• shalafi@lemmy.world
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      24 days ago

      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.

  • Aedis@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    And those lines that are in NYC? Yup the same ones we use today. They haven’t been updated since I bet.

  • FerretyFever0@fedia.io
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    25 days ago

    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?

    • join@lemmy.ml
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      25 days ago

      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.

    • logicbomb@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      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.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    25 days ago

    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.

    • FinnFooted@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      What’s crazy to me is that many of the railroads still exist and are used… But for freight only.

      • nocturne@sopuli.xyz
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        24 days ago

        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.

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          24 days ago

          To be fair, we’re using really fucking old technology so it’s not surprising that it’s that much slower.

          If we had proper high speed rail, like the Shinkansen, it would be much shorter.

              • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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                21 days ago

                suffer in silence
                but also hopefully they have friends and family who will chaffeur them, and greyhound buses exist, airplanes too.

      • suburban_hillbilly@lemmy.ml
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        24 days ago

        This is the whole fucking point. Cars being more convenient than rail is a choice. We have and can make a different choice.

        • Fair Fairy@thelemmy.club
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          24 days ago

          No u see railroads were before cars. We humans made a choice to use cars. That’s because they were drastically more convenient.

          I don’t want to use the railroad I’m sorry. I would rather have a car. I mean yes I want a flying car, I want an electric car - but its still need to be an individual means of transportation I don’t need to share with anyone and with a cargo compartment.

        • Fair Fairy@thelemmy.club
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          24 days ago

          No we cannot. There is no way trains would be more convenient than cars. Have u tried going to the store and bringing a cart of groceries home? I have.

          • Guy Named ZERO@sh.itjust.works
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            24 days ago

            Then make stores we can just walk to in like 10 minutes. Then you don’t need to take a whole cart of groceries home and you can just go shopping every day for whatever you need

              • bent@feddit.dk
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                24 days ago

                I go to one of the 5 stores close to my home several times a week, sometimes multiple times the same day. We have gone insanely overboard with store density, but it’s completely feasible to have small stores everywhere if the incentive are there.

                • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  21 days ago

                  i like to say that the grocery store is my pantry, what i keep at home is basically just pasta, spices, stuff like vinegar, and the fresh things i’ve bought from the store that day.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        24 days ago

        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.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      25 days ago

      It got way better between the 1860s and 1940s. The issue is that starting in the '50s it declined again.