DOES ANYBODY KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?

Fittingly, a troupe that debuted as Chicago Transit Authority (the eponymous agency brought legal action to get that name changed) asked that question.  For years, the South Shore Line, properly the Chicago South Shore and South Bend, issued all-year-around printed timetables, advising that all published times shown were those in effect in Chicago.  When both Indiana and Illinois were on Standard Time, the South Bend passenger had to mentally add an hour; for that part of the year when Illinois and the Indiana Region observed Central Daylight Time, the South Bend passenger might not have had to make any changes, as Indiana was far enough west in the Eastern Time Zone for those counties on Eastern Standard Time to stay on Eastern Standard Time.  Those changes might not have inconvenienced too many passengers on the east end of the railroad, as, well into the 1960s, the railroad offered a memory pattern schedule with hourly South Bend Limiteds, with Gary Expresses on the half hour.  Conditional and positive stops for the morning Limiteds sufficed to serve any passengers from LaLumiere or Hudson Lake or New Carlisle for Bendix or downtown South Bend.  These days, the conditional stops are gone, although with all trains pulling out of Michigan City to form South Bend departures, there are morning departures for any local passengers so inclined.

Conditions were more complicated on the North Shore Line, the much-lamented and more than a little bit missed Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee.  Yes, the railroad operated entirely in the Central Time Zone.  After the War, though, Illinois observed Daylight Saving Time whilst Wisconsin did not.  So much for agricultural interests favoring Daylight Saving Time.  The cock crows at sunup, irrespective of what's on the clock, and farm kids know about morning chores before they head off to school.  Thus, when Wisconsin did adopt Daylight Saving Time, that ended on the final Sunday in September, whilst Illinois stayed with it until the final Sunday in October.

RAILROADS, CONNECTING PEOPLE.

Union Pacific's Semiquincentennial Steam Tour cheered up Northeasterners.  Trains posted a photo gallery, complete with a photograph that longtime editor David P. Morgan would surely have hailed, showing the articulation principle at work, with the lead engine helping Big Boy bend the corner around.

Steve Smedley photograph retrieved from Trains Magazine.

Big Boy and Reading and Northern T-1 Northern 2102, a different sort of War Baby, ran a side by side excursion in advance of Big Boy's visit to Steamtown and an Independence Day event in Philadelphia.  The excursion also acknowledges the 1976 American Freedom Train, as sister engine 2101 was on the head pin east of Chicago.

NO MIRACLE, ONLY PREPARATION.

Rideshare users bore the brunt of World Cup’s opening-night travel mess. Organizers say the plan worked.  The XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress this wasn't.

The World Cup’s opening night in New Jersey ended with hundreds of fans stranded outside MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford past midnight, wandering the grounds in search of rideshares that couldn’t reach them.

On Sunday, the organizers responsible for getting them home said the plan worked.

Uber, the local World Cup host committee and NJ Transit each framed Saturday’s result as a qualified success — while pointing in different directions to explain why fans were still waiting for rides three hours after Brazil and Morocco played to a 1-1 draw.

The host committee called its transportation efforts “very successful,” according to a source with knowledge of the planning, while acknowledging “some issues getting people back late.”

When the process is the most important product, that's the way things go.

NJ Transit moved 21,578 fans by bus and rail in 90 minutes — a number the agency trumpeted on social media Saturday night but one that fell well short of its own target of up to 40,000 riders.

The source close to planning said NJ Transit proved its “efficiency” but said part of the reason for the clogged traffic was more people didn’t use the agency‘s rail or bus options and turned to other forms of transportation.

”Absolutely,” the source said when asked if the NJ Transit passenger shortfall created a domino effect. “The fact the host committee was able to move 16,000 people on school buses in and out of there because there was more congestion on the roads is pretty effective.”

The host committee pushed back on the characterization of the night as a transportation disaster, noting that the stranded fans numbered in the hundreds — a fraction of the roughly 80,000 in attendance.

But the scenes at the Meadowlands racetrack, which served as the designated rideshare pickup area, told a different story for the people living it.

Fans reported waiting more than an hour after drivers who accepted their rides couldn’t reach the pickup zone. By 10:15 p.m., stadium workers told fans that no more Ubers were being allowed into the area.

Look, we're not talking about a quarter-million pilgrims making a day trip to St. Mary of the Lake, or four hundred thousand passengers at The Pennsylvania Station during the War.

A few more tilts, including the 19 July final match, will take place at the Meadowlands.

A RAINY FREEDOM WEEKEND FOR RAILWAY PRESERVATION.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad quit business on 3 July 1957 upon receipt of a favorable court ruling.  The Wheaton Shop blackboard is now property of the Fox River Trolley Museum.

Preservation operations began on a short stretch of electrified trackage in 1966.  For Indepedence Day, visitors were offered rides at the 1966 price of fifty cents.

A short stretch of the Aurora Elgin and Fox River Railroad remained in service as a diesel-powered railroad to move coal from an interchange with Illinois Central to the state hospital in South Elgin.  The Railway Electric Leasing and Investment Company made a deal with the railroad to operate trolley cars, initially on a very short stretch of electrified track.

CLOSING DOWN AHEAD OF THE RAIN.

In 1957, the Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad abruptly suspended all service just past noon on 3 July.  Passengers at Desplaines Avenue were more than a little bit cranky when the train they were hoping to board all of a sudden was moved past the platform without boarding, and nobody offered any substitute transportation.  Things got more interesting as offices closed for the holiday.

These days, the Illinois Railway Museum offer visitors a chance to experience living history, as we documented for 2016 and 2017.  Everybody is in on the plot and there's no unpleasantness when the trains set down at the Seemann Road platform.

Last week Friday, the show was ready to go on, but the weather gods had their own say.  For safety reasons, no electric cars operate during thunderstorms, and to protect the vintage cars, the wood interurbans, which the cash-strapped interurban continued to operate right up to the end, do not run in the rain.

At about 11.30, it looked like business as usual at Wheaton, where steel cars from Elgin and Aurora combined to make up a mid-day Chicago Express.

A few Chicago and North Western Bi-Level Commuter Streamliners were operating in those days, although the control cab cars and push-pull operation came later.  The smoke is rising off Shay 5, which was pulling a short coach train.  The threatening skies are to the northwest.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND TO THE MOON.

Less than a century after American Independence, a by-then continental country survived a second British invasion that involved a sack of its capital, followed a great civil war that tested whether such a country could long endure, and spiked down a railroad from Council Bluffs to Sacramento.

Within a century, men from Planet Earth first set foot on the Moon.

This year, the semiquincentennial of American Independence, another crew of astronauts launched from that nation again circled the Moon, and Union Pacific's Big Boy has gone east to participate in the Independence festivities.

It is only fitting and proper that the railroads participate.  The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, laid the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio on Independence Day, 1827 supposedly remarking that so doing was at least as significant, if not moreso, than signing the Declaration.  Railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln authorized construction of the Pacific Railroad, while the country was engaged in a great civil war.  He chose a central route in consideration of the military exigencies of the times.  That chalking on 4014's smokebox door, "Big Boy" above a V-for-Victory, predates United States participation in the War, and yet, without the big steamers, moving men and material to ports on two coasts would not be as easy.  Legend has it that a German war prisoner, late in the War and being transported to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, it being the practice to offer prisoners an opportunity to earn money by assisting at civilian work, noticed a Big Boy on a nearby track, counted the wheels, and lamented that it would not be possible to defeat a nation that had locomotives such as those.  Not even, to crack wise for a moment, with rocket scientists that did the engineering for the Moon missions of the late 1960s. 

A TRUMPY AMTRAK?

Pajamas Media contributor Ashley McCulley offers "Make Amtrak Great Again."  Her central thesis is sensible national politics.

If Amtrak is the national rail operator of the United States, then it should serve the United States. Not just the Northeast Corridor. Not just the West Coast. For too long, the national agency has been serving only a handful of our population: people who live and work in major coastal cities and rely on rail for daily commuting — you and I both know the dominating voting demographic there. Having lived in Southern California, I can tell you that Amtrak is the best way to get between San Diego and Los Angeles unless you enjoy wasting away in traffic. When we lived in Fredericksburg, Va., Amtrak was a fantastic option for stress-free trips to D.C., Philadelphia, and New York City. All of that said, relegating Amtrak to mere commuting purposes is a disservice to the rail and the taxpayers who fund it.

The challenge is in the how best serve the United States.  There has never been a coherent business model for covering the national network.  The Northeast Corridor get their rolling gated community in the form of Acela trains with premium and business class seating, as well as Northeast Regional trains offering business and coach class seating, and no honoring of the commuter train tickets operated by regional authorities.  The regional operators in North Carolina, Chicagoland, and California have to come up with state money to offer train service that is reasonably comfortable and dependable.

SIXTY YEARS TO GET FROM SKOKIE TO HARMSWOODS.

Perhaps the only thing longer than a forever war or a negotiation with Iranians is the procedural wrangling over restoring a few miles of rapid transit track through the Skokie Valley.

Please indulge me my sarcasm.  "Yellow Line extension in Skokie could take ‘decades’ but CTA is studying it."  It's more accurate to say that the studying has already been going on for close onto seventy years.  What today's flatlanders understand as the "Yellow Line" is the first segment of North America's first high speed electrified railroad, which continued to Deerpath and onward on existing tracks to Milwaukee.  And yes, I've taunted Chicago officialdom for studying a relatively short restoration of service at a pace that would please neither Charles Yerkes nor Samuel Insull.

When the North Shore filed for abandonment in 1958, Chicago Transit Authority (public ownership came in 1945) considered purchase of the high speed line as far as Waukegan. North Shore's own ridership studies had a plurality of the commuters boarding at Dempster Street with relatively light loads north of Briergate. As the Transit Authority has a large maintenance facility along the North Shore just west of the drainage canal in Evanston, it was relatively inexpensive to buy only the North Shore property from west of that facility to Dempster. But no sooner was the North Shore gone than some people wanted it back.

Getting even the next section, to somewhere near the Old Orchard mall, which somehow still exists as a mall, has been newsworthy for years. "Sometime in the late 1980s a friend, in making conversation, asked if I was aware the Transit Authority wanted to extend the Skokie Swift to Old Orchard. My reaction: it used to go to Milwaukee. Surprised reaction. No surprise."  At the time, there were a few more people still living who had ridden the North Shore Line.

TRANSPORTATION MIRACLES REQUIRE PREPARATION.

Reason contributors, including Liz Wolfe, have a troubling blind spot where road socialism is concerned.  "New Jersey Transit is preparing backup ferries to help with demand as fans try to make it to the World Cup. I kind of love how they assume public transit will buckle under the pressure."

Not-a-tall.  I heard one senior law enforcement official describe the World Cup as "multiple Super Bowls" in multiple cities in three countries over six months.  Let's bear in mind that the National Football League unaccountably scheduled a Super Bowl for the Meadowlands, and more people than New Jersey Transit anticipated rode the trains.  Lesson learned.

It is not, however, the World Cup, or the Super Bowl, or New Jersey Transit that concerns me.  Rather, it is a centennial.  "In 1926, the North Shore Line built a much larger temporary station, and borrowed rolling stock from the Chicago Rapid Transit Company, for a one-day International Eucharistic Congress at Mundelein.  A rainstorm provoked an early departure for many pilgrims, and the railroad handled it."

In less than ten score years, Chicago went from "mission" territory to birthplace of a Pope.  Strictly speaking, the aforementioned XXVIII International Eucharistic Congress took place in Chicago and at St. Mary of the Lake seminary, then east of a village called Area (pronounced a-REE-a) and subsequently renamed for George Cardinal Mundelein, who made no small plans.  Neither did the seminary, now known as the University of St. Mary of the Lake, not to be confused with the California university that keeps turning up in intercollegiate sports tournaments.  Nor did Samuel Insull, whose country farm was near the seminary.  For that matter, the cardinal offered the Vatican the use of St. Mary of the Lake as emergency quarters during the War.  The Pope might not have had any divisions, but he was no coward.

ONE STEAMER GOOD, TWO STEAMERS BETTER.

On its way to an extended visit with a second Big Boy at Steamtown, Union Pacific 4014 participated in an excursion on Reading and Northern that featured one of the preserved Reading T-1 Northerns.

Not a sports post today… haha but super cool opportunity to see @UnionPacific Big Boy 4014 in operation! pic.twitter.com/y6QeWcLqVB

— Joey Draper (@Joeyydra1) June 13, 2026

Yes, the virtual train enthusiasts were thick on the grounds, and on the trains.

I just fucking love trains, bro pic.twitter.com/sDHRoVS5Cy

— Oops, all cherries! 🔜 AC (@Melvis_Barksy) June 13, 2026

Please indulge the enthusiastic language.

WHERE ARE YOU HEADED, BIG BOY?

Last week Tuesday offered fine weather for setting a lawn chair under a tree and watching trains.  Big Boy was expected out of Rochelle around 3.15.  The vagaries of railroading.  Union Pacific dispatchers threaded the special through freight traffic in both directions, including a Bird, loaded and empty hoppers, and Dead Freight.

Over the weekend, Union Pacific allowed Norfolk Southern pilots into the cab, and an expanded train with Norfolk Southern's America 250 diesel and several additional office cars set off for Philadelphia.

STEAMING INTO THE WEEKEND.

The downtown crossing of the Lincoln Highway (Illinois 38) and Fourth Street (Illinois 23) is a good place to photograph trains, with favorable sun angles most of the day.  Several photographers (videographers? smart 'phone owners?) set up there for Big Boy's passage on Tuesday.  Stand back, the engineer is blowing the boiler down!

Yes, I am still preparing a video that will feature a few of the moneymakers before and after Extra 4014 East's passage.

PROGRESS OF A CENTURY.

North America's first stretch of electrified high speed railroad opened in June of 1926.  In the winter of 1960, rail enthusiasts were gathering for final rides.

Unattributed photograph, probably a Kodachrome, retrieved from The Trolley Dodger.

The North Shore Line built this section of railroad in order to offer service between Milwaukee and Chicago that wasn't jousting with automobiles on street trackage and subject to franchise restrictions requiring limited trains to stop on the streets of Wilmette.

STEAM TRAINS CONNECT PEOPLE.

Union Pacific's Big Boy once again demonstrated that proposition on its way across Illinois en route to a rendezvous with brother locomotive 4012 in Scranton and an Independence Day event in Philadelphia.

That WBBM-TV report showed one of several freight trains that were going about their business on Tuesday afernoon.  As has become my custom of late, I'll let others do the train chasing, and pick a comfy spot to watch.  The weather was favorable for hanging out under a tree, and in due time there will be a video forthcoming featuring the freight trains before and after the steamer.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

Yes, a political milestone year can be occasion for Serious Stock Taking.

The fun stuff has its place, even if Excessively Earnest People hold it up for mockery.

“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”

If this be treason, archivists at Yale University made the most of it.

“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” [curator Joshua] Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”

The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.

Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced.

What's quintessentially American about this collection is that the academic historian concurred with Henry Ford on the notion of History being Bunk.

Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.

“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”

Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.

Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.

In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.

He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.

Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.

The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.

Predictably, the house organ for Radical Chic will spout the Sixties talking points and disregard the damage that subsequent practitioners of radical chic history, most notoriously Howard Zinn, caused.

DISCOVERING THE ELECTRIC PRESERVATION RAILWAYS OF THE STATE LINE.

Mercedes Streeter of The Autopian stumbles upon the East Troy Electric Railroad.

Countless historic American streetcar and interurban lines have disappeared since their heyday, but I found a place where you can still experience a commute like it’s 1920. This is the East Troy Electric Railroad, Wisconsin’s last running interurban railroad, and it’s one of the most tranquil rides you’ll ever take that doesn’t even surpass 15 mph.

The East Troy Electric Railroad is one of my favorite kinds of museums. Nestled in the town of East Troy in southeastern Wisconsin, this museum doesn’t really have the marketing of the Illinois Railway Museum or the federally recognized status of the National Railroad Museum. Instead, it’s a museum that you hear about through word of mouth or stumble upon on social media, and it has the same kind of lovely charm as a mom-and-pop shop. The museum is small enough that, if you’re not paying attention, you could drive right by it and not notice it was there.

We've called attention to the East Troy Electric Railroad numerous times.  It's unusual among preservation railways in that its busiest season is fall, for apple picking and leaf peeping.

SOCIALISM FOR CARS AND PLANES.

Not so much, though, for Florida's Brightline, which has borrowed heavily to build its concept fast passenger railroad between Orlando and Miami.

Brightline took on far more than just labor and rolling-stock costs.

It bought right of way in one of America’s most expensive real estate markets; built nearly 170 miles of new track alongside an active railway corridor; constructed stations in downtown Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, and Orlando; installed modern signaling and grade crossing safety systems; and navigated several years of environmental review, litigation, and regulatory approvals.

The upfront capital costs, running into the billions, were financed through private loans at commercial interest rates. That debt, which is now strangling the company, results from a system rigged against trains.

When you fly, you use infrastructure built and maintained by the government (at various levels), including airport terminals, runways, and air-traffic control systems. When you drive, you’re using a highway system that cost more than half a trillion public dollars to build—plus tens of billions, annually, to maintain. And to be clear: The federal government covers roughly half of those costs from general tax revenues—not gas taxes.

With Brightline, there is no equivalent public backstop. The company built the tracks, paid for the land, financed the stations, and carries the full capital cost of its infrastructure—borrowed at market rates—on its balance sheet.

It's not that the air traffic control system or the Interstate Highways are any model of Public Excellence, and the hoops Amtrak or the Commuter Rail authorities have to jump through to add service are that much more favorable.

Unfortunately, the essay, a policy brief from the High Speed Rail Alliance, looks to the wrong place for relief.  "Tell Congress: It’s time to reconnect the country with high-speed and regional rail!"

No.  Tell Congress to privatize the airports and air traffic control system, end the "essential air service" subsidies and all the other rents to general aviation enthusiasts and the owners of executive jets, and privatize and allow tolling on the interstate highways and the remaining Universal System highways.

AN INTERURBAN RETURNS TO HOME RAILS.

Well, a short stretch of rail close to its old home rails.

The Village of Villa Park is working with Illinois Prairie Path, labor unions and two railroad museums to give new life to a piece of west suburban transit history.

The Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad was an electrically powered interurban rail line that connected much of west suburban Kane, DuPage and Cook counties to the Loop. Passenger service operated between 1902 and 1957, and freight service ended two years later. Most of the railroad’s right of way, including the portion that went through Villa Park, was converted into the Illinois Prairie Path walking and biking trail.

Now, Villa Park plans to bring one of the old CA&E railcars, known as Car 321, to the former train station near the intersection of Ardmore Avenue and Central Boulevard. Union laborers would restore the exterior to its original condition and rehab that interior so it can be used to host community events. The village plans to build a short stub track to mount the railcar on, and a shed to protect it from the elements.

The Roarin' Elgin shut down late enough into the emergence of a railway preservation movement in these United States that there were interested buyers of cars for preservation, and its inability to attract sufficient capital to completely replace its fleet of wooden cars with steel cars meant a substantial roster of wood cars of relatively low scrap value were available to preservation enthusiasts.  At one time, the seven cars numbered 315-321 all remained in preservation.  Car 318 was the casualty of a rough shunt on Penn Central en route from Indiana to Wisconsin and became a parts donor to sister cars in the Illinois Railway Museum collection.  Car 315 is being rebuilt at the Rockhill Trolley Museum in Pennsylvania in closer to as-built condition, meaning revealing the stained-glass arched upper sash windows that many an interurban covered over to make the car look more streamlined, and Car 316 has received a similar backdating at the Fox River Trolley Museum.  Car 319 returned from an Ohio mobile home park to the Illinois Railway Museum a few years ago, and it often runs in the Roarin' Elgin wood car train.

SPEED, FREQUENCY, PROXIMITY.

Florida's Brightline have a "death train" tag they probably don't deserve.

Federal agencies have investigated the Brightline incidents and produced no firm conclusions about why they have happened so often. The company, sometimes called “Frightline” on the local news, has not been found responsible for any of the deaths. How could it be responsible for people driving around lowered gates or walking into the clearly delineated path of a train? Yet there must be some explanation for the unusual number of fatalities.

Local newspapers likewise raise the alarm.

Since [fall 2017], the death toll has climbed at an extraordinary rate. Brightline trains have killed 182 people, significantly more than publicly known, an investigation by the Miami Herald and WLRN, South Florida’s NPR member station, has found. Reporters spent a year combing federal rail data, local medical examiner records and police incident reports to count the dead. Brightline officials did not dispute the finding.

The reporting team found that Brightline has failed to urgently address the train’s dangers, blamed victims for the high death rate, and, as fatalities climbed, turned to the public to pay for safety upgrades. Even then, critical life-saving measures, including fencing along the tracks and suicide-crisis signs, haven’t been installed due to years-long delays in the release of federal funds.

Local governments and regulators have added to the problem. Deaths have spiked in parts of South Florida where train horns were intentionally silenced after cities and counties demanded “quiet zones” so as not to bother people living near the tracks. But federal regulators have allowed the train-horn bans to stay in place, and cities have resisted closing treacherous railroad crossings.

Brightline is the nation’s most dangerous passenger train, reporters found, killing someone every 13 days of service, on average. In addition to those deaths, 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

The most recent Federal Railroad Administration trespassing casualties, for 2025, report 153 deaths in California, 85 in Texas, 65 in Florida, and 47 in Illinois.  Brightline attract attention as in the past ten years, what was a freight-only railroad has become the route of numerous passenger trains running at up to 79 miles per hour through thickly-settled areas.

Many train tracks are elevated to cross above roadways. Others are sunken down to cross beneath them. But the Brightline’s track intersects flatly, or “at grade,” with the roads on much of its route, including the part that runs through central Miami.

Many states have undertaken grade-crossing-elimination projects over the past half century because they make train routes dramatically safer. On the Amtrak route between Washington, D.C., and New York City, the highest-trafficked stretch of train track in the country, there are no grade crossings. The last one was eliminated in the 1980s.

There are 331 grade crossings along the Brightline route in South Florida.

Florida's geography precludes building a trench for the Florida East Coast, and an elevated line through thickly settled areas is unlikely to appeal to local residents, if infrastructure history is any guide.

GIANT ROLLING DUMPSTERS?

For years, railroading's gondola cars (on the railroad, pronounced gun-DOH-luh, GON-doh-la is a boat in Venice) came in forty foot varieties with or without drop bottoms, for stones or ores or coal, and a century ago the way for a consignee to empty one when dropping the bottom wasn't an issue was to hire a high school kid to shovel it out (!) and in longer varieties called "mill gondolas," which might or might not have had drop ends and sometimes hardware for handling long steel products.  Sometimes older gondolas would be relegated to hide service.  You wouldn't want to marshal them close to the caboose on a train, and pity the hobo who didn't see a pile of something geologic and thought that would be a convenient car to stow away in.

Of late, though, the gondolas sometimes look like this one, on the old Milwaukee Road at Sturtevant.  They're operated by Secure, a Canadian company, and, yes, they function as giant rolling dumpsters.

And yes, this mutation of gondolas has been under way for some time.  As power companies closed their coal-fired generating stations, a sizable fleet of bathtub gondolas, equipped with solid bottoms and rotary couplers in order to unload a train much faster than an army of high schoolers with shovels could do it, cascaded into railroad maintenance service as well as rolling bins that could carry more scrap bundles than your basic forty foot gon of days gone by.