the 24-hour daylight of the polar zone they "ate us all day long".

Ms Vesilovskaya said she hopes her Moscow exhibition will explain to the younger generation that a vital part of Russian history is disappearing. "There is a danger we will lose, with these last buildings and camps, part of our historical memory," she said.

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