[PRCo] Re: Europe ....

[Schneider Fred]

I inserted the word not in the first sentence, last paragraph.  Makes  
sense that way.

On Oct 13, 2008, at 4:26 PM, Schneider Fred wrote:

> 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 not 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.
>
>
>