[PRCo] Europe ....

[Schneider Fred]

I'm not sure which of you are still on the "demented list" so some of  
you may be getting this twice.    There are also some blind carbons.

I think you all know where my heart lies ... if you don't, it's a  
blend of history and where are we going in the future and who is  
leading the way in the future.

If you are not a subscriber or a regular reader, suggest you go out  
and buy the November 2008 issue of Trains magazine.   This is the rag  
that Al Kalmbach once proclaimed would never feature trolley cars.   
It was with great reluctance that they published Bill Middleton's  
interurbans.   David Morgan had his personal interests and once told  
me we should get together over coffee and discuss the trolleys in  
Louisville (his old home town) but he knew better than to anger Al by  
putting anything about them in Al's magazine.

Well, times they are a changing.   Every issue now has a section on  
urban mass transit.   And the November issue has an article by Matt  
Van Hattem on an unimaginable three-week-long Odessy through seven  
countries in Europe (England, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands,  
Switzerland, Italy and Germany) riding 83 trains and 37 transit  
systems.   He covers an area roughly 1,000 miles by 1,000 miles from  
Yorkshire in England to the Pyrenees, east to Milano, the Alps and  
Berlin.   He talks about light rail, about mixing streetcars with  
high speed trains in Germany (they figure out how not to make them  
come together, we say you can't do it because they will come  
together), about 80 year old Peter Witts rebuilt and still running  
full bore in Milano, about 6 mile per hour moving sidewalks, the  
ancient monorail or Schwebebahn (literally translates dangling  
railway) in Wuppertal, cable cars at England's Birmingham airport,  
200 mile per hour trains all over Europe.

I used to preach that it would work here because we lived scattered  
all over the landscape and they understood how to live in cities.   I  
am coming to realize that they may be the model for our future  
because we either have to learn to live in cities again and use less  
energy or run out of fuel or find ourselves involved in some rather  
bloody and continuous wars.