Quotes About Transportation

Because the writer has done her job, the world of the book I am reading has become, for the moment at least, more real than the world at my elbow. Books this good should carry a warning: Your quiche might burn, your child might escape his playpen, the morning glory vine might strangle your roses, and you'll never know.

Yes, my buggy is outside and my horse has been acting up. I wondered if you could come rub its skull and tell me if it's got a bad case of stubborn, or if it might be indigestion?

Buses and trains both set you thinking, but not in the same way. Trains give you a rhythm, sent you into dreams, cut you off from reality. Buses were always stopping and starting; traffic, road-junctions, lights; and of course, bus-stops. The world you passed through was observable. And real. So was the world inside your head. Buses were good places to worry on.

You want to draw your readers into the world you've created, make them feel a part of it, make them forget where they are. And you can't do this effectively if you tell your readers about your world secondhand. You

You know, that idea could be developed into a first-rate little article. Six hundred to seven hundred words, about. The Tyranny of the Wheel, you could call it, with a colored margin of trains and airplanes and ocean liners at top speed—of course liners don't have wheels, but you could do something about that—if I could persuade you, Mr. Wolfe—

In the bad old seventies, when Mondale was Veep, and the government still worried about things like fuel and noise, the Vice President flew on small, efficient DC-9S.

But now, in the age of Reagan, Bush mostly flew a big old 707, the Stratoliner, a Cadillac-with-tailfins kind of plane, so heavy, noisy, and greedy for fuel that no commercial airline would be permitted to land one at an American airport.

When I meet some of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames they occasionally enquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: 'I moved Africa 600 kilometres to the south.' They usually turn quickly to the soccer page. One

I mostly drive around in a Fiat 500 TwinAir, and that's a pretty small car!

Deforestation: a bigger changer of climate than all of transportation put together. Twice as much carbon in the falling forests than in all the atmosphere. But that's for another trial.

The railroad, when it came, would meet high expectations. It came quickly enough, but before the necessary technologies converged into a successful system, variety flourished. Passengers were first carried on 25 March 1807 on the Oystermouth Tramroad on the Gower Peninsula in Swansea, northwest of Cardiff in Wales. The cars were horse-drawn, and the operator paid tolls to the company that owned the road.

Wrought iron began to replace cast iron before 1820, when a Northumberland railway engineer named John Birkinshaw patented a method of rolling wrought iron rails in various shapes in fifteen-foot lengths that could withstand the weight of steam locomotives pounding and running over them.

The date of the trial, Tuesday, 21 February 1804, marked the first time a steam locomotive running on rails hauled a loaded train of freight cars—in this case, about twenty-five tons of engine, iron, wagons, and men.

Larger mines with direct access to the surface had long been laid with wooden rails to make coal and ore carts easier to move; moving a cart on rails required about one-sixth the effort needed to haul a sled or a cart on a dirt path.38 Moving coal to water on such rails—wagonways, they were called—would save money, time, and wear and tear. The earliest known English wagonway dates from 1604.

In the next hundred years, wooden wagonways diffused across England.

the American population was increasing rapidly, from 5.3 million in 1800 to 12.9 million in 1830, and from sixteen states in 1800 to twenty-four in 1830, most of the increase across the mountains in the trans-Appalachian west. The river steamboat from 1807, the Erie Canal between Albany, New York, and the Great Lakes from 1825, railroads from 1829, penetrated the American wilderness and fostered its settlement. These new places and people needed lighting.

The history of liquid energy is a history of pipelines.

The Stanley Steamer was the best-selling car in America in 1898. Two years later, notes the historian Rudi Volti, "of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States in 1900, 1,681 were steamers, 1,575 were electrics, and only 936 used internal combustion engines.

By 1914, the internal combustion engine had swept the field. The Stanley and other steamer companies built a total of only about 1,000 of their cars that year, compared with a total of 569,000 by conventional US automobile manufacturers.16 There were 1.7 million registered motor vehicles in the United States by 1914, up from 8,000 in 1900. Automobiles outnumbered horses in New York City for the first time in 1912, and the difference widened across the decade.

Setting omnibuses on rails increased the number of passengers that horses could haul and improved the ride. In 1856, when New York City's Common Council judged street-level steam locomotives to be dangerous and barred them below Forty-Second Street, horse-drawn street railways replaced them.

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds.

The real change away from horse-drawn transportation came with the advent in the late 1880s of the electric streetcar. Frank Julian Sprague, a West Point–trained electrical engineer, installed the first commercial electric streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887.

By the turn of the century, the electric streetcar had largely replaced the use of horses in public transportation. The animals continued to serve for general hauling, merchandise delivery, and small-scale energy generation. In fact, their urban numbers actually increased.32 Only the development of the internal combustion engine and its application to power the truck and the automobile across the years 1900 to 1915 replaced the city horse with mechanical transportation.

Unlike the Stockton & Darlington, which had won through the parliamentary authorization process with little difficulty, the Liverpool & Manchester encountered fierce resistance from canal owners, stagecoach operators, turnpike trusts, and innkeepers who had come to understand that railway competition was likely to be fatal to their businesses and investments. Nor did the landed gentry whose wayleave the new railway needed to acquire want any part of so noisy and smoky a fire hazard.