Comment by johnea
11 days ago
> The Midwest was once criss-crossed by a network of ‘interurbans’, essentially intercity trams. In the United States, these lines have vanished
They just "vanished"! Man, I hate it when that happens. You leave a railroad outside with out a lid on it for too long and it just, you know, evaporates! What a drag...
What an amazing evasion of reality/truth, another classic use of the passive voice...
The actual lines would be essentially useless today; they kind of _do_ evaporate if not maintained. The important thing is whether the right of way had been preserved. Irish Rail is currently reopening an old line. The first step is ripping up the whole thing and laying a new one; the existing one, closed 25 years ago, is unusable. (For that matter, at time of closing, it was virtually unusable; I think it had a speed limit of 20kph or something for safety reasons.) They degrade badly if not maintained.
It would be more illuminating to reference the General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy directly, in which GM and other defendants (Firestone, tyre company, Standard Oil of California, Philips Petroleum, and Mac Trucks) were convicted of violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act in both monopolising the market for buses and the demolition of extant streetcar lines in numerous US cities:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...>
Thank you for the link!
Here in San Diego we're still suffering from those removals.
New trolley lines aren't installed in a way to serve daily resident commutes, as the original trolley lines did, instead they're primarily organized to serve as tourist disneyland rides...