1 2 Volume 9, #3, May/June 2020
The international heritage interpretation e-magazine.
It seems like yesterday was New Years Day and here we are in late spring and edging into summer. So many wonderful articles to share with you, both about railroad heritage and environmental issues and climate change. InterpNEWS publications have been expanding, enlarging IN issues content, and birthing our new John Veverka’s Interpretive Explorer e- magazine. It’s the goal of Interpretive Explorer to focus on personal interpretive experiences, discoveries and exploring the world’s natural and cultural history wonders from an interpreters’ story telling perspective. I have 40 years of world-wide site visits, wanderings and interpretive experiences to share, and would like to share yours as well. So, repeating my Call for Articles for InterpNEWS, and Call for Explorer stories for Interpretive Explorer e-magazine. Deadline for the July/August InterpNEWS is the 15th of June. Any questions, feel free to ask – [email protected]. Cheers and happy exploring. John Veverka. In this Issue Page
- Interpreting ten historic train lines and stories. National Geographic 3 - 8 Things You May Not Know About Trains. BARBARA MARANZANI 11 - Railroad Bridges/Train Trestles – An Overview. American Railroads.com 16 - Scientists say creating hybrids of the extinct beasts could fix the Arctic tundra and stop greenhouse gas emissions. By Paul Mann 19 - First evidence of feathered polar dinosaurs found. Gondwana Research 22 - Climate change is contributing to California’s fires. Alejandra Borunda 24 - Preserving Railroad History. John Gruber 27 - Who Invented the Railroad? WORLD FACTS 29 - Dreams of a Transcontinental Railroad. HISTORY.COM EDITORS 31 - Climate Change and Agriculture- A Perfect Storm in Farm Country. Union of Concerned Scientists 35 - What’s in a Name? (Curator) Matthew Parkes, National Museum Ireland 41 - Megafauna extinction: DNA evidence pins blame on climate change. Michael Slezak 44 - July 6 1881: Kate Shelley Saves Two Hundred Lives. American Railroad Folklore S. E. Schlosser 47 - Greenhouse gases reach new peak in 2018, U.N. says. Emma Farge 49 - 10 Great Train Robberies. David E. Israel 52 - Railroads In The Civil War. American Railroads.com 57 - Wild Weather – How to live with it. 64 - Is Global Warming Fueling Increased Wildfire Risks? Union of Concerned Scientists. 68 - An Overview of the Underground Railroad – the routes to freedom. Numerous Authors 71 - Railway Post Office Cars Sort & Distribute Mail. Rail West. 77 - Unlocking The Minds Of Your Audience - Speaking Tip # 66. Ethan Rotman 81 - Rails-with-Trails, Rails to Trails Conservancy. 82 - Mount Mitchell Adds Radio to MaximizeVisitor Safety. Linda Folland 85 - Interpreters are Political! Rod Burns 89 - “Seems Unusual,” Dr. Martha Benn Macdonald 94 -“Daughter of a Southern Railway Surgeon, Anecdotes and More” - Dr. Martha Benn Macdonald 96 - Opening Up New Mexico’s Southeast: A Visionary, Water, Town sites and a Railroad - Part 1 Mark H. Gutzman, 98 - Opening Up New Mexico’s Southeast:A Visionary, Water, Townsites and a Railroad - Part 2 Mark H. Gutzman 102
InterpNEWS is published six times a year as a FREE John Veverka & Associates publication and published as a service to the interpretive profession. If you would like to be added to our mailing list just send an e-mail to [email protected] and we’ll add you to our growing mailing list. Contributions of articles are welcomed. It you would like to have an article published in InterpNEWS let me know what you have in mind. Cover photo: Historic locomotive on the move. www.heritageinterp.com – [email protected] – SKYPE: jvainterp 3 InterpNEWS Interpreting ten historic train lines and stories.
National Geographic
1. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
“Views of the Most Interesting Scenery on the Line of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.” (Credit: SSPL/Getty Images)
The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in September 1830 marked the dawn of steam-powered rail travel. Prior to its construction, most railways were horse-drawn and used to haul freight such as coal over short distances. The 31-mile railroad linking Liverpool and Manchester was the first to carry both passengers and freight by means of steam-powered locomotives, which were designed by George Stephenson, winner of the railroad’s open design competition. Capable of traveling 30 miles per hour, Liverpool and Manchester Railway trains carried more than 500,000 passengers in the first year of operation, resulting in generous dividends to investors. Carrying cotton from the port of Liverpool to the mills of Manchester, the railroad spurred the development of England’s Industrial Revolution, and its legacy lives on as the distance between the Liverpool and Manchester’s rails chosen by Stephenson—4 feet, 8.5 inches—remains the industry’s standard gauge. InterpNEWS 4
2. Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
The “Tom Thumb,” constructed by Peter Cooper in 1829, was the first locomotive to be built in America. (Credit: George Rinhart/Getty Images)
In order to compete with the commercial boom experienced by New York Cityfollowing the construction of the Erie Canal, leaders of the rival port of Baltimore proposed a 380-mile rail line linking the city with the Ohio River in Wheeling, West Virginia. In 1827, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad became the first American company to be granted a charter to transport both passengers and freight, and it was the first American railway to employ steam locomotives to carry both passengers and freight on a regular schedule. President Andrew Jackson became the first commander in chief to ride the rails when he boarded a B&O train running from Ellicott’s Mills to Baltimore in 1833.
3. Panama Railway
Rail tracks linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans for the first time when the Panama Railway was completed in 1855. The 50-mile railroad eased the arduous journey across the Panamanian isthmus for passengers who traveled by sea between the East and West Coasts of the United States, and it became popular with the tens of thousands of prospectors seeking riches from the California Gold Rush in the years before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the United States
Railroad train following tracks beside Panama Canal. (Credit: Thomas D. Mcavoy/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images) 5 InterpNEWS The Panama Railway, which transported cargo for steamship companies as well as U.S. mail, was the most intensively used freight rail line until the 1914 opening of the Panama Canal, which followed nearly the same route across the isthmus.
4. Lincoln Funeral Train
Cleveland, Columbus & Cincinnati Railroad engine, with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln mounted on the front, 1862. The engine was one of several used to carry Lincoln’s body from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill. (Photo by Buyenlarge/Getty Images)
After departing Washington, D.C., on April 21, 1865, the black-draped train bearing the coffin of Abraham Lincoln spent nearly two weeks winding its way through 180 cities and seven states before reaching the assassinated president’s burial site in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. The need to keep Lincoln’s body preserved on the 13-day journey as hundreds of thousands of Americans paid their respects helped popularize the nascent industry of funeral embalming, and it also served as a publicity boon for George Pullman, who lent the use of his new, luxurious sleeping cars for the comfort of passengers traveling from Chicago to Springfield on the “Lincoln Special.” After Lincoln’s burial, orders took off for Pullman’s sleepers, which featured polished black walnut interiors, chandeliers and marble washstands and made overnight travel much more enticing for passengers.
5. Metropolitan Underground Railway
The railway age reached new heights when trains began to operate at unprecedented depths below the streets of London on January 10, 1863, with the inauguration of the Metropolitan Underground Railway. The world’s first subway operated on a four-mile-long line connecting Paddington Station with the city’s financial district and was a hit from its opening day when it carried more than 30,000 passengers who rode in gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives. The London Underground proved the effectiveness of mass transit and eased the horse-drawn traffic congestion that was clogging the streets of the British capital and stifling its prosperity. 6 InterpNEWS
“Metropolitan Railway, Bellmouth Praed Street” shows a GWR broad gauge train at Praed Street junction near Paddington station looking towards Edgware Road. (Credit: Public Domain)
6. Transcontinental Railroad The United States truly became united when a sledgehammer pounded a ceremonial golden spike into the ground of Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869, to complete the country’s first transcontinental railway. Constructed over the course of seven years with the Central Pacific Railroad building east from Sacramento, California, and the Union Pacific Railroad building west from Omaha, Nebraska, the transcontinental railroad slashed the travel time for the 3,000-mile cross-country The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah on May journey from months to less than a 10, 1869. (Credit: Public Domain) week.
The transcontinental railroad contributed to the rapid westward expansion of the United States, bringing with it the rise of the Wild West and wars with Native American tribes who lived on those lands. It also made it economically feasible to extract the abundant resources of the West and transport them to the markets in the East. 7 InterpNEWS
7. Trans-Siberian Railway
Trans-siberian Railway. (Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket/Getty Images)
Spanning eight time zones and 6,000 miles across treacherous sub-arctic terrain, the Trans-Siberian Railway was the longest and most-expensive railroad ever built when it was completed in 1916. By shortening from months to just eight days the time it took to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian allowed for greater government control over the world’s largest country. The project required so much money that it led to economic shortages and inadequate weaponry for the Russian military in World War Ithat contributed to the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Communists used the railroad to consolidate power during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution and to rush fresh soldiers to the battlefront during World War II. The railroad sparked eastward migration and also permitted the movement of coal, lumber and other raw materials from Siberia to Russia’s major cities.
8. Holocaust trains
“Selection” of Hungarian Jews on the ramp at the death camp Auschwitz-II (Birkenau). (Credit: Public Domain) 8 InterpNEWS
During World War II, the German National Railway oversaw the forcible deportation of Jews and other Holocaust victims from Nazi ghettos to concentration camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz where six million people were systematically murdered. Deported Jewish people were herded so tightly into freight cars and cattle cars without food or water that many died even before arriving at the concentration camps. The Nazis could not have carried out the genocide on such a horrifying scale without the use of railroads, as Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler alluded to in a January 1943 letter to the Nazi minister of transport: “If I am to wind things up quickly, I must have more trains for transports.”
9. Tōkaidō Shinkansen
Central Japan Railway Co.’s N700 series Shinkansen bullet train. (Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
Train travel entered a new era with the completion of a high-speed rail line between Tokyo and Osaka that sliced in half the travel time between the two cities. Opened just before the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the shinkansen (Japanese for “new main line”) streaked at speeds of up to 125 miles per hour. The pioneering bullet train served as a symbol of Japan’s reconstruction as a post-war industrial power and, after carrying 100 million passengers in the first three years, demonstrated that high-speed rail could be a commercial success. The enginee10ring fTrainsor the Tōka iThatdō Shink aChangednsen—which inc ltheuded d eWorlddicated tra cks, no level crossings and no sharp curves—served as a template for future high-speed rail projects around the globe. While the advent of train travel altered previously held concepts of time and distance, learn about 10 railways and train journeys that also changed the course of history.
CHRISTOPHER KLEIN InterpNEWS 9
10. Eurostar
A Eurostar train enters the Eurotunnel near Calais, France. (Credit: Antoine Antoniol/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
When a rail tunnel under the English Channel opened in 1994, Great Britain was linked to the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. Built at a cost of $16 billion, the 31-mile tunnel between Folkestone, England, and Coquelles, France, allowed Eurostar passengers to travel between London and Paris in just two-and-a-half hours and without the need for ferry transport. Nicknamed the “Chunnel,” the world’s longest undersea tunnel was named one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World by the American Society of Civil Engineers. 10 InterpNEWS
8 Things You May Not Know About Trains From the earliest steam locomotives to today’s high-speed “bullet trains,” here are eight things you may not know about the “iron horse.”
BARBARA MARANZANI
1. The term “horsepower” originated as a marketing tool.
James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine, but he did create the world’s first modern one, and developed the means of measuring its power. In the 1760s, the Scottish inventor began tinkering with an earlier version of the engine designed by Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen’s design required constant cooling down and re-heating, wasting vast amounts of energy. Watt’s innovation was to add a separate condenser, greatly improving the engine’s efficiency. A savvy salesman, Watt knew that he needed a way to market his new product. He calculated how much power a single horse working in a mill could produce over a period of time (though many scientists now believe his estimates were far too high), a figure that he dubbed “horsepower.” Using this unit of measurement, he then came up with a figure that indicated how many horses just one of his engines could replace. The sales ploy worked—we’re still using the term “horsepower” today—and his engines soon became the industry standard, leading directly to invention of the first steam locomotive in 1804.
2. America’s first steam locomotive lost a race to a horse. 11 InterpNEWS
In 1827, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became the first U.S. company granted a charter for transporting both passengers and freight. However, the company struggled to produce a steam engine capable of traveling over rough and uneven terrain, instead relying on horse-drawn trains. Enter industrialist Peter Cooper: Cooper, who not coincidentally owned extensive land holdings over the proposed route of the railroad (the value of which would grow dramatically if the railroad succeeded), offered to design and build just such an engine. On August 28, 1830, Cooper’s engine, which he called the “Tom Thumb,” was undergoing testing on B&O tracks near Baltimore when a horse-drawn train pulled up alongside it and challenged Cooper (and “Tom Thumb”) to a race. Cooper accepted, and the race was on. The steam engine quickly roared into the lead, but when a belt broke loose it was forced to retire, and the horse crossed the finish line first. However, B&O executives, impressed with the massive power and speed Cooper’s engine had proven capable of, made the decision to convert their fledgling railroad to steam. The B&O became one of the most successful railways in the United States, and Cooper (with his newly minted fortune) went on to a career as an investor and philanthropist, donating the money for New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
3. Trains helped the North win the American Civil War. Throughout the war, railroads enabled the quick transport of large numbers of soldiers and heavy artillery over long distances. One of the most significant uses of trains came after the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was able to send 20,000 badly needed replacement troops more than 1,200 miles from Washington, D.C. to Georgia (in just 11 days) to fortify Union forces—the longest and fastest troop movement of the 19th century. Control of the railroad in a region was crucial to military success, and railroads were often targets for military attacks aimed at cutting off the enemy from its supplies. Union General William Tecumseh Sherman provided particularly adept at the art of railroad sabotage. During his infamous “March” through Georgia and the Carolinas, his men destroyed thousands of miles of Confederate rails, leaving heaps of heated, twisted iron that southerners wearily referred to as “Sherman’s neckties.”
4. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination helped publicize train travel.
George Pullman, who had made a name for himself during the 1850s as a self-trained engineer and building mover in Chicago, began tinkering with the idea of a comfortable railroad “sleeping car” after a particularly uncomfortable train ride in upstate New York. By 1863, he had produced his first two models, the Pioneer and the Springfield, named for the Illinois hometown of then-President Abraham Lincoln. 12 InterpNEWS
Pullman’s cars were indeed comfortable, but they were also prohibitively expensive and few railroad companies were interested in leasing them—until President Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865. After Lincoln’s death,, a Pullman car was used as part of the cortege that travelled through several Northern cities before returning his body to Illinois. The funeral train was front-page news, and when Pullman also temporarily loaned one of his beautiful sleeper cars to a grief-stricken Mary Todd Lincoln, the publicity poured in. Two years later, he established the Pullman Palace Car Company, which would revolutionize train travel around the world. Curiously enough, when Pullman died in 1897, his replacement as head of the company was none other than Robert Todd Lincoln, the slain president’s eldest son.
5. The world’s first travel agency got its start thanks to a train trip.
CLOSE 13 InterpNEWS
In 1841, Englishman Thomas Cook, a Baptist minister, organized a train excursion for 540 parishioners to attend a temperance meeting in London. Cook negotiated a set fare for passengers, including tickets and a meal. The trip was so successful that he expanded his operations, first within the United Kingdom and then to the United States and Europe, providing passengers with comprehensive packages including transportation, accommodations and meals. In 1873, the agency, now known as Thomas Cook and Son, launched an international railway timetable, still published today, and by 1890 they were selling more than 3 million rail tickets annually.
6. The railroads also gave us standardized time zones. Britain adopted a standardized time system in 1847, but it took nearly 40 more years before the United States joined the club. America still ran on local time, which could vary from town to town (and within cities themselves), making scheduling arrival, departure, and connection times nearly impossible. After years of lobbying for standardized time, representatives from all major U.S. railways met on October 11, 1883, for what became known as the General Time Convention, where they adopted a proposal that would establish five time zones spanning the country: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. The plan originally called for a fifth time zone, the Intercontinental, which was instituted several years later and became known as Atlantic Time. At noon on November 18, the U.S. Naval Observatory sent out a telegraph signal marking 12:00 pm ET, and railway office in cities and towns across the country calibrated their clocks accordingly. However, it wasn’t until 1918 that standard time became the official law of the land, when Congress passed legislation recognizing the time zone system (and instituting a new “daylight savings time” designed to conserve resources for the World War I war effort).
7. The miles of railroad track in the United States reached its peak in 1916. It didn’t take long for railroads to catch on in the United States. The same year that the “Tom Thumb” lost its race, there were just 23 miles of railroad tracks in the United States. But within 20 years there were more than 9,000, as the U.S. government passed its first Railroad Land Grant Act, designed to attract settlers to the undeveloped parts of the country. By the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, there were 30,000 miles (more than 21,000 of them in the North), and lobbyists were clamoring for a transcontinental system across the nation. The number of railroad miles continued to climb until hitting its peak in 1916. That year there were more than 250,000 miles of track—enough to reach the moon from Earth. 14 InterpNEWS 8. Today’s bullet trains can top 300 mph.
When Englishman Richard Trevithick launched the first practical steam locomotive in 1804, it averaged less than 10 mph. Today, several high-speed rail lines are regularly travelling 30 times as fast. When Japan’s first Shinkansen or “bullet trains,” opened to coincide with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, they were capable of running at speeds in excess of 130 mph. In the 40 years since, the top speed of these trains has been steadily climbing, with a current world speed record of 361 mph. Japan is no longer alone in the high-speed rail department however: France, China and Germany all operate trains capable of similar extreme speeds, and the plans are currently underway in the United States to construct a high-speed rail line connecting the California cities of San Francisco and Anaheim.
Barbara Maranzani 15 InterpNEWS
Railroad Bridges/Train Trestles – An Overview.
American Railroads.com
Railroad bridges and train trestles can trace their roots back to the industry's beginnings in the mid-19th century. Prior to the development of iron, and later steel, early bridges were built of either stone or wood. During this time engineers designed some quite stunning, and perhaps somewhat harrowing, wooden bridges that appeared as if they might not hold a person let alone a heavy train. However, after iron and steel began to be widely employed in the latter 19th century new bridge designs were employed, the most common of these being trusses, beams, girders and spans. Today, many of the stone-arch bridges built in the mid-19th century remain in regular service due to their exceptional construction. Additionally, most are also either on the National Register or National Historic Landmarks with names like the Thomas Viaduct in Maryland or the Starrucca Viaduct in northeastern Pennsylvania.
"Southern Railway SD40-2 #3208 and Norfolk & Western GP38 #4112 with westbound WJ01 crossing the Youghiogheny River on the ex- Pittsburgh & West Virginia at Banning, Pennsylvania on October 10, 1986. The autoracks are loaded with VW Rabbits from the Volkswagen plant in New Stanton, Pennsylvania." - Jack Kuiphoff
One of the first railroad bridges to be built in the country is credited to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad which constructed its Thomas Viaduct in 1835 located at Elkridge, Maryland over the Patapsco River. The bridge gained its name for the B&O's first president, Philip E. Thomas and at the time of its construction was the world's longest masonry bridge and the first curved structure of its kind. Even today it remains the largest bridge of its type and still carries regular freight and passenger trains to this day, a testament to the strength and longevity of not only its stone construction but also the masons who built it. 16 InterpNEWS
A stalwart of the Midwest was the Chicago & North Western, which defined the classic "granger railroad." Here, F7A #4080-C leads its freight train over a bridge in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin during August, 1971.
Other famed stone bridges around the country include the Pennsylvania Railroad's Rockville Bridge near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania crossing the mighty Susquehanna River. This massive structure is 3,820 feet long and includes 48 arches. it opened in 1902 and still carries Norfolk Southern Railway freight trains and Amtrak passenger trains today. Although not built of stone it should be noted that one of the most famous arched railroad bridges in the country is the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad's Tunkhannock Viaduct. Topping out at 240 feet above the valley floor and roughly a half-mile long at 2,375 feet the railroad structure is a striking sight (made all the more impressive by Lackawanna R.R. located across the center arch).
While stone bridges are renowned for their overall beauty and extremely long lifespans they are also very expensive to build. To help keep expenses down early railroads began engineering railroad bridges at first from wood and later from iron once it became available. Some of the earliest engineered railroad bridges included differing truss designs such as the Burr arch truss of 1817 and own lattice truss of 1820. One of the most common early such designs once iron was available was the Pratt truss of 1844, patented by Thomas and Caleb Pratt, and the Warren truss of 1848. These designs can still be found on some railroad lines in the country even today (and some have or are in the process of being preserved). 17 InterpNEWS
As steel became available in the late 1800s larger and more impressive railroad bridges were constructed. Virtually all of these were of designs already on the books, simply differing variations of them such as the cantilever truss and through arch design, the latter of which is perhaps most recognized as railroad bridges go in the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad's Hell Gate Bridge which connects Queens and Manhattan over the East River. This impressive structure was completed in September 1916 and remains an important artery for Amtrak and freight trains today.
The most common railroad bridges are probably variations of the span plate girder designs. These bridges typically only span small streams, cuts or open areas and are relatively cheap and inexpensive to build. However, even some longer railroad bridges will be partially constructed of the span or girder design, it simply depends on how the engineer has drawn up the plans for a particular structure.
Railroad bridges will forever be an important component of the railroad infrastructure which allows trains to cross the country because obviously without them we could never have spanned the smallest stream to largest valley. It should also be mentioned that several bridges are nearing the end of their useful lifespan and will need to be replaced soon (or already have been). Obviously, it is necessary that these bridges are rebuilt sooner rather than later not only to keep an accident from happening but also to keep the flow of goods back and forth across the country. So, when state or federal money is being authorized to help in the building of a private, new bridge it is certainly going towards a worthy cause and is not a waste of tax dollars as these structures are very Wheeling & Lake Erie GP35 #2662, in the "Kodachrome" livery, leads a expensive to construct, even for large colorful mix of power westbound over the ex-Pittsburgh & West Virginia railroads (several million dollars per bridge bridge spanning the Monongahela River at Speers Pennsylvania on is common these days). March 27, 2012. Jack D. Kuiphoff photo. InterpNEWS 18 Scientists say creating hybrids of the extinct beasts could fix the Arctic tundra and stop greenhouse gas emissions.
By Paul Mann, The Conversation SMITHSONIAN.COM
If you managed to time travel back to Ice-Age Europe, you might be forgiven for thinking you had instead crash-landed in some desolate part of the African savannah. But the chilly temperatures and the presence of six- ton shaggy beasts with extremely long tusks would confirm you really were in the Pleistocene epoch, otherwise known as the Ice Age. You’d be visiting the mammoth steppe, an environment that stretched from Spain across Eurasia and the Bering Strait to Canada. It was covered in grass, largely devoid of trees and populated by bison, reindeer, tigers and the eponymous “woolly” mammoth.
Unfortunately, both mammoth and most of the mammoth steppe ecosystem today have long but disappeared. But a group of geneticists from Harvard are hoping to change this by cloning living elephant cells that contain a small component of synthesised mammoth DNA. They claim that reintroducing such mammoth-like creatures to Arctic tundra environments could help stop the release of greenhouse gases from the ground and reduce future emissions as temperatures rise due to climate change. While this might sound like a far-fetched idea, scientists have actually been experimenting with something similar for over 20 years.
Arctic lands are covered by areas of ground known as permafrost that have been frozen since the Pleistocene. Permafrost contains vast amounts of carbon from dead plant life that is locked away by the extremely cold temperatures. The amount of carbon in these frozen stores is estimated to be about twice as much as that currently in the atmosphere. If it thaws out, microbes will break down soil organic material to release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. 19 InterpNEWS
As a result, permafrost and the associated carbon pools have been likened to “sleeping giants” in our climate system: If they wake up, the resulting greenhouse gas emissions would raise global temperatures even further than currently projected, causing even greater global climate change (a process known as positive feedback). This is where our shaggy friends may come in. Mammoths and other large herbivores of the Pleistocene continually trampled mosses and shrubs, uprooting trees and disturbing the landscape. In this way, they inadvertently acted as natural geoengineers, maintaining highly productive steppe landscapes full of grasses, herbs and no trees.
Bringing mammoth-like creatures back to the tundra could, in theory, help recreate the steppe ecosystem more widely. Because grass absorbs less sunlight than trees, this would cause the ground to absorb less heat and in turn keep the carbon pools and their greenhouse gases on ice for longer. Large numbers of the animals would also trample snow cover, stopping it from acting like insulation for the ground and allowing the permafrost to feel the effects of the bitter Arctic winters. Again, this would, in theory, keep the ground colder for longer.
This form of mammoth de-extinction and reintroduction could therefore promote grasslands and simultaneously slow the thawing of these frozen soils. So surely it’s worth it?
Can Bringing Back Mammoths Help Stop Climate Change?
Scientists say creating hybrids of the extinct beasts could fix the Arctic tundra and stop greenhouse gas emissions. Founded by Russian geophysicist Sergei Zimov, the 16 square-kilometer park is filled with around 100 animals roaming free including bison, musk ox, moose, yaks, horses and reindeer. The park is designed to determine if the animals can disturb and fertilize the current ecosystem where little grows into highly productive pastures, as well as slowing or even reversing permafrost thaw.
I’ve been privileged to have visited the park a number of times, and have been amazed at the effort required to undertake such “big science” in this wilderness. We travelled for many hours along the massive Kolyma River to collect reindeer from the Arctic coast, and transported them by small boats to the park – no mean feat in these regions. Adding just another few animals to the experiment was exhausting. But it was totally exhilarating and made me question whether this was such a crazy idea after all.
The limited financial and personnel available to the park has made building and monitoring the project’s success difficult. Early evidence with extant species such as musk ox, reindeer and horse suggests animal presence is changing the park landscape structure and cooling the ground. 20 InterpNEWS
Recently, the park’s grasslands have been shown to reflect more sunlight than the surrounding larch forest, which will reduce the heat penetrating the ground. Scientists have also taken 300 meter-long ground samples from across the landscape to measure the carbon storage in the park, and work out if it differs from that of the surrounding, non-disturbed landscape.
Much of the work relies on public crowdfunding and the park is now seeking money to fill the park with temperature sensors and light sensors. It has already installed a 35-meter high flux tower that continually monitors methane, carbon dioxide and temperature in the park’s atmosphere. Collecting convincing evidence to back up the theory clearly takes time and huge effort, but we should know soon if this bold plan could make a realistic solution to climate change.
Some scientists and conservationists have questioned whether resurrecting the mammoth is really worth it, comparing the high costs with the relative lack of funding for saving the world’s elephants. A key question is whether we need mammoth specifically to make these projects work. Could we not simply knock down trees manually, and then use existing animals? I guess this may depend on whether we decide to expand such an approach across far greater swathes of the Arctic, where human intervention will be costly or even near impossible in places.
Yet tackling global climate change needs ambitious, novel and often epic solutions, both to reduce emissions and to minimize the chance positive feedback from the Arctic that may cause untold damage to our climate system. I don’t know if bringing the mammoth back is the right approach, but at the moment we lack a decent solution for keeping the giant Arctic carbon deposits in the ground.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Paul Mann, Senior Lecturer, Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle 21 InterpNEWS First evidence of feathered polar dinosaurs found.
Gondwana Research.
A cache of 118 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur and bird feathers has been recovered from an ancient lake deposit that once lay beyond the southern polar circle.
Feathered dinosaur fossils are famous, but known from a handful of localities worldwide. Examples from the Southern Hemisphere are especially rare, and mainly include only isolated feathers.
An international team of scientists has analyzed a collection of 10 such fossil feathers found in Australia, which reveal an unexpected diversity of tufted hair-like ‘proto-feathers’ from meat-eating dinosaurs, together with downy body feathers, and wing feathers from primitive birds that would have been used for flight.
Uniquely, the fossil feathers from Australia were all entombed in fine muddy sediments that accumulated at the bottom of a shallow lake close to the South Pole during the Age of Dinosaurs. “Dinosaur skeletons and even the fragile Yet, to date, no directly attributable integumentary remains have been discovered to show that dinosaurs used feathers to survive in extreme polar habitats”, said Dr Benjamin Kear from Uppsala University in Sweden, a leading author on the study. “These Australian fossil feathers are therefore highly significant because they came from dinosaurs and small birds that were living in a seasonally very cold environment with months of polar darkness every year”.
The fossil feathers were discovered in the Koonwarra Fish Beds Geological Reserve, which is a heritage listed site 145 km southeast of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. “Fossil feathers have been known from Koonwarra since the early 1960s, and were recognized as evidence of ancient birds, but have otherwise received very little scientific attention. Our study is thus the first to comprehensively document these remains, which include new specimens that were examined using cutting-edge technologies”, said Dr Thomas Rich of the Melbourne Museum in Australia, who has led numerous expeditions to the Koonwarra locality. 22 InterpNEWS
A suite of advanced microscopic and spectroscopic techniques was employed to determine the anatomy and preservation of the Koonwarra fossil dinosaur and bird feathers.
“The Koonwarra feathers are preserved in incredible detail”, said fossil bird expert Professor Patricia Vickers- Rich of Monash University and the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
“There are even tiny filament-like structures that would have ‘zipped’ the feather vanes together, just as in the flight feathers of modern birds”.
However, unlike the structurally complex feathers of birds today, which are characterized by interlocking branches called barbs and barbules, different kinds of small dinosaurs had coverings that comprised much more simpler hair-like ‘proto-feathers’.
“Dinosaur ‘proto-feathers’ would have been used for insulation”, said Dr Martin Kundrát, of Pavol Jozef Safarik University in Slovakia, a leading author on the study. “The discovery of ‘proto-feathers’ at Koonwarra therefore suggests that fluffy feather coats might have helped small dinosaurs keep warm in ancient polar habitats”.
Microscopic remains of possible melanosomes cellular structures that contain colour pigments were also detected on several of the fossil feathers found at Koonwarra.
These traces occurred across the uniformly dark feather surfaces, as well as in distinct bands that might represent original patterning from the polar dinosaurs and birds. Melanic residues have been reported on fossil feathers from elsewhere around the world, and are widely acknowledged as indicators of dinosaur colouration.
The densely packed fossil melanosomes occurring on the Koonwarra feathers could suggest dark colours that perhaps assisted in camouflage, visual communication, and/or heat absorbance in cold polar climates.
Possible preservation of biomolecules was also assessed, but proved to be too degraded, and were apparently lost during weathering of the rock.
The Koonwarra fossil feathers provide the first record of dinosaur integument from the ancient polar regions, and hint what was once a global distribution of feathered dinosaurs and early birds. Some of the fossil feathers found at Koonwarra are on display in the ‘600 Million Years’ exhibition at the Melbourne Museum in Australia.
Kundrát, M., Rich, T. H., Lindgren, J., Sjövall, P., Vickers-Rich, P., Chiappe, L. M. & Kear, B. P. (in press). A polar dinosaur feather assemblage from Australia. Gondwana Research. InterpNEWS 23 Climate change is contributing to California’s fires.
B Y ALEJANDRA BORUNDA NATIONAL GEO GRAPHIC
CALIFORNIA IS BURNING .
The dangerous fires that have broken out across the state show no signs of stopping, driven by record powerful seasonal winds that are forcing hundreds of thousands of residents from their homes as the flames roar across hilltops and through vineyards. The biggest of them, the Kinkaid Fire in Northern California, is not under control yet and is expected to grow as winds pick up later in the week.
The most disastrous fires in California often occur in the fall. The long, dry summers transform vegetation into the perfect fuel for the annual winds that whip across the landscape.
Frequent fires are part of California’s natural state. Many of its ecosystems, from the chaparral of Southern California to the northern pine forests, evolved to burn frequently. But since the 1980s, the size and ferocity of the fires that sweep across the state have trended upward: Fifteen of the 20 largest fires in California history have occurred since 2000. And since the 1970s, the amount of area burned in the state has increased by a factor of five.
Climate change’s stamp is evident in many of the fires, scientists say, primarily because hotter air means drier plants, which burn more readily.
Fuelling the fires Over the past century, California has warmed by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit, more than the global average of about one degree Fahrenheit. Hotter air draws water out of plants and soils more efficiently than cool, leaving the trees, shrubs, and rolling grasslands of the state dry and primed to burn.
Crucially, that effect increases exponentially with every degree of warming, explains Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. That means that today’s hotter, climate-changed air is much more effective at drying vegetation to a crackle than it was 100 years ago.
“All else being equal, in a warmer world, vegetation is going to be drier, even in a place like California where vegetation is usually dry by autumn. You can still make it drier,” says Swain. That’s exactly what scientists have developed over the past few decades. 24 InterpNEWS
Summertime air temperatures in California have warmed by over 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s, and that summer warming is particularly impactful, new research shows. The area burned across California during the summertime is about eight times higher today than it was only in the 1970s.
The major fires that have devastated the state in the past few years, though, have occurred in the fall, at the end of long, hot summers that sucked the wetness out of trees, shrubs, and other burnable material, but before the winter rains have kicked in.
Overall, the fire season—the time before the winter rains dampen the vegetation—has lengthened by 75 days over the past decades, according to CalFire.
Some of that happens early, in the spring. There’s less and less snow accumulating in the high mountains of California as the climate warms, and any snow that does fall is melting away earlier. As spring comes sooner, the dry season extends, leaving vegetation vulnerable to fire sooner in the season. In some years—often the ones with the most devastating fires—the dry season extends deep into autumn, too.
“Usually—or, I don't want to even say usually anymore because things are changing so fast—we get some rains around Halloween that wet things down,” says Faith Kearns, a scientist at University of California Institute for Water Resources in Oakland. Every day those rains don’t come is a day when fires can spark and spread. And in recent years, those rains haven’t kicked in until November, or even December.
But unlike earlier springs, delays in the autumn rains don’t yet appear to be part of a longer-term trend in most of the state. The biggest climate-induced changes to the precipitation cycle so far seem to be about variability: when it rains, it rains more intensely, but when it’s dry, the droughts are worse. And in the future, the dry season is predicted to stretch longer into the fall. reach 70 or 80 miles per hour. If the speeding winds pass over a flame, they can spread it far and wide, and fast—which is exactly what happened during 2018’s Camp Fire, 2017’s Thomas Fire, and many more. 25 InterpNEWS
A problem with wind
Climate change may have already affected the characteristic autumn winds that have so often contributed to spreading fires across large swaths of the state. In the fall and winter, east-to-west (“offshore”) winds often flow across the state, with warm, dry air cascading down the western side of big mountain ranges like the Sierras. As the air flows downwards, it can get channeled into canyons or valleys, speeding as it falls. Gusts can reach 70 or 80 miles per hour. If the speeding winds pass over a flame, they can spread it far and wide, and fast—which is exactly what happened during 2018’s Camp Fire, 2017’s Thomas Fire, and many more.
There’s some evidence that climate change may actually make some of those wind patterns, like southern California’s Santa Ana winds, less frequent in the future. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be a respite. The intensity is likely to stay strong in the winter, and in a drier, hotter future, the outcome could be fires that start later in the season but burn for longer.
Scientists are working hard to understand exactly how rain, snow, and winds will change—but the warming and drying patterns are clear.
“It just gets harder to predict,” says Kearns. “We used to have a much more reliable rainy season and fire season, and a lot of variables are just shifting at the moment.” 26 InterpNEWS
Preserving Railroad History What's being done to preserve railroads and their landmarks, and what can you do?
By John Gruber |
Preservation of former railroad stations takes many forms, from visitor centers and museums to offices and restaurants. Ciddici’s Pizza of Albany, Oregon, retains most of the original exterior features of the Oregon Electric structure, especially the “OER” logo. Scott Lothes
We all talk about railroad preservation. We all want to be sure our favorite locomotives, depots, sections of track, rights-of-way, or what have you continue to be available for people to enjoy and learn from well into the future. What better time to talk about railroad preservation than in May, declared National Preservation Month by the National Trust for Historic Preservation?
The Center for Railroad Photography & Art has focused attention on the topic in its online feature, "Railroad Preservation in a Nutshell." Others may have other ways to recognize our heritage. But for all of those interested in any facet of railroads and railroad history, preservation is an integral part of railroad activity. "Railroad Preservation in a Nutshell" honors John H. White Jr., a history professor at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, who in 1990 retired from the Smithsonian Institution as its curator of transportation. His thirteen books on early locomotives and passenger and freight cars - a signal achievement in the written history of America's industries, not just railroads - are invaluable for preservationists. His many articles include, most recently, "Elisha Talbott and the Railway Age" in Chicago History (Winter 2010).
Fortunately, we railroad enthusiasts are not alone in our quest for preservation. It is also the policy of the U.S. government, proclaimed in the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which is a good model for us. It declares that "the historical and cultural foundations of the nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the American people." The law also suggests that because of growth in urban centers, highways, and residential, commercial, and industrial developments, and because governmental and private historic preservation programs are inadequate, the federal government needs to accelerate its role in preservation. Railroaders should heed the admonition to preserve. The cover of Trains magazine's special issue, Historic Trains Today, provides a good example. It depicts the colorful, wood-burning steam locomotive, the Eureka, already listed on the National Register of Historic Places, America's official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation. The Eureka operates on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, itself a national historic landmark in Colorado. 27 InterpNEWS
The locomotive John Bull, donated by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1884, was the Smithsonian Institution’s first technology exhibit. John Gruber Collection
Nearly every element of railroad infrastructure, individually or collectively, has been listed on the register: 1,500 stations or depots, 525 properties in historic districts, 60 locomotives, 12 roundhouses, four enginehouses, 12 hotels, and 395 engineering features such as bridges and tunnels. In addition, 19 railroad corridors are on the register.
The story of American railroading begins in 1795 with a small gravity line in Boston used on Beacon Hill to remove dirt from the excavation for the commonwealth's capitol building or statehouse. Ever since, railroads have captivated the public's imagination, enough so that preservation soon got underway. To explain railroad preservation, the Center selected for its Web site technical and historical landmarks that illustrate the connections among preservation, popular culture, and railroads. 28 InterpNEWS Who Invented the Railroad? WORLD FACTS
The Stephensons’ locomotive ws referred to as the ‘rocket’ as it could move loads at a speed of 36 miles per hour.
The development of railroad is considered one of the most important catalysts of the Industrial Revolution. The railroad has evolved from what it was then to what it is today due to the involvement of many people. To appreciate the benefits the railroad has brought to many people from different parts of the world, it is necessary to acknowledge the person who invented it.
Who Invented the Railroad? George Stephenson invented the first steam locomotive in Great Britain. He used the knowledge of steam technology to construct the first locomotive. Therefore, he is credited for the invention of the first railroad. The first locomotive engines that were used in the United States were acquired from George Stephenson Works. The railroads and locomotives in America were imported from Great Britain.
Early Life and Career George Stephenson was born on June 9, 1781, near Newcastle, to a father who worked as an engineman in a coal mine.
His father’s profession could have possibly had an impact on Stephenson’s successful invention. Stephenson began working at the mine where his father worked as a teenager. He only learned how to write and read during his free time from the coal mine. At the mine, Stephenson gained experience in operating steam engines and also worked in many other coalmines situated in northeast England and Scotland.
In 1814, Stephenson invented a locomotive and a safety lamp that was used to make coal mining easier. In 1821, Stephenson was appointed as an engineer for the Stockton and Darlington railway. He was also appointed as the chief engineer during the construction of the Liverpool to Manchester railway line.
Further Developments In 1829, a competition known as the Rainhill Trials were held by the Liverpool & Manchester Railway with the purpose of acquiring the best locomotive to move heavy loads over long distances. A number of people participated in the completion which attracted over a thousand spectators. Stephenson, and his son George, participated in the Rainhill Trials. The Stephensons' locomotive, which was referred to as the ‘Rocket’, emerged the winner of the competition. The 'Rocket’ managed to move loads at a speed of 36 miles per hour. 29 InterpNEWS
The success of the ’rocket’ stimulated the laying up of railway lines in different parts of the country. From the works of Stephenson, the railroad and the railway development grew to what it is today. The people who worked in the industry most definitely acquired their inspiration from the works of Stephenson.
The development of the railroads was not fully supported. Some people, such as the opposition businessmen and religious leaders were against the development. However, their pleas for the government to abandon the development were silenced when the benefits of the railroad became evident to all people.
Significance of the Invention of the Railroad
The invention of the railroad benefited countries that embraced it. The Industrial Revolution, which is known to have taken off first in Great Britain, was boosted by the invention of the railroad.
The industrial revolution would not have been successful if the railroad was not invented. The railroad came in handy in transporting manufactured goods to the markets, raw materials to the industries, and industrial workers to their workplace.
The countries that embraced the railroad after Great Britain, such as the United States, experienced a number of social, economic, and political changes. In America, the importation of the Railroad from Britain promoted the development of other infrastructures such as depots, bridges, and roads that connect to the railroads. 30 InterpNEWS
Dreams of a Transcontinental Railroad
BY HISTORY.COM EDITORS
America’s first steam locomotive made its debut in 1830, and over the next two decades, railroad tracks linked many cities on the East Coast. By 1850, some 9,000 miles of track had been laid east of the Missouri River. During that same period, the first settlers began to move westward across the United States; this trend increased dramatically after the discovery of gold in California in 1849. The overland journey–across mountains, plains, rivers and deserts–was risky and difficult, and many westward migrants instead chose to travel by sea, taking the six-month route around Cape Horn at the tip of South America, or risking yellow fever and other diseases by crossing the Isthmus of Panama and traveling via ship to San Francisco. Did you know? Before the building of the Transcontinental Railroad, it cost nearly $1,000 dollars to travel across the country. After the railroad was completed, the price dropped to $150 dollars. In 1845, the New York entrepreneur Asa Whitney presented a resolution in Congress proposing the federal funding of a railroad that would stretch to the Pacific. Lobbying efforts over the next several years failed due to growing sectionalism in Congress, but the idea remained a potent one. In 1860, a young engineer named Theodore Judah identified the infamous Donner Pass in northern California (where a group of westward emigrants had become trapped in 1846) as an ideal location for constructing a railroad through the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains. By 1861, Judah had enlisted a group of investors in Sacramento to form the Central Pacific Railroad Company. He then headed to Washington, where he was able to convince congressional leaders as well as President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Pacific Railroad Act into law the following year. Two Competing Companies: The Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railroad The Pacific Railroad Act stipulated that the Central Pacific Railroad Company would start building in Sacramento and continue east across the Sierra Nevada, while a second company, the Union Pacific Railroad, would build westward from the Missouri River, near the Iowa-Nebraska border. The two lines of track would meet in the middle (the bill did not designate an exact location) and each company would receive 6,400 acres of land (later doubled to 12,800) and $48,000 in government bonds for every mile of track built. From the beginning, then, the building of the transcontinental railroad was set up in terms of a competition between the two companies. In the West, the Central Pacific would be dominated by the “Big Four”–Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington and Mark Hopkins. All were ambitious businessmen with no prior experience with railroads, engineering or construction. 31 InterpNEWS
They borrowed heavily to finance the project, and exploited legal loopholes to get the most possible funds from the government for their planned track construction. Disillusioned with his partners, Judah planned to recruit new investors to buy them out, but he caught yellow fever while crossing the Isthmus of Panama on his way east and died in November 1863, soon after the Central Pacific had spiked its first rails to ties in Sacramento. Meanwhile, in Omaha, Dr. Thomas Durant had illegally achieved a controlling interest in the Union Pacific Railroad Company, giving him complete authority over the project.
Durant would also illegally set up a company called Crédit Mobilier, which guaranteed him and other investors risk-free profits from the railroad’s construction.) Though the Union Pacific celebrated its own launch in early December 1863, little would be completed until the end of the Civil War in 1865. Danger Ahead: Building the Transcontinental Railroad
After General Grenville Dodge, a hero of the Union Army, took control as chief engineer, the Union Pacific finally began to move westward in May 1866. The company suffered bloody attacks on its workers by Native Americans–including members of the Sioux, Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes– who were understandably threatened by the progress of the white man and his “iron horse” across their native lands. Still, the Union Pacific moved relatively quickly across the plains, compared to the slow progress of their rival company through the Sierra.
Ramshackle settlements popped up wherever the railroad went, turning into hotbeds of drinking, gambling, prostitution and violence and producing the enduring mythology of the “Wild West.” In 1865, after struggling with retaining workers due to the difficulty of the labor, Charles Crocker (who was in charge of construction for the Central Pacific) began hiring Chinese laborers. By that time, some 50,000 Chinese immigrants were living on the West Coast, many having arrived during the Gold Rush. This was controversial at the time, as the Chinese were considered an inferior race due to pervasive racism. 32 InterpNEWS
The Chinese laborers proved to be tireless workers, and Crocker hired more of them; some 14,000 were toiling under brutal working conditions in the Sierra Nevada by early 1867. (By contrast, the work force of the Union Pacific was mainly Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans.) To blast through the mountains, the Central Pacific built huge wooden trestles on the western slopes and used gunpowder and nitroglycerine to blast tunnels through the granite. Driving Toward The Last Spike
By the summer of 1867, the Union Pacific was in Wyoming, having covered nearly four times as much ground as the Central Pacific. The Central Pacific broke through the mountains in late June, however, and the hard part was finally behind them. Both companies then headed towards Salt Lake City, cutting many corners (including building shoddy bridges or sections of track that would have to be rebuilt later) in their race to get ahead. By early 1869, the companies were working only miles from each other, and in March the newly inaugurated President Ulysses S. Grant announced he would withhold federal funds until the two railroad companies agreed on a meeting point. They decided on Promontory Summit, north of the Great Salt Lake; some 690 track-miles from Sacramento and 1,086 from Omaha. On May 10, after several delays, a crowd of workers and dignitaries watched as the final spike was driven linking the Central Pacific and Union Pacific in the “Golden Spike Ceremony.”
The golden spike was made of 17.6-karat gold and was a gift of David Hewes, a San Francisco contractor and friend of “Big Four” member Leland Stanford. During the ceremony, Stanford took the first swing at the spike, but accidentally struck the tie instead. His attempt was followed by Union Pacific Thomas Durant’s. Durant swung and missed – likely because of a hangover he was suffering from the previous evening’s party in Ogden. A railroad worker ultimately drove the final spike at 12:47 p.m. on May 10, 1869. Telegraph cables immediately went out to President Grant and around the country with the news that the transcontinental railroad had been completed. 33 InterpNEWS
The golden spike was removed after the ceremony and replaced with traditional iron spikes. Three other ties—one of gold, one of silver and gold, and one of silver, were also presented at the ceremony. The original golden spike is now part of the collection of Stanford University, which was founded by Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane, in 1885 in memory of their only son.
Impact on The United States
The building of the transcontinental railroad opened up the American West to more rapid development. With the completion of the track, the travel time for making the 3,000-mile journey across the United States was cut from a matter of months to under a week. Connecting the two American coasts made the economic export of Western resources to Eastern markets easier than ever before. The railroad also facilitated westward expansion, escalating conflicts between Native American tribes and settlers who now had easier access to new territories. 34 InterpNEWS Climate Change and Agriculture
A Perfect Storm in Farm Country
Union of Concerned Scientists
As our climate continues to heat up and the impacts of that warming grow more frequent and severe, farmers and farm communities around the world will be increasingly challenged. And US farmers won’t be spared the damage that climate change is already beginning to inflict.
In fact, the industrial model that dominates our nation’s agriculture—a model that neglects soils, reduces diversity, and relies too heavily on fertilizers and pesticides—makes US farms susceptible to climate impacts in several ways.
The combination of advancing climate change and an already-vulnerable industrial system is a “perfect storm” that threatens farmers’ livelihoods and our food supply. The good news is that there are tools—in the form of science-based farming practices—that can buffer farmers from climate damage and help make their operations more resilient and sustainable for the long term. But farmers face many obstacles to changing practices, so it’s critical that policymakers shift federal agriculture investments to support and accelerate this transition.
I. How climate change will challenge farmers
Various authoritative reports, most notably the multiagency 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment, have reviewed what science is telling US farmers to expect in coming decades—and it’s not pretty.
Climate change trends 35 InterpNEWS
Changing precipitation patterns.
Rainfall patterns have already begun shifting across the country, and such changes are expected to intensify over the coming years. This is likely to mean more intense periods of heavy rain and longer dry periods, even within the same regions.
Projected increase in maximum daily precipitation between now and 2090 according to the RCP 8.5 and RCP 4.5 climate change scenarios. Intense rainfall events, and the flooding that often follows them, will become more common in most of the contiguous US. Map source: EPA report
Changing temperature patterns. Rising average temperatures, more extreme heat throughout the year, fewer sufficiently cool days during the winter, and more frequent cold-season thaws will likely affect farmers in all regions.
Projected increases in number of days over 90°F between now and 2090 according to two climate change scenarios. Even in the less severe RCP 4.5 scenario, there will be many more 90-degree days in important farm states such as Iowa, Missouri and Kansas. Map source: EPA report. 36 InterpNEWS
Climate change impacts
Floods. We’ve already seen an increase in flooding in many agricultural regions of the country, including the Midwest, the Southern Plains, and California. Sea level rise is also ratcheting up the frequency and intensity of flooding on farms in coastal regions. These costly floods devastate crops and livestock, accelerate soil erosion, pollute water, and damage roads, bridges, schools, and other infrastructure.
Droughts. Too little water can be just as damaging as too much. Severe droughts have taken a heavy toll on crops, livestock, and farmers in many parts of the country, most notably California, the Great Plains, and the Midwest, over the past decade—and science tells us that rising temperatures will likely make such droughts even worse, depleting water supplies and, in some cases, spurring destructive wildfires.
Changes in crop and livestock viability. Farmers choose crop varieties and animal breeds that are well suited to local conditions. As those conditions shift rapidly over the coming decades, many farmers will be forced to rethink some of their choices—which can mean making new capital investments, finding new markets, and learning new practices.
New pests, pathogens, and weed problems. Just as farmers will need to find new crops, livestock, and practices, they will have to cope with new threats. An insect or weed that couldn’t thrive north of Texas in decades past may find Iowa a perfect fit going forward—and farmers will have to adapt.
In this 2013 photo, soybeans show the effect of drought near Navasota, TX. Photo: Bob Nichols, USDA/CC BY 2.0 (Flickr)
Industrial amplifiers
Degraded soils. Typical monoculture cropping systems leave soil bare for much of the year, rely on synthetic fertilizer, and plow fields regularly. These practices leave soils low in organic matter and prevent formation of deep, complex root systems. 37 InterpNEWS
Among the results: reduced water-holding capacity (which worsens drought impacts), and increased vulnerability to erosion and water pollution (which worsens flood impacts).
Simplified landscapes. Industrial agriculture treats the farm as a crop factory rather than a managed ecosystem, with minimal biodiversity over wide areas of land. This lack of diversity in farming operations exposes farmers to greater risk and amplifies climate impacts such as changes in crop viability and encroaching pests.
Intensive inputs. The industrial farm’s heavy reliance on fertilizers and pesticides may become even more costly to struggling farmers as climate impacts accelerate soil erosion and increase pest problems. Heavy use of such chemicals will also increase the pollution burden faced by downstream communities as flooding increases. Farmers may also increase irrigation in response to rising temperature extremes and drought, further depleting precious water supplies.
A family surveys their flooded farm and corn fields in Wever, Iowa, 2012. Photo: Russ Munn/AgStock
What it will mean
How will these industrially amplified climate change impacts affect people—farmers, residents of rural communities, and all of us who rely on the food farmers produce? In a variety of ways:
- As summer heat intensifies, farmers and farm workers will face increasingly grueling and potentially unsafe working conditions.
- Accelerating crop failures and livestock losses will make farmers with access to insurance or disaster relief programs more reliant on those taxpayer-funded supports, while those without sufficient safety nets will face additional challenges. Failing farms and stagnating farm profits will also increase suffering in many rural communities. 38 InterpNEWS
- Farming communities will be among the first to feel the ways extreme weather exacerbates agriculture’s impacts on water resources—with nearby water supplies polluted or depleted before the damage extends to drinking water and fisheries far downstream. Nationwide, reductions to agricultural productivity or sudden losses of crops or livestock will likely have ripple effects, including:
II. Meeting the challenge
Business as usual won’t protect the future of our food supply—or the well-being of the farmers and communities that produce it. We need to take concrete steps to prepare for climate impacts on agriculture and to reduce both their severity and our vulnerability to them.
We also need to remember that climate change risks aren’t distributed equally—and neither are the pathways to climate adaptation. Public policies and institutional practices have long denied communities of color, low- income groups, and tribal communities access to critical resources and decision-making processes, leaving them with fewer options and more risk in the face of climate impacts. So it’s crucial to ensure that these communities have a voice in shaping our adaptation strategies.
Helping farm communities manage severe impacts
When climate impacts strike, support systems need to be in place to help communities cope and recover:
Shelters and other facilities to provide housing, food, first aid, and other immediate needs for people whose lives have been disrupted or displaced by floods, droughts, fires, or storms.
Investment in local capacity and infrastructure to support people harmed by climate impacts as they rethink or rebuild their lives and businesses. This includes not only infrastructure for communication, transportation, water and sanitation, but also training in new practices and opportunities that build adaptive capacity.
Reducing damage by making farms more resilient
Our farms and farm communities don’t have to be sitting ducks for climate impacts. Forward-looking farmers and scientists are finding new, climate-resilient ways to produce our food:
Build healthier, “spongier” soils through practices—such as planting cover crops and deep-rooted perennials—that increase soil’s capacity to soak up heavy rainfall and hold water for dry periods;
Make farms stronger by redesigning them as diverse agroecosystems—incorporating trees and native perennials, reducing dependence on fertilizers and pesticides, and reintegrating crops and livestock;
Develop new crop varieties, livestock breeds, and farm practices specifically designed to help farmers adapt to evolving climate realities.
Addressing the root of the problem 39 InterpNEWS
Fortunately, our farm and food system can be an important part of the solution, both by reducing emissions at every stage of the food production and distribution process, and by building agroecosystems that can sequester (store) more carbon.
The Harvest Wind Farm near Elkton, MI. Photo: Waterbugs174/Creative Commons (Flickr).
III. Policy recommendations
What policy levers can we pull to help get these solutions off the ground?
Invest in public research. Publicly funded research provides farmers with the tools and information they need to maximize efficiency and productivity. With climate change, farmers need science more than ever, yet public funding for research that can help them cope has been in short supply. Agroecology research—which produces the kind of long-term, literally root-deep solutions that can help farms stay viable for generations—has been particularly underfunded.
Expand conservation programs in the federal farm bill that make it easier for farmers to adopt sustainable practices that will make their farms more climate-resilient. We need to boost their funding and their impact.
Strengthen safety nets (and make them drivers of resilience). Regardless of what science and forward- looking policy can do, farms across the country will be challenged—and some more than others. It’s essential that we provide farm families and communities with the support they need to survive the climate crisis and become more resilient. This includes better crop insurance programs, health care access for farmers and farm workers, and effective, responsive disaster relief programs.
Achieve net zero emissions. We need to prioritize policies to drastically reduce our climate emissions and give us a chance of getting to net zero ASAP. Reversing the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement would be a good start, but there is much more we can do. 40 InterpNEWS What’s in a Name?
Written by Matthew Parkes, Assistant Keeper, National Museum Ireland
Re-printed with permission of the Geological Curators’ Group (contact email: [email protected]).
I am a geological curator and proud of it. As a curator, I work in a museum and I look after ‘stuff’! My job happens to be geological collections because that is what I trained for and what I understand and know intimately from years of working with them. My curator colleagues look after other things, each with their own expertise in different collections. There, in plain language that anyone should be able to understand is a definition of what the term curator means.
I get very annoyed with the misappropriation of the term ‘curator’ and even worse, the abuse it suffers. The streets and the clubs and the festivals and cultural spaces are clearly filled with wannabee curators. I can only assume that they adopt a ‘curator’ cloak for the authenticity it presents. I believe the public generally hold museum curators as a neutral, trustworthy source they can rely on.
Selecting a few tunes to be played together is being a DJ, not ‘curating’ a concert. Getting a few bands together again for an outdoor music gig is not ‘curating’ a festival, however legendary they may be. The range of artistic, cultural or literary events and even culinary things that are now ‘curated’ is so horrendous that I have to blot them out of my mind.
Are we losing an understanding and respect for the extensive expertise that curators have? This is Leicester’s New Walk Museum – where the specialist curators were made redundant in 2019. © Matthew Parkes. 41 InterpNEWS
Broadening this discussion a little (well strictly speaking, I guess it’s more of a monologue), how did we end up with such a plethora of job titles for curators. Of course, there is more to it – my own official title is Assistant Keeper Grade 1. Traditionally the Keeper was in charge of a department and assistant keepers had their specialisations to look after. Perhaps it seemed anachronistic when new titles started popping up and perhaps Collections Manager or Collections Assistant seemed exciting?! The specific roles that developed had then to have their own title to attract people- Conservator, Documentation Officer, Collections Interpreter, or such like. Add ‘Assistant’ to the end of any of these titles and you can pay less and still get well-qualified people such is the attraction of working in a museum. Do we really need such a proliferation of names for essentially the one role of a curator?
In my thinking, a geological curator should be capable of turning their hands to a wide range of activities related to the collections they care for. Some basic preparation of fossils; straightforward cleaning, consolidation, and conservation of specimens; a full range of documentation skills; public engagement and educational activities; publishing authoritative research; investigating collection histories and media activities should all be potential activities a geological curator could be involved in. Often this will depend on the size of the museum and the range of staff employed to cover all these areas. The problem as I see it, is the larger the museum and the more focused each curator becomes, the more silos develop and exclusion from a fuller, more rewarding role becomes accepted. Even if 90% of the time is highly focused on curating specific collections, each curator should be given 10% to flap their wings and do some public engagement activities, or research, or media work, or whatever will keep them fulfilled within the whole team.
GCG members having fun whilst learning new techniques on a casting and moulding workshop. Specialised training in different aspects of our roles often comes from within our ranks. © Matthew Parkes. 42 InterpNEWS
I do not follow the idea made in some larger museums of having Researchers who have nothing to do with collections and Collections Managers who are not allowed to research the very collections they care for. Maybe for very senior, very expert people with a curating career under their belts it may be a luxury to allow them to complete research projects, but surely the collections-spade work can still be done through training-in a younger generation under direction? But as a general approach to running a geological or natural science museum it must surely be counter-productive.
If you ever want to assess the likelihood of political or other events, you can be sure the bookies will have an opinion, translated into a number. If you want to get a measure of how significant anyone outside of museums views all these different job titles, an interesting measure is looking at the different employments in categorised lists for things like insurance. I am merely classed as a ‘museum attendant’ as far as my insurance company is concerned and that is the only category for anyone working in a museum!
So, to try and descend from my soapbox (well it is my last opportunity as Chair of GCG) I want to promote the Geological Curators’ Group as the group that brings all our varied roles and diverse job titles together in an umbrella of geological curators. Without prejudice, GCG welcomes anyone working or interested in geological collections and tries to build the profession through providing a network, as well as training and support. If you are reading this but are not a member, then please seriously consider joining. The more of us there are, the better we can champion the collections and the curators who understand them best, against the myriad of threats. Make no mistake, geological collections are seriously under threat everywhere.
And finally, coming up on the 10th and 11th December is our annual conference and AGM titled ‘How can we make our precious collections available to researchers?’. We are looking for a broad dialogue in order for curators to better understand researchers’ needs and for researchers to recognise the immeasurable value of collections available to them in our museums. We also want researchers to appreciate their responsibilities to secure important material they collect and how easy that can be if they engage with curators. So be a part of this meeting if you can. Offer a talk or a poster on a case study from your own experience. And it can be about a bad experience as well as a good one! To conclude, the final task for the GCG Chair is to make an award of the GCG’s own Brighton Medal for outstanding service to geology in museums. This year’s recipient is truly a deserving one, but you will have to come along to the Sedgwick Museum on the 10th December to find out who it is. Hope to see you there!
Researcher Rob Gandola used a cat-scan in a hospital to find first evidence of salt glands in a fossil crocodile skull – a great example of innovative research on collections. The AGM Seminar is a good chance to tell your story, good or bad, of such co-operation between researchers and curators looking after collections. © Matthew Parkes.
Dr Emma Nicholls Deputy Keeper of Natural History Curator of Palaeontology, Geology and Osteology Horniman Museum and Gardens Email: [email protected] 43 InterpNEWS Megafauna extinction: DNA evidence pins blame on climate change
Michael Slezak Science
New forensic DNA evidence is painting a detailed picture of the death of the world’s megafauna – and it suggests that humans were not to blame.
Ever since a giant sloth was uncovered more than 200 years ago, hinting at the former presence of a menagerie of prehistoric giant mammals – the “megafauna” – humans have been on trial for their extinction. And the prosecution’s case has been strong.
“The overwhelming evidence is that the megafauna extinctions occur around the world whenever humans turn up,” says Alan Cooper, an ancient DNA researcher from the University of Adelaide in Australia.
And that chronology is hard to argue with, he says. “Whether it be 50,000 years ago in Australia or 13,000 years ago in South America or 1000 years ago in New Zealand: it’s a perfect match.” But the real culprit, he says, is climate change.
Cooper and colleagues have simultaneously produced an unprecedentedly accurate map and timeline of changes in megafauna populations around Eurasia and North America, and precisely matched that timeline up with ancient climate records. 44 InterpNEWS
It punches a hole in a key argument of the prosecution. This states that climate cannot have caused megafauna extinctions because it has changed so much over the past 60,000 years. There were lots of warm and cool periods – interglacial and glacial epochs, respectively. If climate change is the real megafauna killer, why did the animals survive those events only to die when humans turned up in their region?
The new data show that they did not survive. Megafauna extinctions were actually relatively common during the past 60,000 years whether humans were around or not.
Invisible extinctions
To establish this, Cooper and his colleagues first compiled 10 years of ancient DNA work that has revealed a series of “invisible” extinctions. These are events involving two or more lineages with essentially identical skeletons but distinct genes – for example, two species of bison. If both lived in the same area in prehistory, one could have disappeared and we would not be aware of this just from examining the bones.
Secondly, Cooper’s team created a new ancient climate record that, uniquely, can be accurately linked with the carbon dates from bones to show when particular extinctions happened. Usually the climate change and carbon dating timelines are independent and difficult to link together. But Cooper and his colleagues found a marine sediment deposit near Argentina that contains a record of past climates – and because it contains marine microfossils, these past climates can be tied precisely to carbon dates.
Pulling everything together, the team was able to draw a picture that shows exactly what the climate was doing when various megafauna species vanished over the past 60,000 years. And a pattern emerges.
“Climate is the thing that is constantly sending these species out through time without humans even being involved,” says Cooper. “That’s the bit that is really completely new.”
The team were surprised by another finding that emerged: it wasn’t the long cold periods that wiped out megafauna, as some have suggested – it was warming.
“What we found, which we were staggered by: no matter how we analyzed the data, abrupt warming’s drove the extinctions or the replacements,” says team member Chris Turney of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
It is most likely that warming was such a killer because it arrives rapidly – temperatures change far more abruptly than they do at the onset of a cooling period, says Cooper.
But Cooper is not letting humans off entirely. There was an uptick in extinctions at the end of the last ice age when, famously, the woolly mammoth met its maker. He says there is little doubt that humans played a part in that extinction because it correlates with a sudden explosion in human numbers around the world.
Overkill hypothesis
But perhaps humans did not simply hunt species to extinction – sometimes called the “overkill” hypothesis. Cooper says that the DNA research indicates that megafauna species were sometimes able to survive potential extinction events by migrating as climate changed. But those species-saving migrations became far more difficult to undertake 12,000 years ago because humans began disrupting the landscape in a big way through farming. 45 InterpNEWS
Brian Huntley from Durham University, UK, thinks the results prove more than Cooper claims. He says the assumption that humans played any significant part in the extinctions is unjustified. The magnitude of the last warming event was about twice that of the previous ones, and so would explain the increased rate of extinctions, he says.
But the prosecution is not giving up. Tim Flannery, a palaeontologist based in Sydney, Australia, says that the global correlation between human arrival and megafauna extinctions is just too big to be a coincidence, particularly in the southern hemisphere. “In New Zealand nothing happens through dramatic cycles in climate until 1000 years ago when people get there,” he says. And although Cooper’s work pins extinctions on periods of warming, in Australia the megafauna disappearance began 50,000 years ago during a period of slow cooling – just as humans arrived, he says. Southern migration
Moving the work further south is the next frontier for Cooper and the human defence council. Right now, he is in Idaho, digging up more megafauna from Natural Trap Cave, trying to link what happened in warmer areas, south of the permafrost, to see whether the same sorts of things happened there. “We’re looking at South America too, and I think we can see the same pattern,” he says.
When it comes to Australia, Cooper is less sure of the sequence of events. But his ongoing work is pointing towards a long period of overlap between humans and megafauna. If that is right, it could be more evidence against the idea that humans are a sharp, fast killer of megafauna. Whatever happens, more data will be revealed in coming years. Cooper’s findings also provide a stark warning for humans today. They show that periods of rapid warming cause major waves of extinctions and near-extinctions around the world. Natural Trap Cave, Idaho. And what saved some animals during some of these periods was being able to migrate – which is less of an option today. “Human alteration or destruction of ecosystems is so pervasive that it is clear that many species, including groups such as birds, are unable to shift their ranges sufficiently rapidly to match current anthropogenic climatic changes,” says Huntley.
Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4315 46 InterpNEWS
American Railroad Folklore (from a true story).
July 6 1881: Kate Shelley Saves Two Hundred Lives.
American Folklore S. E. Schlosser
It was a dark and stormy night in Boone County, Iowa, where nineteen year old Kate Shelley lived on her family’s farm near Honey Creek. The rain was pouring down in torrents and the creek was spilling over its banks and carrying away barns and lumber and threatening to sweep away the family cow.
It was such a horrendous night that the Northwestern Railroad was concerned that the flooding was weakening the railroad bridge just past the Shelley homestead, and dispatch sent a pusher engine out to check the tracks for damage.
Looking from her window, which in daylight commanded a view of the Honey Creek bridge, Kate Shelley could barely make out through the darkness and storm the approaching locomotive’s headlight. A second after she spied it she heard a tremendous crash and the light vanished; she knew that the bridge had collapsed and that the locomotive had fallen into the abyss.
There was no one at home but her mother and her little brother and sister, and Kate knew an eastbound passenger train was due about midnight and would soon be barreling towards the chasm.
Hastily filling an old lantern and wrapping herself in a waterproof, she sallied out in the storm against her mother’s protests. She climbed up the steep bluff to the track, tearing her clothes to rags and painfully lacerating her flesh on the thick brambles.
When she reached the part of the bridge which still remained Kate crawled out as far as she could, swung her lantern over the dark abyss, and called out at the top of her voice.
It was pitch black below but she heard the faint answer of the engineer, who had crawled upon some of the broken timbers.
He called to her to find her way to the station a mile away and to warn the approaching express of the fall of the bridge.
Without hesitation, Kate set out toward the small station at Moingona. 47 InterpNEWS
The Kate Shelley Railroad Museum, Moingona, Iowa.
She crept along the timbers of the damaged bridge, thirty feet above the roaring current, gingerly stepping from tie to tie. Then she had to cross the Des Moines River bridge, about five hundred feet in length. Just as she tremblingly put her foot on this structure, the wind, rain, thunder and lightning gusted so hard that she lost her balance and her lantern went out. Without her light she could not see a foot ahead of her, except when flashes of lightning revealed the outlines of the bridge and the seething waters beneath.
With no time to lose, Kate threw away the useless lamp, and dropping on her hands and knees, crawled across the high trestle. When she again reached solid ground, she ran to the station, told her story in breathless haste and then fell unconscious.
When she came to, she led a party back to rescue the crew. Edgar Wood, perched in a tree, grasped a rope thrown to him, and came ashore hand-over-hand. Adam Agar couldn’t be reached until the floodwaters began to recede. Pat Donahue’s corpse was eventually found in a cornfield a quarter mile downstream from the bridge, but A.P. Olmsted was never found. Thanks to Kate’s warning, the express train was successfully stopped at Ogden, and the 200 passengers aboard were saved.
Kate Shelley at the Moingona Depot, ca 1880’s. InterpNEWS 48
Greenhouse gases reach new peak in 2018, U.N. says.
Emma Farge
GENEVA, Nov 25 (Reuters) - Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere hit a new record in 2018, exceeding the average yearly increase of the last decade and reinforcing increasingly damaging weather patterns, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said on Monday.
The U.N. agency's Greenhouse Gas Bulletin is one of a series of studies to be published ahead of a U.N. climate change summit being held in Madrid next week, and is expected to guide discussions there. It measures the atmospheric concentration of the gases responsible for global warming, rather than emissions.
"There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases' concentration in the atmosphere - despite all the commitments under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
"This continuing long-term trend means that future generations will be confronted with increasingly severe impacts of climate change, including rising temperatures, more extreme weather, water stress, sea level rise and disruption to marine and land ecosystems," said a summary of the report.
The concentration of carbon dioxide, a product of burning fossil fuels that is the biggest contributor to global warming, surged from 405.5 parts per million in 2017 to 407.8 ppm in 2018, exceeding the average annual increase of 2.06 ppm in 2005-2015, the WMO report said.
Irrespective of future policy, carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for centuries, locking in warming trends. 49 InterpNEWS
"It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5 million years ago," Taalas said.
"MORE HOPEFUL THAN I USED TO BE"
The annual increase in methane - a greenhouse gas that is more potent than CO2 but dissipates faster - was the highest since 1998, said the report, which includes data from dozens of sites as well as naval and aerial measurements.
For nitrous oxide, which helps to erode the atmosphere's ozone layer and expose humans to harmful ultraviolet rays, it was the biggest increase ever recorded. Asked about the Madrid talks, which begin on Dec. 2, Taalas said there were some grounds for optimism.
"What is good news is the visibility of these issues is higher than ever," he told journalists. "So, personally, I'm more hopeful than I used to be 10 years ago, but of course we have to speed up the process." 50 InterpNEWS
The U.N. Environment Programme's (UNEP) annual "emissions gap" report, due on Tuesday, assesses whether countries’ emissions reduction policies are enough to meet agreed targets of limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 Fahrenheit).
Last week, a report co-authored by UNEP showed that major fossil fuel producers are set to bust global environmental goals with their coal, oil and gas extraction in the next decade.
Later on Monday, a majority of European Union lawmakers were hoping to symbolically declare a "climate emergency" during a debate on the Madrid conference, to increase pressure on the incoming EU executive to take a stronger leading role in the fight against climate change.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; editing by Stephanie Nebehay and Kevin Liffey) 51 InterpNEWS
10 Great Train Robberies
David E. Israel.
History
1. The First Train Robbery in the West
Although Jesse James popularly gets credit for committing the first train robbery, the following robbery actually predates his: On November 5, 1870, just west of Reno, NV, a Central Pacific passenger train was overtaken by a gang of robbers who'd been tipped off that the train was carrying gold worth $60,000. The conductor was forced to apply the brakes and separate the engine, tender, baggage and express cars from the rest of the train. The engineer was then taken to the express car to request admittance. When the door opened, the expressman was greeted three sawed off shotguns. By prying open boxes in the express car, the gang was able to uncover $41,000 in gold coins. The spoils weighed over 150 lbs. However, the robbers inadvertently left behind $8,000 in silver, $15,000 in hidden gold bars, and piles of bank drafts. (Keep in mind that an acre of land cost about $5 at the time.) All of the robbers were apprehended or killed before being able to enjoy their bounty.
2. Jesse James’ first Train Robbery
The notorious gang leader, Jesse James, is a Wild West legend. He and his colleagues the James-Younger gang, had already established a local reputation for crime before the legendary robbery. Former confederate guerillas, the gang dressed in KKK garb. They then loosened part of the track and attached a rope to it near the Adair, Iowa station. As the Rock Island train approached the station on July 21, 1873, the engineer saw the rope tied to the rail. He attempted to back the train up to avoid the hazard, but was unsuccessful. The engine, tender, and baggage cars were derailed and the engineer killed. Jesse and his brother Frank, approached the expressman with cocked 44’s. The James-Younger gang rode off with nearly $3,000—worth about $51,000 today. 52 InterpNEWS
3. Gads Hill Missouri Great Train Robbery Jesse James may not have been the first to rob a train in the West, but he was the first to rob one in Missouri. On January 31, 1874, the James-Younger gang rode into the small town of Gads Hill, population 15. They were again dressed in KKK masks and sent shock waves through the small community. They lit a bonfire within sight of the station platform and had one member to the gang stand on the platform holding a red signal lamp. The train did not normally stop at the Gads Hill station but was scheduled to do so that day in order for State Rep. L.M. Farris to meet up with his son. As the train neared the station, the conductor jumped off the train to see what was going on, he was seized and the train was switched to a siding. The gang members boarded the train, raided the express/mail car and then systematically relieved the passengers of their jewelry and currency.
4. The Wilcox Robbery
The Wild Bunch, with infamous members Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, went out with a bang for their final train robbery. On June 2, 1899 around 2:30 AM, the Union Pacific Overland Flyer No. 1 was flagged down by two men with warning lights. The men overtook the first engine and made the engineer disconnect the second part of the train, which had its own engine. Then they blew up a small wooden bridge after the first engine had passed over, to prevent anyone in the second section from following. Forcing the trainmen over to the mail car to begin their raid, three of the bandits blew the door off of the car with dynamite. Not satisfied with what they found, the gang continued on to the express car. There they found the express car messenger. When he refused to open the door for the robbers, they opened it themselves with more dynamite. The blast left the messenger stunned and unable to relay the combination, so they blew the safe open with more dynamite, using such an excessive amount of the “giant powder” that the entire car was destroyed. They escaped on horses they had hidden nearby with over $50,000 in loot. 53 InterpNEWS
5. The Largest Train Robbery in the United States
On June 14, 1924, the Newton gang stole the largest sum ever from a United States train. The Newton boys, all brothers, were known for never killing anyone. They also never stole from women and children. Still, they were still the most successful bank robbers in the United States. For this big heist, they recruited postal inspector William J. Fahy, one of the best investigators at the time, to help them plan it. Also in their employ were several local gangsters. Instead of horses, the Newton gang boasted fast cars. Taking hold of a mail train in Roundout, IL, just outside of Chicago, using homemade tear gas bombs of formaldehyde, the gang rounded up $3 million dollars in cash, jewelry and securities. One of the gang members accidentally shot Dock Newton during the heist. This slip up led to the capture of the gang members. Within 7 months of the heist, all suspects were apprehended and sentenced.
6. The Great Gold Robbery The Wild West was not the only stage for train robberies. In 1855, a train carrying gold bars from London to Paris was the victim of an “invisible” robbery. The gold was stored sealed, bound by iron bars, and secured in double key safes. The highly guarded bars were weighed after completing its traverse of the English Channel via boat, but two of the safes weighed slightly more and one slightly less than the original weight. In Paris, it was discovered that the gold had been replaced by lead shots. Masterminds William Pierce and Edward Agar, with the help of a railway clerk, had boarded the train with carpet bags and shoulder satchels full of lead shots. They disembarked in Dover with £12,000 worth of gold. That would be worth approximately $1,253,962 today. All were quickly caught and jailed. 54 InterpNEWS
7. Another Great Train Robbery? On the evening of August 7, 1963, the Traveling Post Office “Up Special’ train left Glasgow for London. It consisted of 12 carriages where postal workers sorted, picked up, and dropped off mail along the trip. The second carriage behind the engine was known as the HVP (High Value Package) and it was carrying a record £2.6 million due to a bank holiday in Scotland—worth more than $62 million in today's currency. Just after 3am, the driver brought the train to a stop at a tampered, red signal. When he tried to call for more information, he found the lines cut. The train was then boarded by a 15 member gang who took the train to an overpass bridge where they loaded the loot of used £1, £5 and £10 notes into their ex-army dropside truck. The gang had cut all phone lines in the vicinity, but authorities where still hot on their trails. Fingerprints had been left all over the crime scene and the culprits were quickly identified.
8. The Bezdany Raid This was no normal train robbery! No, this was an attempt to free Poland from Russian and Austro-Hungarian occupation. In 1908, Józef Pi?sudski organized and trained a group he called Bojówki, 20 revolutionaries—16 men and four women that included Pilsudski’s future wife, three future prime ministers and other notable members of the future Second Republic. The plan was to overtake a train and station at Bezdany. After a short firefight, where one Russian solider was killed and five injured, the gang blew open the mail car, gathered the money into bags and fled. They ran off with 400,000 rubbles—equivalent to more than $4 million in today's currency. The money was used to fund the revolutionary’s cause and free Poland!
When he refused to open the door for the robbers, they opened it themselves with more dynamite. The blast left the messenger stunned and unable to relay the combination, so they blew the safe open with more dynamite, using such an excessive amount of the “giant powder” that the entire car was destroyed. They escaped on horses they had hidden nearby with over $50,000 in loot.
9. The Great Train Robbery of British Columbia
Bill Miner, a notorious outlaw who was upstaged only by Jesse James, moved to British Columbia after being released from a California prison. Three years later, he stopped a Canadian Pacific Railway train in Mission, B.C., about 70 kilometers east of Vancouver. He managed to walk away with $10,000. Miner was known as “a gentleman and a bandit.” He was always polite and well liked within the community and never forgot to bid his victims, “Good day.” He is credited with being the first outlaw to use the phrase, “Hands up!” Two years after his first CPR robbery he stopped another train but wasn’t so lucky. His mask was accidentally knocked off and the train was only carrying $15. He was captured and sentenced to life at the British Columbian Penitentiary, but managed to tunnel out and was never seen again!!
10. Gold Special In the 1920s, train robberies had started to decline in the United States due to tighter security and the advent of traveler’s checks from American Express. People no longer had to carry gold with them when they traveled. However, in 1923 the D’Autremont brothers attempted to pull off a large scale train robbery in a get rich quick scheme. The brothers planned to board the Southern Pacific “Gold Special” at Tunnel No. 13 in Ashland, OR. Once aboard, the brothers set off dynamite to open up the mail car. However, they wound up using too much dynamite and succeeded only in killing the mail clerk and destroying anything of value. hey then shot and killed the brakeman, fireman, and engineer in the confusion that followed. 55 InterpNEWS
The ensuing investigation was one of the most elaborate in United States history and laid the foundation for modern criminal forensics.
______56 InterpNEWS
Railroads In The Civil War
American Railroads.com
American civil war railroad gun.
Railroads in the Civil War would play a pivotal role in deciding how the campaign transpired. The North not only held a commanding advantage in total mileage but also boasted a mighty industrial machine across New England. There were many reasons for the South's failure to achieve victory. One of the most noteworthy was its inability to properly utilize the railroad. It also faced an unforeseen problem of suffering tremendous damage from Union forces which were successful in regularly disrupting operations. Since most of the fighting occurred below the Mason-Dixon Line this issue was only magnified as the conflict wore on. For its part, the North suffered setbacks as well. Most notably was the venerable Baltimore & Ohio which lay in the heart of the fighting. Initially, the B&O was an ardent Southern sympathizer but that changed after a series of Confederate attacks severely crippled its network. As Mike Schafer notes in his book, "Classic American Railroads," it proved an invaluable asset for the Union. Aside from the war railroads dealt with other issues throughout the 1860's, such as numerous track gauges and a lack of sufficient bridges spanning major waterways. Issues like these resulted in a lack of fluidity.
Mortar technology was not new during the Civil War but making them mobile was, as seen here with the "Dictator" near Petersburg, Virginia in 1864. 57 InterpNEWS
When discussing railroads during the Civil War their role is often overlooked. They proved a vital asset in the movement of troops and materiel, ultimately allowing the North to achieve total victory. After fighting broke out in 1861 the country had a rail network totaling more than 30,000 miles. Of this, 21,300 miles (along with 45,000 miles of telegraph wire), or about 70%, was concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest while the Confederacy enjoyed only 9,022 miles (and 5,000 miles of telegraph wire). Despite this discrepancy the South did command one advantage; most of its trackage was brand new at the time. As William Thomas points out in his book, "The Iron Way: Railroads, The Civil War, And The Making Of Modern America," 75% of its lines had been constructed only in the1850s. The railroad may have still been a relatively new technology during the mid-19th century but the need for heavier rail, reinforced bridges, and durable rights-of-way to handle ever-increasing tonnage had become well understood by that time.
The Confederacy's lack of such infrastructure was further compounded by its inability to effectively harness the iron horse for military purposes as historian John P. Hankey articulately points out in his excellent essay from the March, 2011 issue of Trains Magazine entitled, "The Railroad War: How The Iron Road Changed The American Civil War." For instance, Southern leaders believed civilian rail movements should take precedence over military transports. It was not until the war's final years did the Confederacy understand the railroad's usefulness. In contrast, by 1862 the North began laying the groundwork for what became a unified and efficient transportation network. It began with President Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Pacific Railway Act into law on July 1, 1862, authorizing construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. The project was launched within a year and formally completed on May 10, 1869 when Union Pacific and Central Pacific met at Promontory Summit, Utah. The idea for such a coast-to-coast railroad dated back to 1854-1855 when then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis led surveying efforts west of the Mississippi River. Mr. Thomas goes on to note that leaders in the North viewed railroads a bit differently than their Southern counterparts. While both understood their importance, the South saw trains as a means of maintaining slavery's status quo for economic growth.
By comparison, the North employed them as a means of developing new territories for trade and economic prosperity, which led to the Transcontinental Railroad's creation. There were four potential routes chosen; a northern, central, and two southern corridors. Unfortunately, none could satisfy parities both for, and against, slavery and the plan was shelved.
U.S. Military Railroad (USMR) 4- 4-0's are lined up in the captured city of Nashville, Tennessee during 1864. 58 InterpNEWS
However, once the war broke out, states seceded, and Davis became President of the Confederate State of America, the Union was free to do as it wished. Northern leaders subsequently settled on the central route which was projected to run due west of the Missouri River at Omaha, Nebraska/Council Bluffs, Iowa and terminate at San Francisco. While Union Pacific's and Central Pacific's project is best remembered it was not the only transcontinental project undertaken at that time.
On July 2, 1864 President Lincoln signed an updated Pacific Railroad Act into law which created the Northern Pacific Railroad Company to build a northern route into the Pacific Northwest. The NP was dealt a series of logistical and financial problems that delayed its completion by nearly two decades. However, once finished it too was instrumental in opening another segment of the country to economic growth. In time, three other systems reached Puget Sound; Union Pacific, Great Northern, and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific (Milwaukee Road).
The 4-4-0 "Firefly" is seen here crossing a trestle on the Orange & Alexandria Railroad. Photo courtesy National Archives. 59 InterpNEWS
The original Pacific Railway Act was not the only important event of 1862; that year also witnessed creation of the United States Military Railroad. The USMR did not take direct command of the North's rail network (Unlike a half-century later when the United State Railroad Administration operated the nation's railroads during World War I from 1917 to 1920.). Instead, it acted as its own enterprise and made use of trackage when needed to offer the best tactical advantage. The North fully understood the railroad's importance and mobility. As Mr. Hankey notes virtually all major conflicts were located either at or near important rail junctions. The USMR was under the command of General Daniel C. McCallum (former general manager of the Erie Railway) and General Herman Haupt (former chief engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad). These expert railroaders were incredibly effective at putting together a skilled workforce to maintain efficient operation. The two men were also adept at preventing field officers from interrupting everyday affairs through either meddling or special requests.
As previously mentioned, for the significant damage Southern railroads received the B&O was also hit hard since its main line was situated right along Union and Confederate lines within the border states of Maryland and Virginia (West Virginia after 1863). John Stover notes in his book, "The Routledge Historical Atlas Of The American Railroads," the B&O rescinded its Southern support when Confederate militia, under the command of then-Colonel Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, laid siege to its line through Northern Virginia.
He believed that by crippling B&O's network the Union could not effectively wage war. While this tactic was unsuccessful the Confederacy did cause more than $2.5 million in damages (over $35 million in today's dollars) which required 10 months to repair. In an attempt to curb further property destruction the railroad built the first-ever armored rail car. It looked quite similar to the South's famous Merrimack ironclad warship except that it rode on wheels! Interestingly it was the very B&O that initially proved the railroad's tactical effectiveness; on June 2, 1861, more than a month prior to the war's first major engagement at the "First Battle of Bull Run" (known within the Confederacy as the "Battle of First Manassas") it transported troops from Grafton, Virginia to a location about six miles east of the city to capture the town of Philipi ("Battle of Philippi"). The speed of the movement caught Southern forces off-guard, demonstrating just what the railroad could do.
A view of Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania during November of 1863. Today, the station and tracks are still in use. 60 InterpNEWS
For the Union's many successes the South enjoy its own triumphs with this technology. There was the previously mentioned "Battle of First Manassas" when General Joe Johnston used the Manassas Gap Railroad to move his troops into position, eventually securing a Confederate victory. Also, the "Battle of Chickamauga" in early September of 1863 saw a Southern victory after General James Longstreet quickly moved his force of 12,000 men from Virginia to Georgia, which bolstered Confederate lines as part of the Army of Tennessee. Thanks in large part to this effort U.S. forces were defeated after three days of fighting. More often than not it, however, it was military strategy and not the railroad which led to Southern victory. With a belief in unilateral states' rights there was no central oversight or management of its network. By the time leaders realized this fallacy all hopes for total victory had, to a greater extent, been lost. Perhaps the most famous railroading event of the war took place in the South, best remembered as the Great Locomotive Chase. It all began in April of 1862 when disguised Union soldiers stole the General, a Western & Atlantic 4-4-0 "American Type" steamer in an attempt to destroy Confederate supply lines. Also known as the "Andrews Raid" it began at Marietta, Georgia and lasted for nearly 91 miles until a Confederate crew caught up with the locomotive near Ringgold.
During the chase the Southerns used a hand-powered track car as well as the locomotives Yonah, Shorter and Texas before finally catching the raiders.
As schooners anchor just offshore, Federal artillery and accompanying caissons sit on the wharf awaiting transport by rail at City Point, Virginia during the ongoing Siege of Petersburg in early 1865.
The twenty-two Union soldiers attempted to flee after abandoning the General but were soon discovered. For their bravery the U.S. troops were awarded the Congressional Medal Of Honor, some posthumously. 61 InterpNEWS
During the war's final years Southern railroads were in such horrid condition they offered virtually no strategic military importance. In particular was the Louisville & Nashville which saw the most destruction of any system. The Confederacy's idea to win the war had largely been predicated on outlasting its aggressor. A similar tactic was successful just over a century later when North Vietnam caused enough American casualties during the Vietnam War to cause the U.S. government to give up. The Confederacy faced a much more determined leader in President Lincoln who, for a number of reasons, did everything within his power to reunite the country and was eventually successful in that effort. Looking back, the South may have achieved its desired result if Lincoln had never found an effective commander. As Mr. Hankey points out, had the U.S. lost one battle here or there it may have turned the tide. Today, this is all conjecture, of course, but the questions and rhetoric regarding such are still brought up among historians.
Destroying railroad infrastructure became a common strategy by both sides to slow the other's advance. Seen here is a wrecked bridge of the Richmond & Fredericksburg Railroad at North Anna River, Virginia on May 25, 1864. 62 InterpNEWS
The USMR crewman of the 4-4-0 "General Haupt," named after the U.S. Military Railroads' Chief of Construction and Transportation, pose proudly next to their locomotive. Photo courtesy National Archives.
After The War
While the Civil War had emotionally and physically scarred the country, the railroad paved the way for further expansion and growth after hostilities ended. Between 1850 and 1871 the federal government offered more than 170 million acres of western land to railroads in exchange for establishing new routes between the Midwest and the west coast. Along with the aforementioned Transcontinental Railroad the Northern Pacific, financed by banker Jay Cooke, began a northerly route from Lake Superior at Duluth, Minnesota to Seattle, Washington in 1864. Building through the very rugged and remote regions of western Montana, northern Idaho and Washington it took NP nearly twenty years before its completion in 1883 (hampered, partially, by the financial Panic of 1873). Finally, two major technological advances were introduced just a few years after the war; George Westinghouse's automatic air brake of 1869 and Eli Janney's automatic coupler of 1873. These two devices were so revolutionary they remain in regular use today as the most practical and efficient way to stop a train and join/detach equipment. As the century came to a close railroads were rapidly opening new routes, branches, and corridors throughout the country. Even though track widths were still prolific and a standard gauge had not yet been established the 1860's did witness improved cooperation, particularly in railroads' willingness to exchange freight. 63 InterpNEWS
Wild Weather – How to live with it.
Torrential hurricanes, devastating droughts, crippling ice storms, and raging heat waves—all are extreme weather phenomena that can claim lives and cause untold damage. Climate change influences severe weather by causing longer droughts and higher temperatures in some regions and more intense deluges in others, say climate experts. Among the most vulnerable are communities in exposed mountain and coastal regions. In those settings worldwide, citizens are adjusting to new weather realities by strengthening warning, shelter, and protection systems.
CATASTROPHES ON THE RISE Meteorological records show a rise in weather-related disasters since 1980. Climate change affects some weather, but experts caution against blaming it for every extreme event.
SURVIVING STORMS A fierce cyclone hits Bangladesh about every three years. In 1991 Cyclone Marian killed 140,000. In 2007 Cyclone Sidr flattened 565,000 homes, but a warning system and fortified shelters helped limit deaths to 3,500. Today restoring coastal mangroves and hillside forests aims to stave off surging seas, landslides, and floods during future storms. 64 InterpNEWS
SUCCUMBING TO HEAT The global average temperature in May 2015 was the highest on record. In India some 2,200 people perished during a ten-day heat wave when reported highs hit 113°F (45°C). To cope, the city of Ahmadabad offered potable water and cooling centers in high-risk areas and trained health aides to treat heat-related illness.
RISING SEAS, RISING CONCERNS Climate change may not cause a particular storm, but rising sea levels can worsen its impact. In 2012 a nine- foot storm surge from Hurricane Sandy hit New York City at high tide, making the water 14 feet higher than normal at the tip of Manhattan. Flooding destroyed neighborhoods and beaches in outer boroughs. The sea level in this area is rising by more than an inch each decade—twice as fast as the global average—and is predicted to rise 11 to 21 inches by 2050. To prepare, the city is implementing coastal resiliency measures: A multiuse project will create more green spaces for city residents as well as a system of floodwalls, berms, and retractable barriers for enhanced storm protection.
THE PRICE OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES Costly storm and flood damage to burgeoning coastal infrastructure is growing. Innovations such as building floating villages and relocating vulnerable assets away from rising seas can reduce risk and losses.
Health Risks
Climate change isn’t just bad for the planet’s health—it’s bad for people’s too. Effects will vary by age, gender, geography, and socioeconomic status—and so will remedies. A recent international study in the Lancet says that many more people will be exposed to extreme weather events over the next century than previously thought—“a potentially catastrophic risk to human health” that could undo 50 years of global health gains. 65 InterpNEWS
Solutions are in the works. In flood-prone Benin, national health insurance has been expanded to cover diseases likeliest to increase as the world warms and sea levels rise. In the steamy Philippines, programs are helping low-income residents manage weather-related risks with loans, hygiene education, and waste and water control. Meanwhile public health experts everywhere are calling for new measures to help people stay healthy despite floods, droughts, and heat waves.
- Power outages in extreme weather could cripple hospitals and transportation systems when we need them most.
- Crop declines could lead to undernutrition, hunger, and higher food prices. More CO2 in the air could make staple crops like barley and soy less nutritious.
- Occupational hazards such as risk of heatstroke will rise, especially among farmers and construction workers. Labor could shift to dawn and dusk, times when more disease-carrying insects are out.
- Hotter days, more rain, and higher humidity will produce more ticks, which spread infectious diseases like Lyme disease. Ticks could be in much of the eastern U.S. by 2080.
-Trauma from floods, droughts, and heat waves can lead to mental health issues like anxiety, depression, and suicide.
- More heat can mean longer allergy seasons and more respiratory disease. More rain increases mold, fungi, and indoor air pollutants. 66 InterpNEWS
- Mosquito-borne dengue fever has increased 30-fold in the past 50 years. Three-quarters of those exposed so far live in the Asia-Pacific region.
- Senior citizens and poor children—especially those already afflicted with malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea—tend to be most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses.
- Drought and chronic water shortages harm rural areas and 150 million city dwellers. If localities don’t adjust quickly, that number could be nearly a billion by 2050.
- Rising sea levels can threaten freshwater supplies for people living in low-lying areas. More severe storms can cause city sewage systems to overflow. The End ? Up to us I guess. JV 67 InterpNEWS
Is Global Warming Fueling Increased Wildfire Risks?
Published Sep 9, 2011 Updated Jul 24, 2018 Union of Concerned Scientists.
The effects of global warming on temperature, precipitation levels, and soil moisture are turning many of our forests into kindling during wildfire season. As the climate warms, moisture and precipitation levels are changing, with wet areas becoming wetter and dry areas becoming drier.
Higher spring and summer temperatures and earlier spring snowmelt typically cause soils to be drier for longer, increasing the likelihood of drought and a longer wildfire season, particularly in the western United States.
These hot, dry conditions also increase the likelihood that wildfires will be more intense and long-burning once they are started by lightning strikes or human error.
The costs of wildfires, in terms of risks to human life and health, property damage, and state and federal dollars, are devastating, and they are only likely to increase unless we better address the risks of wildfires and reduce our activities that lead to further climate change.
Wildfires are already on the rise
Wildfires in the western United States have been increasing in frequency and duration since the mid-1980s. Between 1986 and 2003, wildfires occurred nearly four times as often, burned more than six times the land area, and lasted almost five times as long when compared to the period between 1970 and 1986. 68 InterpNEWS
Natural cycles, human activities like land-use change and fire exclusion, and human-caused climate change can all influence the likelihood of wildfires. Many of the areas that have seen increased wildfire activity, like Yosemite National Park and the Northern Rockies, are protected from or relatively unaffected by human land- use change, suggesting that climate change is a major factor driving the increase in wildfires in these places.
Precipitation patterns, global warming, and wildfires
Though the current trend of increasing severe wildfire frequency in parts of the US is projected to continue as the climate warms, droughts and wildfires are not equally likely to occur every year.
Natural, cyclical weather occurrences such as El Niño events also affect the likelihood of wildfires by affecting levels of precipitation and moisture and lead to year-by-year variability in the potential for drought and wildfires regionally.
Nonetheless, because temperatures and precipitation levels are projected to alter further over the course of the 21st century, the overall potential for wildfires in the western United States is projected to increase.
As the world warms, we can expect more wildfires
US wildfire seasons—especially those in years with higher wildfire potential—are projected to lengthen, with the Southwest’s season of fire potential lengthening from seven months to all year long. Additionally, the likelihood that individual wildfires become severe is expected to increase.
Researchers project that moist, forested areas are the most likely to face greater threats from wildfires as conditions in those areas become drier and hotter.
Surprisingly, some dry grasslands may be less at risk of catching fire because the intense aridity is likely to prevent these grasses from growing at all, leaving these areas so barren that they are likely to lack the fodder for wildfires to start and spread. 69 InterpNEWS
A conflagration of costs
The economic costs of wildfires can be crippling. Data on total US property damage from wildfires are hard to come by, but the costs are estimated to be on the level of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
In addition to property damage, wildfires cost states and the federal government millions in fire-suppression management. The US Forest Service’s yearly fire-suppression costs have exceeded $1 billion for 13 of the 18 years between 2000 and 2017. In 2015, these costs exceeded $2 billion, and in 2017 they totaled almost $3 billion. The risk to property owners is particularly acute in areas at the “wildland-urban interface.” In California alone, this area includes more than 5 million homes in coastal southern California, the Bay Area, and northeast of Sacramento.
The environmental and health costs of wildfires are also considerable. Not only do wildfires threaten lives directly, but they have the potential to increase local air pollution, exacerbating lung diseases and causing breathing difficulties even in healthy individuals.
Additionally, a counterintuitive aspect of mountain forest wildfires is their ability to increase flash flood risk. The loss of vegetation from wildfires and the inability of burned soil to absorb moisture can cause flash floods in lower-lying areas when rains do come in the days and months following fires, especially to the semi-arid Southwest.
Wildfire safety and prevention
Greenhouse-gas emissions from human activities are raising global temperatures and changing the climate, leading to a likely rise in wildfire severity and frequency.
But it is not too late to act. What we do now has the power to influence the frequency and severity of these fires and their effects on us.
By engaging in fire safety efforts—creating buffer zones between human habitation and susceptible forests, and meeting home and city fire-safety standards—we can help reduce our current risks, and by taking steps to reduce our impact on the climate, we can help to keep our forests, our homes, and our health safe. 70 InterpNEWS An Overview of the Underground Railroad – the routes to freedom.
Numerous Authors
The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early to mid-19 century, and used by enslaved African-Americans to escape into free states and Canada. The scheme was assisted by abolitionists and others sympathetic to the cause of the escapees. Not literally a railroad but rather a secretly organized means of movement, the workers both black and white, free and enslaved, who aided the fugitives can also be referred to as the "Underground Railroad". Various other routes led to Mexico, where slavery had been abolished, or overseas. An earlier escape route running south toward Florida, then a Spanish possession (except 1763–83), existed from the late 17th century until Florida became a United States territory in 1821. One of the main reasons Florida was purchased by the United States was to end its function as a safe haven for escaped slaves. However, the network now generally known as the Underground Railroad was formed in the late 1700s. It ran north and grew steadily until the Civil War began. One estimate suggests that by 1850, 100,000 slaves had escaped via the "Railroad". 71 InterpNEWS
British North America (present-day Canada) was a desirable destination, as its long border gave many points of access, it was further from slave catchers, and beyond the reach of the United States' Fugitive Slave Acts. Most former slaves, reaching Canada by boat across Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, settled in Ontario. More than 30,000 people were said to have escaped there via the network during its 20-year peak period, although U.S. Census figures account for only 6,000. Numerous fugitives' stories are documented in the 1872 book The Underground Railroad Records by William Still, an abolitionist who then headed the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee. At its peak, nearly 1,000 slaves per year escaped from slave-holding states using the Underground Railroad – more than 5,000 court cases for escaped slaves were recorded – many fewer than the natural increase of the enslaved population. The resulting economic impact was minuscule, but the psychological influence on slave holders was immense. Under the original Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, officials from free states were required to assist slaveholders or their agents who recaptured runaway slaves. But, citizens and governments of many free states ignored the law, and the Underground Railroad thrived. With heavy lobbying by southern politicians, the Compromise of 1850 was passed by Congress after the Mexican–American War. It stipulated a more stringent Fugitive Slave Law; ostensibly, the compromise addressed regional problems by compelling officials of free states to assist slave catchers, granting them immunity to operate in free states. Because the law required sparse documentation to claim a person was a fugitive, slave catchers also kidnapped free blacks, especially children, and sold them into slavery. Southern politicians often exaggerated the number of escaped slaves and often blamed these escapes on Northerners interfering with Southern property rights. The law deprived suspected slaves of the right to defend themselves in court, making it difficult to prove free status. In a de facto bribe, judges were paid a higher fee ($10) for a decision that confirmed a suspect as a slave than for one ruling that the suspect was free ($5). Many Northerners who might have ignored slave issues in the South were confronted by local challenges that bound them to support slavery. This was a primary grievance cited by the Union during the American Civil War, and the perception that Northern States ignored the fugitive slave law was a major justification for secession. To reduce the risk of infiltration, many people associated with the Underground Railroad knew only their part of the operation and not of the whole scheme. "Conductors" led or transported the fugitives from station to station. A conductor sometimes pretended to be a slave in order to enter a plantation. Once a part of a plantation, the conductor would direct the runaways to the North. Slaves traveled at night, about 10–20 miles (16–32 km) to each station. They rested, and then a message was sent to the next station to let the station master know the runaways were on their way. They would stop at the so-called "stations" or "depots" during the day and rest. The stations were often located in barns, under church floors, or in hiding places in caves and hollowed-out riverbanks. The resting spots where the runaways could sleep and eat were given the code names "stations" and "depots", which were held by "station masters". "Stockholders" gave money or supplies for assistance. Using biblical references, fugitives referred to Canada as the "Promised Land" or "Heaven" and the Ohio River as the "River Jordan", which marked the boundary between slave states and free states. Although the fugitives sometimes traveled on boat or train, they usually traveled on foot or by wagon in groups of one to three slaves. Some groups were considerably larger. Abolitionist Charles Turner Torrey and his colleagues rented horses and wagons and often transported as many as 15 or 20 slaves at a time. Routes were often purposely indirect to confuse pursuers. Most escapes were by individuals or small groups; occasionally, there were mass escapes, such as with the Pearl incident. The journey was often considered particularly difficult and dangerous for women or children. Children were sometimes hard to keep quiet or were unable to keep up with a group. 72 InterpNEWS
Struggle for freedom in a Maryland barn. Engraving from William Still's The Underground Rail Road, p. 50.
In addition, enslaved women were rarely allowed to leave the plantation, making it harder for them to escape in the same ways that men could. Although escaping was harder for women, some women were successful. One of the most famous and successful conductors (people who secretly traveled into slave states to rescue those seeking freedom) was Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave woman.
Due to the risk of discovery, information about routes and safe havens was passed along by word of mouth. Southern newspapers of the day were often filled with pages of notices soliciting information about escaped slaves and offering sizable rewards for their capture and return. Federal marshals and professional bounty hunters known as slave catchers pursued fugitives as far as the Canada–US border. Fugitives were not the only black people at risk from slave catchers. With demand for slaves high in the Deep South as cotton was developed, strong, healthy blacks in their prime working and reproductive years were seen and treated as highly valuable commodities. Both former slaves and free blacks were sometimes kidnapped and sold into slavery, as was Solomon Northup of Saratoga Springs, New York. Harriet Tubman (photo H. B. Lindsley), c. 1870. A worker on the Underground Railroad, Tubman made 13 trips to the South, helping to free over 70 people. She led people to the northern free states and Canada. This helped Harriet Tubman gain the name "Moses of Her People". 73 InterpNEWS
"Certificates of freedom," signed, notarized statements attesting to the free status of individual blacks also known as free papers, could easily be destroyed or stolen, so provided little protection to bearers. Some buildings, such as the Crenshaw House in far southeastern Illinois, are known sites where free blacks were sold into slavery, known as the "Reverse Underground Railroad". Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, when suspected fugitives were seized and brought to a special magistrate known as a commissioner, they had no right to a jury trial and could not testify in their own behalf. Technically, they were guilty of no crime. The marshal or private slave-catcher needed only to swear an oath to acquire a writ of replevin for the return of property. Congress was dominated by Southern Congressmen because the population of their states was bolstered by the inclusion of three-fifths of the number of slaves in population totals. They passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 because of frustration at having fugitive slaves helped by the public and even official institutions outside the South. In some parts of the North, slave-catchers needed police protection to exercise their federal authority. Opposition to slavery did not mean that all states welcomed free blacks. For instance, Indiana, whose area along the Ohio River was settled by Southerners, passed a constitutional amendment that barred free blacks from settling in that state. Since the 1980s, claims have arisen that quilt designs were used to signal and direct slaves to escape routes and assistance. According to advocates of the quilt theory, ten quilt patterns were used to direct slaves to take particular actions. The quilts were placed one at a time on a fence as a means of nonverbal communication to alert escaping slaves. The code had a dual meaning: first to signal slaves to prepare to escape, and second to give clues and indicate directions on the journey. 74 InterpNEWS
The quilt design theory is disputed. The first published work documenting an oral history source was in 1999, and the first publication of this theory is believed to be a 1980 children's book. Quilt historians and scholars of pre-Civil War (1820-1860) America have disputed this legend. There is no contemporary evidence of any sort of quilt code, and quilt historians such as Pat Cummings and Barbara Brackman have raised serious questions about the idea. In addition, Underground Railroad historian Giles Wright has published a pamphlet debunking the quilt code. Similarly, some popular, nonacademic sources claim that spirituals and other songs, such as "Steal Away" or "Follow the Drinking Gourd", contained coded information and helped individuals navigate the railroad. They have offered little evidence to support their claims. Scholars tend to believe that while the slave songs may certainly have expressed hope for deliverance from the sorrows of this world, these songs did not present literal help for runaway slaves. The Underground Railroad inspired cultural works. For example, "Song of the Free", written in 1860 about a man fleeing slavery in Tennessee by escaping to Canada, was composed to the tune of "Oh! Susanna". Every stanza ends with a reference to Canada as the land "where colored men are free". Slavery in Upper Canada (now Ontario) was outlawed in 1793; in 1819, John Robinson, the Attorney General of Upper Canada, declared that by residing in Canada, black residents were set free, and that Canadian courts would protect their freedom. Slavery in Canada as a whole had been in rapid decline after an 1803 court ruling, and was finally abolished outright in 1834.
On the paths to freedom. 75 InterpNEWS
References
Blight, David W. (2004). Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory. Smithsonian Books. ISBN 1-58834-157-7. Bordewich, Fergus M. (2005). Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America. Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-052430-8. Calarco, Tom (2008). People of the Underground Railroad: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0313339244. Chadwick, Bruce (2000). Traveling the Underground Railroad: A Visitor's Guide to More Than 300 Sites. Citadel Press. ISBN 0-8065-2093-0. Frost, Karolyn Smardz; Osei, Kwasi (2007). I've Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 978-0-374-16481-2. Foner, Eric (2015). Gateway To Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. New York, New York: Norton. ISBN 0393244075 Forbes, Ella (1998) But We Have No Country: The 1851 Christiana Pennsylvania Resistance. Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers. Griffler, Keith P.(2004) Front Line of Freedom: African Americans and the Forging of the Underground Railroad in the Ohio Valley. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-8131-2298-8. Hagedorn, Ann (2004). Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-87066-5. Hendrick, George; Willene Hendrick (2010), Black refugees in Canada: accounts of escape during the era of slavery, McFarland & Co, ISBN 9780786447336 Hendrick, George; Hendrick, Willene (2003). Fleeing for Freedom: Stories of the Underground Railroad As Told by Levi Coffin and William Still. Ivan R. Dee Publisher. ISBN 1-56663-546-2. Hudson, J. Blaine (2002). Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in the Kentucky Borderland. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-1345-X. LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer (2014). Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Potter, David M. (1976). The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. ISBN 0-06-131929-5. "Operating the Underground Railroad". National Park Service. "Part 4: 1831–1865 Narrative, The Underground Railroad". Africans in America c.1780 – 1862: Judgment Day. PBS. 76 InterpNEWS
https://www.railswest.com/technology/rpo.html
Railway Post Office Cars Sort & Distribute Mail
Railway Post Office Cars were used to pick up, sort and distribute first class mail, magazines, newspapers and registered mail between cities on the vast majority of passenger trains in the United States. RPO routes formed a network crisscrossing the United States.
The first recorded use of the railroads to carry the mail was on a route from Philadelphia to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, beginning in December 1832.
Stage coach contractors Samuel Slaymaker and Jesse Tomlinson were granted an allowance of $400 per year "for carrying the mail on the railroad as far as West Chester" (30 miles). Similar contracts were granted in some other areas.
The Post Office appointed a Route Agent, John Kendall, to accompany the mails between Albany and Utica, New York, in 1837. In 1838 and 1840, agents were assigned to attend the mail between Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia and between Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts.
The United States Congress officially designated all railroads as official postal routes on July 7, 1838. The act increased the use of railroads to transmit the mails and limited the use of post riders and horse-drawn vehicles to post offices that were not on railway routes. Mail service by railroad increased rapidly.
Initially, mail was sorted only at the distributing post offices. Eventually the postal agents began opening the bags they picked up along the route and distributing the mail to the bags that were being dropped off further down the line. The first purpose built RPO cars entered service on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad in 1862, at the direction of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. Overland mail from the east had been backing up in St. Joseph. To expedite delivery, William A. Davis, postmaster of St. Joseph, used the car to separate mail for connection with a westbound stage departing soon after the train's arrival at St. Joseph, Missouri. St. Joseph, used the car to separate mail for connection with a westbound stage departing soon after the train's 77 InterpNEWS
An increasing volume of mail during the Civil War led to the beginning of a national railway mail system in 1864. The first permanent Railway Post Office route was officially established in August when George B. Armstrong, the assistant postmaster of Chicago, Illinois, placed a postal car equipped for general distribution in service between Chicago and Clinton, Iowa, on the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. This service is differed from the 1862 operation because mail was sorted to and received from each post office along the route, as well as major post offices beyond the route's end-points. Similar routes were established between New York and Washington; Chicago and Rock Island, Illinois; Chicago and Burlington, Illinois; and New York and Erie, Pennsylvania.
Railway Mail Service Inaugurated
In 1869, the Railway Mail Service was officially inaugurated, headed by George B. Armstrong, to handle the transportation and sorting of mail aboard trains. Use of full service RPO cars became widespread, by the 1880s, railway post office routes were operating on the vast majority of passenger trains in the United States.
Passenger trains didn't stop at every station along the route. To pick up the mail pouch from a smaller town non-stop station, a Ward mail-bag catcher, which used a steel catcher arm affixed to the door of railway post office cars, was used by clerks to extend the catcher arm as the train approached a non-stop station along the route and pick up mail from a fixed crane on the fly. The patent for the device was awarded to L.F. Ward of Elyria, Ohio, in January 1867, they began use in 1969. The mail pouch for that station would be tossed out where the station agent or a postal worker would promptly retrieve it.
A fast and exclusive mail train was introduced in September 1875, consisting of five cars, designed to expedite the movement of mail from the east to the west between New York and Chicago. Traveling on the New York Central and the Pennsylvania railroads, the first train carried more than 33 tons of mail in about 24 hours. Railway Mail Clerks were subjected to stringent training and ongoing testing of details regarding their handling of the mail. On a given RPO route, each clerk was expected to know not only the post offices and rail junctions along the route, but also specific local delivery details within each of the larger cities served by the route. On busier routes several railway mail clerks would work as a team in each car.
The Postmaster General's 1896 annual report for the Railway Mail Service indicates that the mails were carried on 172,794 miles of railroad, and 6,779 postal clerks were employed on 152,825 miles of traveling post offices that included railroads, steamboats, and electric cars. Casualty figures for the years 1877 to 1896 showed that 94 clerks were killed in the line of duty, and 821 were seriously injured on the job through derailments, falls, drownings, fires, other work-related accidents and train robberies.
Railway Postal Car Standards Established
In 1912 the Post Office Department's established standards for the construction of railway postal cars. Three basic car or compartment lengths were agreed upon, 15-foot and 30-foot compartments, and full length 60-foot cars; with standard features including letter cases, pouch and paper racks, and overhead boxes. The pouch and paper racks were in five foot sections; each section could be folded up against the side of the car when not in use. Standardization made cars interchangeable so they might be used on any trip assignment. All 60-foot RPO cars built after 1912 were of all-steel construction.
The inside of RPO cars included letter cases for sorting first class mail, pouch and paper racks for sorting magazines and newspapers, and storage space at each end. Mail was sorted for distribution to cities along the route, was cancelled when necessary, and dispatched to post offices in towns along the route. Registered mail was also handled, and the foreman in charge was required to carry a regulation pistol while on duty to discourage theft of the mail. 78 InterpNEWS
On most railroads RPO cars had a mail slot on the side of the car, so that mail could actually be deposited in the car, much like using the corner mail box, while the train was stopped at a station. The mail handled in this manner received a cancellation just as if it had been mailed at a local post office, with the cancel giving the train number, endpoint cities of the RPO route and the date, and offered the fastest delivery as overnight delivery would be virtually assured.
Fast Mail and Express Trains speed Mail between Cities
While the majority of RPO service consisted of one or more cars at the head end of passenger trains, many railroads operated solid mail trains between major cities; these solid mail trains would often carry 300 tons of mail daily. The fast mail train would have precedence over all other scheduled trains on the line. The first transcontinental Fast Mail to the Pacific ran in 1889; from Chicago, this involved the Chicago & Council Bluffs RPO on the Burlington Railroad, Omaha & Ogden RPO on the Union Pacific Railroad, and the Ogden & San Francisco RPO on the Central Pacific Railroad. In later years, the Chicago & Omaha RPO on the Chicago & North Western Railroad gradually took over the link between Chicago and Omaha.
The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe began fast mail service between Los Angeles and Kansas City, Missouri, in November 1897.1 Eventually the service became trains Nos. 7 and 8, the Fast Mail and Express between Los Angeles and Chicago. These trains were assigned a 60-foot Railway Post Office car, such as RPO Car No. 60, and typically four mail storage cars. Additional cars would be added when needed. For a number of years passenger cars would be added to the end of the train, typically a coach-baggage combine and a coach, or just the coach-baggage combine.
For the 10 to 11 Railway Mail Clerks assigned to ATSF Fast Mail and Express Train No. 8, the day would begin in Los Angeles between 8:30 a.m. and an 11:30 departure time. Mail would arrive in separated in pouches and sacks for the various cars on the train. Two storage cars were loaded with sacks and pouches going beyond Winslow, Arizona, the other two storage cars were used for taking on and putting off mail at stations along the line. A pair of Santa Fe employees rode the storage cars, and took in additional sacks and pouches, which were filled by the Railway Mail Clerks as the train rolled along. Sacks and pouches taken in would be sorted by the Railway Mail Clerks, three clerks were typically assigned to first class mail, one handled newspapers, one handled registered mail and one handled mixed mail. Additional clerks were assigned for mail going to specific states, typically California and Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Illinois.2
From the time they started work in Los Angeles to their arrival in Ash Fork, Arizona, after midnight the following morning, the Railway Mail Clerks worked through the night to keep up with the flow of mail being received and distributed. A second crew would replace them at Ash Fork, as the train continued toward Chicago. The Railway Mail Clerks worked in a 28 day cycle, working six days, followed by eight days off, with at least 3 round trips in each month. 79 InterpNEWS
In 1930, more than 10,000 trains were used to move the mail into every city, town, and village in the United States. Shortly after W.W.II, there were 1500 RPO routes crisscrossing the United States with 30,000 workers in more than 4,000 cars.
Mail Sorting and Distribution shifts away from RPO Cars
The decline in passenger travel during the 1930's and 1940's led the railroads to reduce the number of trains, which also affected the number of RPO routes. In February 1941, the first Highway Post Office began service between Washington & Harrisonburg, Va. in a large bus that was equipped somewhat like a RPO car. In 1949, the Post Office Department renamed the Railway Mail Service to the Postal Transportation Service, or PTS. In 1951 there were 700 RPO routes in service, less than half the number of routes than at the end of W.W.II. More than 130 HPO routes were established by 1955.
In 1963, the Sectional Center concept of transit mail service was announced, along with ZIP coding of mail. With this new system the first three digits of the ZIP code describe the central mail processing Sectional Center Facility, or SCF. The SCF sorts mail to all post offices with those first 3 digits in their ZIP codes. Mail is then sorted according to the final 2 digits of the ZIP code and the sorted mail is sent to these post offices in the early morning. As centralized processing of mail was implemented, there was little need for the RPO Cars and HPO busses. Long distance truck transportation was replacing RPO routes and first-class mail began to be transported in airplanes. By 1965, only 190 trains carried mail.
By 1970, the railroads carried virtually no First-Class Mail. In 1971, the Post Office Department terminated seven of the eight remaining routes. The only remaining railway post office ran between New York and Washington, D.C., the highest populated corridor in the nation, which made its last run on June 30, 1977.
For additional reading:
Bruns, James H. Mail on the Move. Polo, Illinois: Transportation Trails, 1993. Romanski, Fred J. The "Fast Mail": A History of the U.S. Railway Mail Service, Prolog Magazine, Fall 2005, Vol. 37, No. 3, College Park, MD. White, John H. Jr. The American Railroad Passenger Car. 1978, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD. 2 vols. Wilking, Clarence. The Railway Mail Service, Railway Mail Service Library, Boyce, Virginia, 1985.
1 New York Times, Santa Fe Fast Mail Train.; Twenty-eight Miles Made Yesterday in Twenty-two Minutes. November 22, 1897, page 3. 2 Romanski, Fred J. Prolog Magazine, The "Fast Mail": A History of the U.S. Railway Mail Service, Fall 2005, Vol. 37, No. 3 80 InterpNEWS
Unlocking The Minds Of Your Audience Speaking Tip # 66
Ethan Rotman Speak Easy
Chances are, we've all tried to use a key that is rusted, dirty, and nicked. Yes, the key might open the lock, but it takes more effort and frustration.
Content is the key to a good presentation, but if key is not well polished, the presentation won't measure up to expectations.
A good presentation is easy to follow and fun to hear. The audience is intrigued and inspired, and the room is filled with energy. This happens when the speaker's goal is to allow the audience to focus on the meaning of the words, rather than exert effort trying to figure out what they mean. The more distractions (rust, dirt, nicks) the speaker can remove, the easier it is for the key to unlock the minds of the audience.
Common types of speaker rust, dirt, and nicks include:
Irrelevant information or relevant information delivered at the wrong time. As a speaker, it's easier to determine what to say than to know what not to say. Some speakers assume they are the center of attention and believe the audience wants to hear everything they have to say. Effective speakers understand the audience is the center of attention, so everything said must benefit the audience, not satisfy the ego of the speaker.
Poor presentation style. Distracting mannerisms, verbal fidgeting (ums, ahs), and pacing back and forth all detract from speaker credibility. Rather than being able to relax and absorb what's being said, the audience only shares the speaker's discomfort.
Poorly designed talk. The audience expends energy trying to piece together bits of information, rather than being able to expand on the ideas being presented.
Poorly designed graphics. The audience is forced to guess what an image means, rather than just listen to the speaker and understand the points being made.
Lack of attention to audience needs. An audience member who is thirsty, hungry, deprived of caffeine or a health break has a difficult time listening, let alone focusing and appreciating.
A good presentation demonstrates respect for the audience. It says the speaker values the audience enough to make the experience completely enjoyable. Most people will forgive poor presentation style if the content is valuable or interesting; however, they have every right to expect a presentation with good content and excellent delivery.
© 2011 iSpeakEASY. All rights reserved -. We help people profit from their words. Call for information on individual coaching or group workshops. More tips can be found at www.iSpeakEASYblog.wordpress.com. 81 InterpNEWS Rails-with-Trails
Trail users and trains safely coexist on a rail-with-trail section of the Chehalis Western Trail in Washington State. — Photo CC Rails-to-Trails Conservancy https://www.railstotrails.org/build-trails/trail-building-toolbox/basics/rail-with-trail/
Many people are familiar with the concept of rail-trails, which are multi-use trails developed on former railroad corridors. With the increasing popularity of rail-trails across the country, communities are looking for other innovative ways of securing land for safe, popular and effective trail development. An emerging answer is rails-with-trails, which are trails adjacent to or within an active railroad corridor. The rail-with-trail concept provides even more opportunities for the creation of trail systems that enhance local transportation systems, offering safe and attractive community connections. 82 InterpNEWS Rails-with-trails can also provide a solution for rail companies and local governments concerned about safety risks posed by those who illegally cross rail lines. By providing a safe, attractive alternative for cyclists and pedestrians, often with fencing between the pathway and the railway, rails-with-trails can eliminate the previous incentive to use the tracks as a shortcut.
As of 2018, there are more than 350 rails-with-trails in the United States, with the length located along active railroad corridors totaling more than 930 miles—and more are being built each year.
Reports
The three most comprehensive resources on rails-with-trails were developed to address common concerns and highlight best practices used in this unique type of trail development. The reports include safety statistics, design guidelines, recommendations for acquisition methods and liability protection, sample legal agreements and case studies. Use these documents to learn more about successful rails-with-trails and to determine the best strategies for negotiating with the railroad or other managing agency:
America's Rails-with-Trails: A Resource for Planners, Agencies and Advocates on Trails Along Active Railroad Corridors. Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, 2013. Rails-with-Trails: Lessons Learned. Alta Planning + Design and the U.S. Department of Transportation, 2002. Rails-with-Trails: Design, Management, and Operating Characteristics of 61 Trails Along Active Rail Lines. Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, 2000. (Note: visit the active website to access the links in blue – JV)
A list of known rails-with-trails, examples of easements and lease agreements, a list of state Recreational Use Statutes, selected rail-with-trail feasibility studies and design guidelines, and a rail-with-trail image library are also available in the online appendix for America’s Rails-with-Trails.
Benefits
Rail-trails are an excellent repurposing of former railroad corridors, often transforming once-derelict properties into vibrant community assets. Rails-with-trails offer the same health, transportation and environmental benefits by utilizing existing resources when there may be limited appropriate space for multi-use trails. Rails- with-trails enhance local transportation networks by providing non-motorized connections that are sometimes preferable to on-road bike lanes or sidewalks located on congested, dangerous roadways.
Rails-with-trails benefit railroads, too. In most cases, the trail manager purchases a use easement or license from the railroad, providing financial compensation and in some cases reducing liability responsibility and cost to the railroad. In some instances, a fully developed trail will also provide the railroad with improved access for maintenance vehicles. 83 InterpNEWS
Concerns
Safety is probably the biggest concern when considering a rail-with-trail project. Both railroads and potential trail managers may be apprehensive about placing a public trail close to an active railroad track, fearing an increased risk of accidents along the corridor. However, many successful rails-with-trails across the country stand as a testament to the ability of trains and trails to coexist. For a list of several rails-with-trails and associated information such as characteristics of train traffic, safe design and exposure to risk and liability, see the Rail-with-Trail Survey Findings in Section IV of America's Rails-with-Trails.
The perception that large railroad companies have deep financial pockets forces the issues of trail insurance and liability to the forefront of negotiations with the railroad for trail development. Fortunately, various levels of protection are available to railroads and trail managers. State Recreational Use Statutes (RUSs) provide landowners with special protection from liability. The State of Maine amended its Recreational Use Statute to offer the same degree of protection to owners of railroad and utility corridors. Some railroads may require trail managers to accept full liability—also called indemnification—when negotiating a rail-with-trail agreement.
For a more comprehensive analysis of the safety and legal issues associated with rails-with-trails, see Section III of America's Rails-with-Trails.
Large Class I railroads may be hesitant to enter into rail-with-trail agreements because a trail would mean a loss of right-of-way width and a perceived potential for lawsuits. However, smaller railroad operations may be more willing to negotiate an agreement, especially transit or tourist trains that are typically owned and managed by governmental entities whose mission it is to serve the public interest. The Rail-with-Trail Case Studies found in Section V of America's Rails-with-Trails include specific information on three successful trails alongside excursion railroads.
Environmental contaminants may also be a concern and should be addressed when developing a feasibility study (see "Steps in Feasibility Study" on p. 32 of Rails-with-Trails: Lessons Learned).
Note: Having worked on interpretive plans for many Rails-to-Trails projects, I found this website to be a valuable resource for any organization thinking of developing a Rails-to-Trails project. I have left the links for resources available at the main page of the website in blue for your reference. A great resource. J. Veverka, IN Editor/Interpretive Planning Consultant. https://www.railstotrails.org/build-trails/trail-building-toolbox/basics/rail-with-trail/ 84 InterpNEWS Mount Mitchell Adds Radio to Maximize Visitor Safety
North Carolina's First State Park Notches Another "First".
Linda Folland Communications Manager Information Station Specialists, Inc. www.theRADIOsource.com
John Whitehouse installs the Information Station antenna on a tower at Mount Mitchell State Park.
ASHEVILLE, NC: The installation of an Information Radio Station at Mount Mitchell State Park in North Carolina has been completed just before the snow flies. Located on the peak of the highest mountain east of the Mississippi River, the station will be tasked with keeping visitors safe and informed as they snake up the steep access road from the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Observation Deck – 6600 feet above sea level.
Stunning View from atop Mount Mitchell's Information Radio Tower Foreground: antenna & visitor center; Background: Black Mountain skyline 85 InterpNEWS
Alan Orovitz, Park IT manager, spearheaded the project, providing guidance for the station’s antenna location and its innovative audio management system. Costs were mitigated through the purchase of key preowned/certified RF components from provider Information Station Specialists.
Posing with the station’s support tower prior to installation (left to right) Tim Clark, Rick Harkins, Joe Lappin, Duke Rose and Alan Orovitz – all with Friends of Mount Mitchell State Park
A triangular steel tower was erected to support the antenna, instead of the conventional wood or aluminum pole, due to the high winds that can be present atop Mount Mitchell. After the tower was erected and the antenna tuned, Orovitz reported to The Source that a robust signal can be received at the Park entrance, located on Highway 128 and the Blue Ridge Parkway, 3 miles away and 1000 feet down the mountain.
Full coverage of the park’s entrance road is important, so visitors can be apprised of adverse or changing conditions as they ascend to the summit. In a climb of that magnitude, road conditions can go from dry to icy before drivers know it. Another goal of the broadcast is to orient visitors, directing them to continue past the park office, restaurant and campground all the way to the summit’s observation deck, where the best views can be taken in. According park staff, the scenery along the route is so stunning, that some visitors pull up short, take their pictures and turn around, not realizing that the best views are at the top of the mountain – just ahead.
That's a Lot of Signal
Literally. This new quick-deploy radio station is specifically for parking-lot-sized applications.
Emergency, health and school officials have requested a highly portable, short-range radio system for some time now. Schools have envisioned one that can be used to communicate with parents arriving at reunification sites after school tragedies; for emergency managers, a way to talk to people who show up at evacuation meeting sites; for health officials, a means of informing motorists who line up at points of medicine distribution (PODs) or treatment centers. 86 InterpNEWS
Innovative Funding Options
Equipment and services provider Information Station Specialists has introduced a lease-to-own financing plan for agencies who wish to obtain radio and related systems but don’t have grant opportunities or available budget. The short 6-year agreement averages between $7 and $19 a day for Information Station Specialists' most commonly purchased information radio systems.
For agencies that would be required to issue requests for quotes, the “H-GAC Buy” buying cooperative may be an attractive option. If an agency is (or becomes) an H-GAC Buy member, they can purchase products against an existing contract, circumventing the need for a competitive procurement process.
Opinion
All-digital AM is coming – but not to worry.
How will digital broadcasting on AM affect Information (TIS/HAR) Radio Stations?
WASHINGTON, DC: Just before Thanksgiving, the FCC opened up a "Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" seeking comment on the advisability of allowing full-power broadcast radio stations the option to migrate from analog to all-digital. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has signaled that it will support the effort, which all but guarantees that it will roll forward in some form or another. But how could this change impact 10-watt (TIS/HAR) Information Radio Stations?
Answer: Most 10 watt Information Radio Stations will see no adverse effects. Why?
AM Receivers The main reason is because the change to "all-digital" affects only specific broadcasters. It does not affect the ability of existing (and future) AM radio receivers to receive analog AM radio signals. Yes, even future "HD" (digital) radio receivers will not be "all digital." They will still continue to pick up analog AM signals in addition to digital ones.
10 Watt Information Stations will not be required to make any changes of any kind. They will remain 100% analog. That means they will continue to be receivable on all AM receivers. 87 InterpNEWS
AM Broadcasters Commercial AM broadcasters will not be compelled to make the change to all-digital. It will be totally optional. So, in real-world terms, the broadcasters with the deepest pockets and in the most competitive markets will be firt to make the cut-over. That means you can expect to see it happen initially at the big city AM stations. Due to the 5-figure cost for a broadcaster to make the upgrade, it remains to be seen if the conversion will penetrate to marginally profitable radio stations in smaller cities and rural areas.
Increased noise? The new digital format (which is named “MA3”) that will be employed by broadcasters could affect a few Information Stations. But like the proverbial slot machine, the cherries would have to line up just right for it to be an issue. The broadcast station would have to be 1) in the immediate area, 2) on the first adjacent frequency, and 3) would have to add digital side-bands – which not all broadcasters will do. Digital sidebands will double the digital station's bandwidth and could cause noise to Information Stations on next- door frequencies, if they are really close by.
Digital downside? It’s the opinion of the American Association of Information Radio Operators (AAIRO) that the real risk of an All-Digital AM conversion is not to Information Stations but to the broadcasters who choose to make the change. Certainly they will reap the quality and bandwidth benefits for a not-so-small investment. Someday they will be able to play music again and may have multiple program streams. But listeners who have digital AM radios won’t notice much of a difference if their favorite station goes digital, especially if the format is news-talk – like most AM’s are today. Voice quality on analog AM is already pretty good. And because only 18% of cars on the road have digital-capable receivers, if a broadcast station made the cut-over today, it would instantly evaporate 82% of its audience , chasing the majority of the listeners to FM, satellite radio – and, ironically – to AM competitors that choose to remain analog.
Emergency Consideration As pointed out by Paul Riismandel in his recent Radio Survivor blog entitled, “Can We Save AM Radio by Killing it?”, one of the worst results would be if during an emergency, local listeners would fire up their battery-operated analog radios only to find that their local radio broadcaster has gone-all digital. Instead of updated news and emergency information, they would receive an amorphous mass of digital hiss.
That could be an unintended – but very real – consequence of the all-digital AM conversion, which would serve to underline why localized Information Radio Stations (TIS) could be the real lifesavers when their communities count on them most. 88 InterpNEWS Interpreters are Political!
Rod Burns, B.Ed. CPHI Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada
I've mentioned to many people, that as a Heritage Interpreter, our lives spin around 3 words Relate, Reveal and Provoke. To achieve the 3 concepts, there are mountains of research we must dive into, in developing any presentation theme. Further, we must be aware of the broad range of issues which might be touched on by a programs theme. Extensive historical research as well as reading contemporary articles must be undertaken to become conversant in the different points of view and perspectives.
In developing any theme, I keep in mind a movie which I watched many years ago The Other Side of the Coin. The movie centers around a social conflict, in which individual opinions will sway the verdict in a trial. Early into the movie, the viewer is asked: “ How many sides to a coin are there?
Most people in a quick response will say 2 sides. Others, taking a second longer, will reply 3 sides. Find a coin, and observe carefully! How many sides? What is your answer, if the coin has flat sides around the outer edge? These flat sides I relate to how a persons opinion about an issue is formed: the persons age, culture, education, working language(s), travels to other lands and cross cultural experience. Each flat edge will influence a persons final view / opinion about an issue brought up in the Heritage Interpreters presentation.
I am no longer in uniform and limited to staying within government regulations. For the past 30 years I've been self employed in the Eco-Tourism industry. I've made it point to keep up with the varieties of perspectives held by others towards all manner of local and international issues. 89 InterpNEWS
Relating
Where I call home, these past 35 years, British Columbia, Canada there are 2, very large issues which as a Heritage Interpreter, I cannot avoid becoming involved in. My book library, shelves of documents, gigabytes of computer files grow weekly. My calendars over the years identify the conferences, personal meetings, public meetings, rallies, protests which I've attended. I might be a passive observer or up front at the microphone asking questions or summarizing an opinion on the issue at the forefront of the meeting.
Revealing
Below, are two key issues on which I've filled shelves with case files:
1) Forestry: 2) British Columbia, began its Green Gold Rush in the 1870's. Land grants were given by the government of the day, to attract settlers. Private investors negotiated with the provincial government to obtain forest land grants. In one case, the Government, on the condition that the company build and maintain a railway, connecting coastal communities. (E&N Railway Land Grant with the Dunsmuir family) was granted in perpetuity, a 220 kilometer long by 30 km ((150 miles x 20 miles) wide forest concession. The family company would own any mineral claims (tunnels of coal and veins of gold). They were also permitted to sell any of the cleared lands for farm or town developments.
In the years 1950 to 2004, dozens of companies have been granted renewable Tree Farm Licences. Initially, these licences required the companies to build mills and processing facilities in the area of their timber harvest. Since 2004, the local processing requirement has been removed. Loggers / forest workers are no longer employees but sign individual services contracts. In 2019, 17 of 35 major saw, pulp & paper mills have permanently shut down around the province. The offshore owned companies have taken 400 million dollars in profits generated in BC to purchase similar mills in the United States and Europe 90 InterpNEWS
A major issue generating extensive debate, born 25 year ago, centers around Corporate Governance. The corporate collective, through lobbyists and in-side government staffers are writing government policy around cutting standards and local processing requirements.
A Second Forest issue revolves around social responsibility and community survival. As long as the companies are cutting on public lands, do they have a long term social responsibility to ensure the life long employment of workers; to pay sufficient taxes to keep open local schools, hospitals, community services / libraries / recreational facilities?
A Third portfolio of forest issues focuses on Environment Sustainability: Should forests be clear cut or select cut? Are Forest Companies and their contractors responsible for ensuring that streams and rivers retain quality habitat, to a standard which ensures the continued healthy existence of birds, forest animals, aquatic life? Old Growth Forests: How much original forest needs to be retained to ensure full multi-thousand years old bio- diversity, not just a few species of trees, to be harvested every 60 – 80 years?
More communities, around the province, are arguing that the melt waters coming off massive forest clear-cuts are responsible for Spring time flash floods followed by summer droughts.
Company officials declare that climate change is responsible for the flash flood and dried up fish rearing channels, not their logging practices! They have contracted Professional Engineers ensuring Professional Reliance for every road and cut block.
Blending Social and Environment, increasingly communities are needing to spend 100's of millions of dollars to mitigate flash floods coming down clear cut slopes into community water reservoirs. 91 InterpNEWS
The lowered water quality has increased health concerns. Who should pay for new water filtration systems? The government who wrote water management recommendations, the logging companies or the downstream communities ?
2) Commercial Fishing in the Future of British Columbia There are 26 Indigenous / Native Indian Nations which have been living / traveling / trading in this area for over 14,000 years. Critical to their survival have been the seasonal catching of 5 species of Pacific Salmon. With the arrival of European settlers after 1872, catching and processing millions of tons of salmon led to the development of hundreds of coastal communities. Prior to the 1970's and home freezers, 56 Salmon Canneries were located along the coast. In 2019, the last cannery of the 56 closed. Fish are now cooled and shipped to Asian countries for canning / filleting / turning into frozen fish sticks. From there, they are distributed around the world.
September 2019, commercial fishers have gone to the Federal Government to plead for financial relief. Over the past 20 years, fish catches, globally have been in critical decline (Dr. D. Pauly: Vanishing Fish, 2018) The catch this season, not only in British Columbia, was a disaster, with the near collapse of what was forecast to be an above average returns. The State of Alaska has put in place a closure of their cod fishery, starting in 2020, to be kept in place until stocks recover.
As Heritage Interpreter / ecotour guide I am asked a huge range of questions by visitors involving histories, international trade agreements, possible reasons for the international decline in fish volumes. What might be the environmental changes which have influenced fish populations?
3) Farmed Salmon vs. Wild Salmon
Since 1980, Atlantic Salmon, hatched in Norway have been shipped to British Columbia, Chile, Australia and Scotland. Over an 18 month period, the smolts are raised in open water net-pens. In British Columbia, there are 135 farms. Each can raise approximately 1 million fish. The farmed salmon industry means employment for about 6,000 people on the farms and in 5 processing facilities. 92 InterpNEWS
Issues which have become international media stories include a) whether or not the disease PRV was brought over from Norway and now infects B.C waters. Some fishers will argue that PRV triggers a second disease, Infectious Heart Muscle Anemia. This disease weakens wild salmon, to the point of death long before they are able to reach their spawning gravels, 100's of kilometers up fresh water rivers.
Internationally, from Scotland, Chile, Australia and Canada, the issue of exploding populations of Sea Lice vs. Atlantic Salmon Farms, is a regular conversation topic. Sea Lice, from the opinion of Commercial Fishers and Marine Environmentalists are key to the decimation of wild salmon populations. Conversely, the Farm Owners claim they have had to spend in excess of 50 million $ plus annual costs to soak their farmed stock in the chemical “Slice” to clean off clouds of wild sea lice. 93 InterpNEWS
Clouds of wild sea lice on s salmon.
Provocation:
In closing, I hope that I have given you pause, to ask are Heritage Interpreters' Political?
I have taken 3 key hot themes within my sphere of influence, as examples to say YES WE ARE!
I hope that you will take the topics of Forests and Fish and put them into your own life sphere. We need the fish for food. The forests we rely on for paper products, reading materials as well as to act as natural water managers of volume and quality. Bears, Eagles, Ravens all rely on spawning salmon to put on enough body fat to survive the winter and breed next years young!
For urban Heritage Interpreters, how critical has it been to make political presentations, away from your place of employment? Do you get passionate about the issue within Democratic Capitalism, Equality, Social Justice?
As a Heritage Interpreter: maximize your political freedom: be it through your music, poetry, essays, theatre, public speaking!
Rod Burns, B.Ed. CPHI Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada [email protected] 94 InterpNEWS
“Seems Unusual,”
Dr. Martha Benn Macdonald
“Seems unusual, don’t you think, that Jonathan Edwards (left) and Aaron, Burr, Jr.(right), are buried next to each other, I said to my friend, as we sipped Starbucks’ special Christmas coffee, a delightful blend of ginger, orange, and cedar. “Not really,” he answered, explaining that that Aaron Burr’s mother was Esther Edwards, daughter of Jonathan Edwards. “She married the elder Aaron Burr, a Presbyterian minister, who served as the second president of New Jersey College, later Princeton. So Edwards was the grandfather of the younger Burr.” I was intrigued. My friend, a graduate of Princeton, asked if I’d ever been to the campus. “Yes, when my sister, Rose, and our family friend, George, completed their work at Westminster Choir College, the commencement ceremony was held at Princeton. “Beautiful!” I still had trouble connecting the younger Burr who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel on July 11, 1804, with Edwards who had preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” My visual image was a pistol for Burr (in the duel) and a shovel in Edward’s sermon (God holding you over the fires of Hell). We analyzed the visual. “Well, you’ve told me about interpreting Theodosia Burr Alston, who was married to Joseph Alston, governor of South Carolina, and about writing a story about her.” “I did. This was a gentle, sort of poetic story, which my mother and I did together. Mamma did the illustrations, and I did the narrative. The story portrays the final days of little Aaron Burr Alston, son of Theodosia Burr and Joseph Alston. At ten, the child died of malaria. In addition, I grew up hearing the story of the Aaron Burr rock in Chesterville where Burr, a prisoner for treason, jumped from his horse in front of the tavern there on the hill and gave a speech, hoping some of the men who had gathered to listen, might rescue him.” But they didn’t. My father, a medical doctor and a history buff, always took our guests to the King’s Mountain Battleground or to the Aaron Burr rock. I asked Daddy why Burr had been accused of treason. “Because he wanted to start his own independent territory by seizing Texas and Mexico, and he had been caught in Alabama. When no one stepped up to support him in Chesterville, Burr was seized and bound to his horse as the Army whisked him off to Lewis’ Tavern a few miles up the road---then led him back to New York. I asked my friend if he’d studied Hamilton and Burr. “Not really, but someone gave me a ticket to see Hamilton. That’s how I learned so much about Alexander Hamilton.” 95 InterpNEWS
“Fascinating!” I answered. A Presbyterian minister, my friend related that Hamilton was a Deist and Burr a Presbyterian who, for various reasons, did not receive final rights. Burr and Hamilton had argued for a long time. Burr supported General Gates and the Lees. Hamilton, on the other hand, attacked the Lees and Gates. The rivalry began years before the duel. In fact, in the Monticello Christmas catalogue, there are the Hamilton socks and the Jefferson socks, and the caption says they were political rivals. Even though they were rivals, they were similar. Both were small men, both were orphaned when they were young (Burr’s mother died on April 7, 1758, of smallpox, and Hamilton was the illegitimate son of West Indian parents: Elizabeth and Philip Schyler), and both were attorneys in New York City. Allegedly, Burr’s fees were higher than Hamilton’s, and Burr won most of his cases. Further, Hamilton had to build up his practice; Burr did not. So what was the conflict? According to scholars, the conflict was an old one: an argument that occurred long before Burr defeated Hamilton in the duel. Hamilton had written to Charles Pinckney back in 1792 that Burr was not dignified. In addition, wishing to crush John Adams, Hamilton had written a pamphlet which Burr exposed. Because Hamilton was from the West Indies, he could not be elected to office. Burr could and was elected Jefferson’s Vice-President in 1804. And so their conflicts continued until Burr and Hamilton met on July 11, 1804, where they cast lots for the choice of positions. After salutations, they walked ten full paces and cast lots for the choice of positions. Burr fired, and Hamilton fell at once. Many scholars will disagree for a variety of reasons, but that argument is not the reason for this article. One conversation or another leads to another. If my friend and I had not discussed the graves at Princeton, my interest may not have been piqued. But it has been. If I were to be an interpreter at Princeton, I would probably go with the visuals: a pistol and a shovel, and create a dialogue based on these images. *
Dr. Martha Macdonald College English instructor (Ret), author, and performer. [email protected] 96 InterpNEWS
“Daughter of a Southern Railway Surgeon, Anecdotes and More”
By Dr. Martha Benn Macdonald
Southern Railroad surgery car ca. 1950,s
I imagine everyone has a story of a train or a train trip, perhaps only a ride through the Smoky Mountains to look at the gorgeous leaves. My older sister, Rose’s story seemed different and showed intelligence on her part. I was always excited when my sister came home from NYC. Mamma and Daddy and my identical twin sister, Mary, and I drove to Charlotte after church to meet her. This particular Sunday in March, however, was bleak. The sky was gray, threatening rain, and meeting Rose often boded something unpleasant with my father, a Southern Railway Surgeon. The two never got along. First, the train was late arriving at the station, so my father began pacing. This was in 1958. We finally saw Rose who was beautiful (so I thought). She’d lost weight. She was a professional singer, and there was an elegance about her. But something had happened, and I intuitively knew it when I saw her. She apologized for being late and explained that she’d lost her ticket. “Why did you do that?” my father asked. “I don’t know how it happened,” she defended, and, of course, in his Calvinistic mind, accidents were never allowed. Never, ever, even with car keys. Rose explained that she’d shown the conductor her fur coat (which displayed her name) and had explained to the conductor that her father, Dr. Roderick Macdonald, was a Southern Railroad surgeon. The conductor agreed to let her ride, but only if her father paid the ticket fee in Charlotte. Daddy did, of course. But our ride home to Rock Hill was not entirely pleasant, especially since everyone was hungry. So there you go, or there we go. I felt compassion for my sister and felt that her negotiations with the conductor had been clever and logical. I wondered if I, rather shy in those days, could have been so astute. I’d grown up with train stories. So had my father in Blackstock, S.C. He was born there in 1898, he told us that 27 trains passed through the tiny hamlet. He remembered that his Uncle Ruffie (his mother’s younger brother), a brakeman on the railroad, was buried without a head. What? Yes! One rainy night in April of 1887, James Rufus Oates reached out to pick up the mail, and his great raincoat was swept up between the wheels, pulling him under. Ruffie lost his head, and he’s buried in the cemetery of Historic Concord Presbyterian Church without a head. Gloomy! His mother’s message on his tombstone is something to the effect: “I hear your footsteps, and in my dreams I hear thy loving voice and see thy tender face.” Because her husband had abandoned Mary Elizabeth Rosborough Oates after the War (he is not buried in the old cemetery), she must have felt especially protective of her two children. InterpNEWS 97
My Uncle Wesley Starnes, who grew up a few miles down the road from Blackstock and Woodward, remembered jumping for fun on bales of cotton that were piled up by the railroad track, waiting to be hauled by the Charlotte/Augusta Railroad farther South. His prank occurred on Halloween night. Railroad farther South. I love hearing stories of trains and feeling the excitement, yet at the same time, a sort of fear, when trains come in, their great wheels turning. Even that summer in 1966, when I took the day train from College Park, Maryland, where I was working on my M.A. in English, to Washington, D.C. where I served as an intern for our Congressman from the Fifth District in South Carolina, the Honorable Tom S. Gettys, I felt a little afraid, and I cannot explain why. Returning to College Park, via Union Station in the late afternoon, I was at ease. Before I completed my Ph.D., I had a few more train trips: from Williamsburg, Virginia, where I was teaching at the College of William and Mary, to Washington, D.C. Years earlier, when my father was a student at the University of South Carolina, there was a fire in Augusta which could be seen from miles around (sorry about the passive voice, but I hear Daddy’s voice. When he told stories, he used the passive voice. He said that many of the boys road on the flat cars from Columbia to Augusta just to see the fire. What fun in 1915! But he dared to skip school, rather amazing for the son of a very strict Presbyterian Scotsman from the Outer Hebrides, and rode with a friend in a Hup mobile to Augusta. Daddy had to pay the price, however, when Old Professor Snowden, an elder in the First Presbyterian Church, known for his top hat and cane, told my father that he’d have to repeat the course. “But I have an A in Chemistry.” “You heard me, Macdonald. Repeat the course.” Daddy went to see the Dean who awarded him a C. Disappointed, for sure, my father was grateful not to have failed. And then not long after that, in fact, just before the Armistice was signed, Daddy was drafted: to Plattsburg, New York, and Illinois, where he froze: he had no Johns. This was his first trip out of the sunny South. He returned to the university, finished his classes in 1919, including acting in a course in French Drama, totally unrelated to medicine. After receiving his degree, he headed to the Medical College of Charleston (later the University), and then took a freighter to study in Vienna and Budapest. And one last train story. When my father’s younger brother, James Claiborne Macdonald, suffered from an appendicitis, his mother (Daddy’s mother) took him by train to Rock Hill, where Daddy later settled, and old Dr. Fennell who practiced at St. Philip’s Catholic Hospital, walked up a block on Confederate Avenue and commanded the driver to stay while he did surgery. After performing the surgery on my Uncle Claiborne, the driver managed to switch to another train (the story is a little vague now in my mind), and my grandmother took her son home to Blackstock. He later became a student at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. Instead of studying, he drove the president of the college around and enjoyed life, much to his parents’ chagrin, much to my father’s disappointment. And I could add more stories and more about the railroads, but maybe I will another time.
Dr. Martha Macdonald College English instructor (Ret), author, and performer. [email protected] 98 InterpNEWS Opening Up New Mexico’s Southeast: A Visionary, Water, Town sites and a Railroad - Part 1
By Mark H. Gutzman, Assistant Forest Archaeologist, Lincoln National Forest, New Mexico
By the end of the U.S. Civil War, federal actions to encourage white settlement in the western territories and more tightly bind them to the Union, were institutionalized and gathered momentum through the Morrill Act, the Homestead Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act. Enterprising individuals utilizing these federal doorways opened up the west for settlement through ranching, mining, and railroad construction. This is the story of one such man.
Charles Bishop Eddy (Figure 1) came to the Pecos in 1881 from Milford, New York at the age of 24, accompanied by his older brother John Arthur, and their Colorado ranch partner George N. Bissell, just three years after the famous Lincoln County War. They hoped to become big cattle ranchers in the New Mexico territory, joining such renowned cattlemen as Charles Goodnight, Oliver Loving, and John Chisum, who were running large herds in the Pecos Valley. After arriving in the small cow town of Seven Rivers, their first order of business was the creation of the Eddy-Bissell Cattle Company. By 1884 their cattle company had developed into the Halagueño (promising) Ranch, which spread across an area from Seven Rivers to La Huerta (the orchard), a suburb of present-day Carlsbad, New Mexico, USA.
FIGURE 1. CHARLES B. EDDY.
In 1887 Eddy built the Halagueño diversion ditch (Figure 2) from the Pecos River, to “water the desert,” as a requirement of The Desert Land Act. Eddy then incorporated the venture as the Pecos Valley Land and Ditch Company. Patrick F. “Pat” Garrett, along with promoter Charles Greene, joined forces with Eddy in 1888 to build a system of canals and flumes to divert water to their ranches and properties (Figure 5).
Since it was the desire of Eddy to bring Europeans to the West’s clear skies and clean water, a town site would be needed, and that site would need water (Hufstelter et al, 1993, Bogener, 2017). Greene was able to procure investors from the east in the form of the multi-millionaire Robert Weems Tansill (founder of Tansill’s “Punch 5 Cent Cigar” in Chicago), and railroad tycoon James John “J.J.” Hagerman. With this capital, Eddy et al, laid plans for a new town on the west bank of the Pecos River. FIGURE 2. HALAGUEÑO FLUME ACROSS THE PECOS RIVER MAY 1, 1903. P E Eddy had young cottonwood trees (Alamo in Spanish) planted along the streets of his new town for shade. The lining of streets with cottonwood trees would become an aspect of future Eddy town sites (Figure 3). The town was incorporated as Eddy on September 15, 1888 (Hufstelter et al, 1993, Bogener, 2017). 99 InterpNEWS
The United States Congress passed The Desert Land Act on March 3, 1877, to encourage and promote the economic development of the arid and semiarid public lands of the Western states.
Through the Act, individuals may apply for a desert land entry, to reclaim, irrigate, and cultivate arid and semiarid public lands.
This Act amended the FIGURE 3. THE TOWN OF EDDY CIRCA 1890. Homestead Act of 1862.
Greene was able to procure investors from the east in the form of the multi-millionaire Robert Weems Tansill (founder of Tansill’s “Punch 5 Cent Cigar” in Chicago), and railroad tycoon James John “J.J.” Hagerman. With this capital, Eddy et al, laid plans for a new town on the west bank of the Pecos River. Eddy had young cottonwood trees (Alamo in Spanish) planted along the streets of his new town for shade. The lining of streets with cottonwood trees would become an aspect of future Eddy town sites (Figure 3). The town was incorporated as Eddy on September 15, 1888 (Hufstelter et al, 1993, Bogener, 2017).
The following year (1889), the territorial legislature formed two new counties, taking them out of the large Lincoln County, naming them Eddy and Chavez. The county seat was at Seven Rivers; however, during the elections of 1890 for new county commissioners, a referendum was put on the ballot to change the seat to the town of Eddy and to build its first courthouse (Figure 4). The referendum passed, but without a lot to build it upon. Charles Eddy eventually donated an entire block of land for the new courthouse. In 1899 the town of Eddy was renamed Carlsbad and became the first town Charles Eddy established in FIGURE 4. EDDY COUNTY COURTHOUSE. New Mexico but would not be his last.
With the need to have easier and quicker access for settlers and export of goods, the Pecos River Railroad Company (PRR) was chartered on March 1, 1890, to build a line fifty-four miles in length from Pecos City (now Pecos, Texas) to the Texas-New Mexico Territory border. As a long-time railroad tycoon, the road was organized by J.J. Hagerman (Figure 7) as part of Eddy’s project to irrigate and develop lands along the Pecos River. Their capital investment was $750,000, and the business office was set up in Pecos. 100 InterpNEWS
Their capital investment was $750,000, and the business office was set up in Pecos. Members of the first board of directors included Hagerman, Charles B. Eddy, Henry C. Lowe, Edgar B. Brown, J. G. O'Connor, W. H.
FIGURE 6. PRR TRAIN CROSSES THE PECOS RIVER VIADUCT HEADING NORTH TO EDDY, NEW MEXICO.
Austin, and Harold P. Brown. The railroad opened on January 1, 1891. In that year the company owned no equipment and earned $3,193 in passenger revenue and $12,837 in freight revenue.
This enterprise was Eddy’s first experience in the railroad business. The Pecos River was controlled by the Pecos Valley Railway Company, which built north from the Texas-New Mexico Territory border to Eddy (now Carlsbad) and was later extended to Roswell, New Mexico. The Pecos Valley would come to be known as “The Fruit Belt” of New Mexico (Figure 8). Through extensions and mergers, the Pecos Valley Railway Company became the Pecos River Railroad and the line was abandoned by 1991. Eddy was not one to sit idle. With his name set in history by 1889, Eddy had accomplished a great deal with his New Mexico business ventures. However, this was only the beginning. On February 9, 1889, the Lincoln County Leader (newspaper) wrote an article on White Oaks & Lincoln County, an article that spoke of mining and the lack of transportation to get the product to market. He had also heard of a few attempts to build a railroad from El Paso, Texas to White Oaks, New Mexico Territory. This knowledge sparked in idea in Eddy,
so he traveled back to New York seeking investors. This story will continue in FIGURE 7. JAMES JOHN Part 2 with the establishment of the El Paso & Northeastern Railway, the HAGERMAN WAS AN AMERICAN INDUSTRIALIST WHO OWNED establishment of three more major railroad towns to support the railroad and MINES, RAILROADS AND CORPORATE FARMS IN THE its axillary industries (logging for railroad ties, and coal mining for fuel) along AMERICAN WEST DURING THE with the continuing development of water systems for both the railroads LATE 19TH AND EARLY 20TH CENTURIES. HE WAS ONE OF locomotives and the new inhabitants of these desert towns. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL MEN IN TERRITORIAL NEW MEXICO. 101 InterpNEWS
Drawing Image from pamphle t to draw
FIGURE 8. A FARMHOUSE NEAR ROSWELL, NM.
FIGURE 9. SHATTONS' CAR - ARNO, TEXAS [PECOS RIVER FIGURE 10. PECOS VALLEY AND NORTHERN RAILWAY’S APPLE TRAIN RAILROAD]. LEAVING PECOS VALLEY TO MARKET. References:
Bogener, Stephen. 2017. Ditches Across the Desert: Irrigation in the Lower Pecos Valley. Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ Press.
Gutzman, Mark H. 2019. Indian Divide Switchback on the Capitan Branch of the El Paso & Northeastern Railway. Alamogordo: Unpublished Manuscript, Lincoln National Forest.
Hufstetler, Mark, Lon Johnson, and Gregory D. Kendrick. 1993. Watering the Land: The Turbulent History of the Carlsbad Irrigation District. Denver [Colo.]: National Park Service, Rocky Mountain Region, Division of National Preservation Programs. 102 InterpNEWS Opening Up New Mexico’s Southeast: A Visionary, Water, Townsites and a Railroad - Part 2
By Mark H. Gutzman, Assistant Forest Archaeologist, Lincoln National Forest, New Mexico
After the building of dams, reservoirs, and canals in and along the Pecos River at intervals from Roswell to Eddy (now Carlsbad), New Mexico Territory, organizing townsite companies, diverting waters from rivers to put thousands of previously barren and unproductive acres under irrigation; and selling large acreages of land into settlement, the Eddy brothers, due to differences of opinion in managing the Pecos Valley Irrigation and Railroad projects, sold their interests in 1895 to J.J. Hagerman. C. B. Eddy, promoter extraordinaire, his brother John Arthur and their long-time attorney W.A. Hawkins were now free THE MINING TOWN OF WHITE OAKS AS SEEN LOOKING EAST. to pursue and act upon the information Charles had read in the Lincoln County Leader’s 1889 article regarding the mining town of White Oaks, New Mexico Territory. Charles Eddy and Hawkins moved to El Paso, Texas, for the purpose of reviving and constructing, if found feasible, the then defunct “White Oaks Railroad.”
FREIGHT WAGONS PREPARE TO LEAVE WHITE OAKS.
The idea for the White Oaks Railroad began with a need. Both supplies for the miners and extracted ores from the mines had to be freighted in wagons to and from El Paso, 160 miles to the south, or to San Antonio, New Mexico, 100 miles to the west, in order to reach a railroad. It is said that it used to take two weeks for the freight wagons to make the round trip to El Paso, and ten days for San Antonio. According to rumor, the Santa Fe railroad carefully surveyed this situation, but concluded that building a line from San Antonio, NM to White Oaks was not feasible due to construction costs balanced against potential revenues. 103 InterpNEWS
However, some El Paso citizens were more optimistic. They formed a Texas corporation named locally, the “White Oaks Railroad,” under the corporate name of Kansas City, El Paso & Mexican Railway Company (KCEP&M); and, beginning in 1888, started construction. By 1890 they had constructed about 10 miles of railroad, one mile of which extended from South El Paso northerly to the Galveston, Harrisburg and San Antonio Railway (G.H.&S.A.) tracks, and nine miles northeasterly to the end of the line just north of the Ft. Bliss Military Reservation. There construction ended due to a lack of funds to pay the contractor Morris R. Locke & Co. Litigation arose and the El Paso courts placed the railroad in receivership. There the matter remained dormant until 1892, when for $50,000, Charles Davis, the receiver, sold all the properties and right-of-way of the White Oaks Railroad to J. Gould, a railroad magnate from New York, who in turn conveyed the properties to the Texas & Pacific Railway Co. (T&P), of which he was then the controlling figure. Gould had planned for the T&P to complete the line to White Oaks, but after further consideration abandoned the plan and the project slumbered on. Such was the situation in 1895, when Charles B. Eddy, his brother John and their attorney W.A. Hawkins arrived in El Paso with the purpose of acquiring the bankrupt railroad, and building it to White Oaks.
The Eddy’s had made several trips back to their hometown in New York seeking investors for their new venture, and by May 5, 1897 the New Mexico Railway & Coal Company (NMRy&CCo) was incorporated. The corporation formed under the laws of New Jersey and controlled, through stock ownership, the El Paso & Northeastern Railroad in Texas, and Railway in New Mexico (EP&NE). The corporation was headed by President, C.D. Simpson HEADER FOR COMMON STOCK IN of Scranton, PA, with other officers of the board being Vice- THE NEW MEXICO RAILWAY AND President G.C.W. Lowrey of New York, 2nd Vice-President and COAL COMPANY. General Manager, Charles B. Eddy of El Paso, TX, Secretary, B.S. Harmon of New York, and F.H. Ross, Treasurer, of New York. The stated purpose of this venture was to reach the gold mining town of White Oaks and the coal fields of the Salado Flats, NM Territory. As such, the name given the venture was the EP&NEs “White Oaks Route.” In October 1897 Charles B. Eddy, now president of the newly incorporated El Paso & Northeastern, began constructing the road’s first eighty-seven-mile segment from El Paso, to his newly acquired property in New Mexico. For $5,000 Eddy acquired a large acreage of land and appurtenant water rights in Alamo Canyon on the western escarpment of the Sacramento Mountains, from Oliver M. Lee (the Oliver Lee ranch is now a New Mexico State Park). At this same time, Eddy started working on another goal for his new railroad, one that at the time was unstated. Aside from reaching the gold mines of White Oaks and the coal fields of the Salado Flats, he wanted to connect with the Rock Island Railroad, which was then building west across Kansas. He felt that with this combined route, freight from Chicago could be shipped though Kansas City and El Paso, then on to Los Angeles and the Pacific coast, thus creating another transcontinental route. Eddy’s goal would be realized in February 1902. Progress on the new line reached the Jarilla Mountains mining district in May 1898 and there Eddy established Jarilla Junction before continuing north. Jarilla Junction became a town in 1905 (in 1906 it was renamed Orogrande). Always looking for a way to make profit, and because he also owned a mine in the district, Eddy built a 4.77-mile spur line from Jarilla Junction into the mining district. Eddy’s railroad could now haul iron, copper, silver, and gold ore to the El Paso smelters and the Silver City reduction works for processing (The Scranton Republican, May 2, 1898, pg. 4). 104 InterpNEWS
JARILLA MINING DISTRICT AND LOCATION OF EDDY'S FIRST RAILWAY STATION.
With only thirty-eight miles of rail left to lay before reaching what would become Alamogordo, Eddy set his brother John to organize the Alamogordo Improvement Company. The first meeting of Stockholders was held on April 13, 1898 at Hueco, NM, a stop on the newly constructed railroad six miles north of the Texas border, and 24 miles south of Jarilla Junction. In attendance were the five Stockholders, W.A. Hawkins, J.A. Eddy, A.S. Greig, J.L. Campbell, and J. L. Bickford. John Eddy was elected Chairman, and W.A. Hawkins Secretary. The first business to attend to, was the subdivision of a portion of the Eddy property into town lots. When the railroad finally reached the town site for Alamogordo, Eddy had a decision to make as to where his next railroad segment should be constructed. His first and closest option would be to turn east and climb up into the Sacramento Mountains to access its Douglas fir for the ties and bridge timbers needed for the construction of the line. On the other hand, he also needed fuel, and that he would find in the coal deposits of the Salado Flats approximately fifteen miles to the southeast of White Oaks. As both locations were important to his plans, he decided to build almost simultaneously to both. NOTES FOR THE FIRST MEETING OF THE ALAMOGORDO IMPROVEMENT COMPANY'S STOCKHOLDERS.
With the decision made to move up the mountain, the owners of the EP&NE founded the Alamogordo and Sacramento Mountains Railway (A&SM), as a logging railroad for their Alamogordo Logging Company. Charles Eddy and his brother made several trips into the Sacramento Mountains on horseback during their initial exploration phase. He knew that the mountains possessed the timber needed for rail ties and knew he would need a rail line to get to it. Seeing the challenge, Charles hired a brilliant locating engineer, H. A. Sumner as his Chief Engineer. 105 InterpNEWS
Laying track in the rather flat Tularosa Basin presented no major problems for the grading crews; however, the Sacramento Mountains rise sharply from the Basin and would require a special layout to get a train to its summit. Sumner had a lot of previous experience building railroads in the Colorado Rockies, so Eddy was getting the best man for the job.
After arriving in New Mexico, Sumner set up his office in La Luz as Alamogordo did not yet exist (Albuquerque Citizen, 27 Apr 1898, p. 2). La Luz is a town six miles north of the new Alamogordo town site and was founded by Franciscan friars in the early 18th Century, calling it Nuestra Señora De La Luz (Our Lady of the Light). In May of 1898 Eddy had his newly arrived engineer, survey and layout the town site (White Oaks Eagle, 12 May 1898, p. 3), and by June, the new railroad town of Alamogordo, NM, was finally created through a town lot sale. With the construction of Eddy’s offices, shops and a company hospital, Alamogordo became the New Mexico headquarters for the NMRy&CCo, and the EP&NE H. A. SUMNER. (Myrick 1970:76 – 83).
Alamogordo was designed with 10th Street as the main east/west thoroughfare and Pennsylvania Avenue (now White Sands Blvd.) as the main north/south thoroughfare separating the railroad from the town proper to the east. The business district was south of 10th, and the residential district ran north of 10th. Streets running east of Pennsylvania Ave. are named for States (New York, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio etc.). The Alamogordo Depot was constructed at the west end of 10th Street and on the railroad side (west) of Pennsylvania Ave. As with his first town on the Pecos River, Eddy lined his main streets with Cottonwood trees.
ALAMOGORDO DEPOT (R), AND EP&NE HOTEL AND BUSINESS OFFICES (L), FROM ALAMEDA PARK.
And what about water? For Alamogordo, a pipeline was constructed from Alamo Canyon where it collected its surface water from the many springs along the canyon. This water was enough to supply the residence, large public troughs along 10th Street and a manmade lake in a green belt park to the north of the Alamogordo Depot. This park full of trees also served the purpose of noise abatement from the railyards to its west. But the railroad was not so fortunate. Until wells could be dug at points along the line, trains had to carry their water with them in large wooden tanks set upon flatcars. Water would be a problem for the EP&NE for many years, and this story will be discussed in Part 3. 106 InterpNEWS
InterpNEWS Market Place
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We’ve been working to update our interpretation programs, services and media Market Place as a place for exhibit planners and designers, media developers and other interpretive related agencies and organizations to advertise their services. We are happy to offer non-profit organizations reduced advertising for their memberships or fund-raising as well. We reach thousands of agencies and organizations in 60 countries! Our new advertising rates for 2020:
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The Heritage Interpretation Training Center offers 44 college level courses in heritage interpretation, from introductory courses for new interpretive staff, docents and volunteers, to advanced courses for seasoned interpretive professionals. Courses can be offered/presented on site at your facility or location, or through our e-LIVE on-line self-paced interpretive courses.
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------Interpretive Master Planning Volume 1, Strategies for the new millennium. (Available as an e-book - $30.00),
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