6d ago

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

41 comments

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.
- 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.
- Look at what they took from us!
  
  Look how they massacred my boy!
- Cars are much more convenient than railroads
  
  No they're not - when I sleep during the car trip, everyone freaks out!
  
  This is the whole fucking point. Cars being more convenient than rail is a choice. We have and can make a different choice.
  
  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.
  
  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?
- '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.
  
  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.
  
  Tactical Acumen I think. That's the overall reputation of Lee, earned or not. He's never really been noted as a good strategist.
- If labour is free, you don’t need industrialisation, and that attitude carries over to logistics.
- 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.
- oh sure they have! they tore down the overhead wire :))))))))))))))))))))))))))

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